On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “Yeah, Bob Dylan is going to come out this way,” the man says.

  “Oh, did you see the concert?”

  “I saw it last night,” he tells Ratso and the reporter proceeds to recount his experience with the RCMP.

  “You got a car?” Ratso asks and the guy nods yes, so the two repair to a Volkswagen parked across the street. Roy, a government worker, introduces himself to the journalist.

  “What’s your story?” Ratso wonders. “Why are we sitting here in this fucking Volkswagen, with the heater on, at the stage, waiting for, waiting for, er what?”

  “Well, I just went to the concert last night,” Roy explains in soft, precisely measured tones, “and I like Mr. Dylan’s work a lot. I like Baez too, but I thought the concert would have been a bit better. Anyway, Bobby does a lot to instill the emotion of hope and I think he’s really important in society today.”

  “Have you admired his work for long?” Ratso asks.

  “I go back to ’64, the first time I remember hearing Dylan was ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on the radio.” Ratso laughs to himself at the coincidence. “That was the first eleven-minute song, back then that was really something important, but it was the lyrics that kind of got to me.”

  “What is he saying to you?” Ratso wonders, thinking of someone who would voluntarily wait in the minus-ten-degree weather outside of the Gardens.

  “A lot of things,” Roy muses, peering out of the car window at the stage-door scene. “Bob’s a focal point whether he likes it or not, a focal point for hope, love, that’s part and parcel too. It’s more than words though. It’s thoughts and feelings. There’s no sense in having thought on one hand and feeling on the other unless you can integrate the two in one. I think what Bob does is put them both together in one point in one place in time and that serves as sort of a catalyst for other people, not that they should project their feelings on him, because he’s just human, just an individual, but he acts like kind of a catalyst in that people say, ‘Hey, this guy means something, this guy’s saying something.’” Roy falls silent.

  “I guess he means enough to you to park a block away on a freezing night just to feel some vibe,” Ratso smiles.

  Roy turns to him. “I think there’s a common bond here among people our age. Do you feel that at all?” The reporter nods. “Think it could be possible to feel it all the time?”

  “Depends on the circumstances,” Ratso says.

  “Doesn’t it though?” Roy shakes his head and studies his hands. “I think one of Dylan’s best songs is ‘Talking WW III Blues’ where he says some of the people can be half right part of the time, part of the people can be half right some of the time, then he simply says ‘I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.’ I think that is the proper approach. I’d like to meet Dylan, I really would.” Roy peers out the window again. “Just to sit down and talk to him. His music really means something to me. It’s sort of like on the cover of Before the Flood, where everyone’s standing with a match, out there, there’s people who sort of glimpse knowledge, not knowledge but they know, they understand. That’s what Dylan is to me, a guy that carries certain strains of like thought and knowledge and keeps them alive and that in a sense generates spirit, ’cause that’s basically what it’s all about, spirit, and Bob’s very spiritual.”

  “What if you met him …” Ratso starts.

  “I’d talk to him,” Roy anticipates, “I’ve thought about it.”

  “How would you approach him? He’s been hit on so much, he’s really wary. Let’s say you saw him in the street, not necessarily ten minutes from now in front of the Arena, just on the street, how would you break through that façade?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Roy says softly. “Do you think it’s possible to break through that façade?”

  “Not right away. But let’s say you saw him, what would you say?”

  Roy coughs nervously and looks away. “I’d ask him if he was looking for a brother and I think if he was interested he might sit down and think about it. He’d probably react.”

  Ratso smiles. “Yeah, he’d probably say, ‘I got a brother.’”

  “What’s he like, older or younger,” Roy asks, and Ratso suddenly finds himself in the middle of a psychodrama.

  “He’s older and younger,” Ratso barks.

  “I suppose he would be,” Roy nods. “Got any sisters?”

  “Now, that’s something else there,” Ratso chuckles.

  “That’s true,” Roy smiles, “I think it was some cat that said, ‘When Ruthie says come see her in her honky-tonk lagoon and I could watch her waltz for free.’ I bet there are two types of sisters. What I wonder about the guy who wrote that was how consciously aware he was when he wrote that.”

  “How aware of what?” Ratso interrupts.

  “What it meant to him.” Roy suddenly begins to look very spacey. “You’re not him.”

  “No, I’m not him,” Ratso feels for the door handle.

  “I guess Bob has thought about that too, what it’s like being him. I thought about him a lot. Listen,” Roy reaches into the glove compartment, “if you see him will you give him this for me?” He hands Ratso a folded piece of paper.

  “Sure,” Ratso grabs the paper and opens the door. “What should I say to him?” he pokes his head in the car.

  “Oh, nothing.” Roy glances at the stage door. “Just give him the note.”

  The crowd has swelled to about fifty now, mostly teenyboppers who are primed to emit a torrent of shrieks as soon as Guam heads out the door and for the buses. Ratso elbows his way to the front and stands there surrounded by thirteen-year-old girls and a guy in his twenties with a dog.

  The guy stares at Ratso and his coonskin cap and then meekly asks him who he is. Ratso explains. “I’m a New York Jew stuck in Toronto,” the kid smiles, and holds his dog up. “My dog sings with Dylan every time I put on a Dylan album. Whenever Dylan plays the harp my dog goes grrrr.” All the girls crowd around to get a look. But suddenly they all break rank and tear off after Mick Ronson, who’s fighting his way onto Phydeaux. A few seconds later, they come streaming back.

  “I got a kiss, I got a kiss,” one nubile twelve-year-old is muttering, walking back slowly in a trance.

  “Oooohh,” her friend is moaning, rolling her fingers into two fists. “Ohhh, I hate you Gerry. I didn’t get one. I’m gonna cry.”

  But then, Joni Mitchell starts inching her way out. “It’s Joni!” Ratso shrieks and he leads the charge, followed by twenty shrieking girls. After Joni successfully negotiates her way to the bus, stopping to give some fans the two bouquets she had emerged from backstage with, Ratso tires of the constant din and heads for the crew bus.

  Back at the hotel, he checks out the hospitality suite. It’s fairly quiet, only McGuinn, Ronson, Gary Shafner, and Chris O’Dell around. But Sylvia, the Jamaican Jewess that Ratso compared bloodlines with, steps off the elevator and the two walk into the room.

  They sit on the couch and immediately Gary starts to harass Ratso. “Do you know the best-looking part of your body is the raccoon tail?” Gary snaps. But before the reporter can respond, Dylan strides in.

  “Hey, c’mere,” Ratso screams. “I got that Jamaican Jew you wanted to meet.” Dylan advances cautiously to the couch.

  “Hey Gary, is there any more tequila?” Dylan thirsts, then turns to McGuinn. “You’re a trouper, man,” he smiles.

  “Joan’s a trouper, did you dig her tonight?” Ratso remembers the exchange with Neuwirth.

  “What happened?” Bob blurts.

  “I’ll never tell,” the reporter turns coy, “I got kicked out of the hall tonight.”

  “You didn’t get hurt did you?” Dylan’s mock-serious, the makeup still smeared over his face.

  “Nah, I got kicked out with that woman who was dancing in the front row. She got in the hall by saying she was your mother.”

  “I bet she was,” Dylan jokes.

  “Man, I love your mother,”
McGuinn gushes. “Your mother kissed me and said she loved me.”

  “Stop telling him mother stories,” Ratso chides, “you’re embarrassing him.”

  Dylan scans the room. “Is Hawkins still around?”

  “No, he left. Hey, this is Sylvia, she’s the Jamaican Jew.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Bob giggles.

  “Prove it to him,” Ratso nudges her with an elbow.

  “Sit down,” he offers Dylan a seat next to her.

  “No, I don’t want to sit down,” the singer shyly refuses.

  “C’mon, sit down,” Ratso insists.

  “OK,” Dylan gingerly sits, “but I’m not too good with girls.”

  “I’ll help you,” Ratso is generous, “I gave Peter Orlovsky tips.”

  “Oh, give it a try,” Roger pipes in.

  “I get too embarrassed,” Dylan’s rubbing his hands together.

  “Oh, just ask her a question,” McGuinn suggests.

  “A Jamaican Jew, is that right?” Dylan’s still shaking his head. “I thought you were getting married to that other girl, Ratso,” Roger smiles innocently.

  “Hey, don’t get him in trouble now,” Bob warns. “He’s in enough trouble, as it is.”

  “You know, Linda,” Roger suddenly asks Dylan, “Linda? My wife?”

  “Yeah,” Bob laughs.

  “She said she wants to be my friend tonight,” Roger announces proudly.

  “Instead of your wife?” Bob asks, straight-faced.

  “No, better,” Roger beams.

  “She’s finally catching on, huh,” Dylan smiles.

  Gary bursts in with a tequila report, no bottles to be found, but Ramblin’ Jack may be hoarding one.

  “Call him, maybe he’s got some,” Dylan suggests then turns back: “So Linda’s gonna be your friend, huh? That’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah, I’m happy,” Roger brushes his hair off his collar. “She’s even going down to Burt Sugarman’s office with a lot of eight-by-ten glossies to let him film them for a tribute to the Byrds.”

  “So you worked it out so you don’t have to bring her eggs and bacon no more,” Dylan seems happy for his friend.

  “Listen man,” Ratso starts to qualify something he had wanted to tell Dylan for weeks, “this is said out of all due respect for your music, but I think you should re-record Desire, you know, I mean I heard the originals and the band is so much hotter now, the songs all have another life ….”

  Dylan frowns. “Hey man, a record’s a record. I got twenty of them. It’s just a record. Gary, how we doing on the tequila?” And with that, the elusive Mr. Dylan gets up and heads out in the lobby.

  But a mere minute later, Ronee Blakley stumbles in, wearing a nightgown and two different socks. “I couldn’t go to sleep,” she moans, “I had to see what was going on.”

  “Ronee,” Ratso shrieks, “that’s the same nightgown you’ve worn three nights in a row.”

  Blakley fingers the garment. “I’ll have you know this is clean,” she sniffs and plops down on the couch.

  “Rolling Stone fucked me for the fourth time in a row,” Ratso moans, remembering the latest article, where his byline had been buried after three rewrite men.

  “Anybody could fuck you, Ratso,” Ronson chuckles.

  “Not over, though,” Blakley looks for something to drink.

  Sylvia meanwhile has been sulking on the couch. “Dylan doesn’t like me,” she pouts to Ratso, and then heads out to look for her friend, who’s roaming the halls somewhere with Ronnie Hawkins. With that Ratso departs, shakes his head all the way back to his room, falls on the bed and passes out.

  But luckily the reporter wakes in time to make the bus, which will take the troupe to the train station for a scenic ride to Montreal. Ratso rushes into the lobby, throws his luggage on the rack, and hops aboard, settling into a seat in the rear next to Mel Howard.

  Howard has seemed a bit preoccupied of late, and Ratso has just chalked it up to the imminent end of the tour, a prospect that has everyone involved as depressed as a bunch of campers at the end of the summer. In a way this was the ultimate camp, a traveling sleep-away bunk of thirty with a staff of counselors and a crew of fifty. There’s been swimming, plenty of recreation, and a canteen that serves liquor until eight in the morning. So to Ratso, Howard just looked like a kid who’s on the wrong side in color war.

  “I’m bummed out about the film,” Mel confides in Ratso as the bus warms up outside the hotel. “What I’m concerned about is that I have an opposing point of view from Meyers and those guys and Alk, even though Howard’s a friend of mine.”

  “What’s the dispute?” Ratso perks up.

  “Well, let me give you some background,” Mel volunteers. “When I first met Louie Kemp, who’s an old friend of Dylan’s, grew up with him, loves Dylan, thinks Dylan is a special guy and it’s kind of if you’re someone from the neighborhood and there was a star, a local legend, and somehow if the guy stays connected to that local legend, that’s the kind of relationship Dylan has with him. Sometimes the kid, the joker, I mean, he was obviously the energy source of his crowd, and on another level, he’s half myth, and they’re all a little awed by him and Louie and some of the other guys I met from Minnesota seem to have a relationship similar to the guys I grew up with, a lot of put-down humor, a lot of irony, a certain kind of toughness that city kids get, and I think that Dylan having been a superstar for a number of years is cut off from those kind of roots. People don’t talk straight to him, he’s always gotta weigh and measure what everyone says because everyone’s out to impress him, win him, sell him, whatever, so I think if you do that long enough and have to maintain a public image as a performer, as a poet and as a supersensitive person, I think more and more there’s a certain amount of illusion involved in it. Anyway, when Louie and I met what we talked about a lot was what Dylan meant to both of us. In other words, once we got past the formalities of my credentials as a filmmaker and his credentials as a friend who’s going to be a producer of the whole tour, in a sense, for Dylan, it then came down to what was my point of view going to be and what was his, ’cause he’s never made films and he was trying to ferret that out. Everyone was selling him on making another Woodstock with the million cameras, and what we connected on was a few spare things.

  “Dylan to me, and of course Louie too, was a kind of icon, a mythological character who represented for us the rebellion that we all went through, searching for newer values, being more independent, trying to find a better way, and when Dylan came back in ’74 after having had a public breakdown, which was parallel to so many people I knew having broken down after the kind of enthusiasm and messianic quality of the ’60s, like we found the ultimate truth and then suddenly you find that you found nothing, you’re still scrambling, and a lot of people got broken by that, and, in a certain way, Dylan seemed broken by that and by degrees crawled his way back. Broken by the motorcycle accident, sure, but some of the albums, some of the music lost the fire, the sense of focus, and in a way, when he came back in ’74 he was transformed.

  “When I saw him, the halting shy ironic kid was now a very sexual adult male who was taking responsibility. I’m reading a lot into this but by saying I want to play Madison Square Garden to twenty-five thousand fans and acoustically singing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and saying ‘How does it feel?’ in retrospect is a whole different thing than saying it as a bunch of kids sitting on MacDougal Street and saying ‘Let’s go out and bop.’ Here’s a guy saying, ‘Well, we all went through shit, stand up and be proud because this is what we opted for, it’s a wonderful thing that we’ve done.’ And it was an inspiration.

  “And, incidentally, Dylan’s Jewish and the rumor was around that he was interested in the JDL, and had gone to Palestine, and this and that. Louie wears a golden ch?, the symbol of life, and I’m heavily Jewish, I speak Yiddish, so there’s that, the mythology of Dylan as a latter-day Hassid, as a Cabalistic kind of poet, all that, and as a kind of extension of
the whole idea of the wandering Jew, wandering poet, the person who is inspired and goes amongst the community to carry the message of inspiration and renewed faith and renewed hope. I mean I’m into that kind of mythology as a filmmaker and part of the malaise that we’re all suffering from is that nobody knew what to believe in anymore.

  “So here comes Dylan, dumb enough, naive enough, beautiful enough, all of those things to say ‘Let’s go out and form a caravan and wake up the country,’ and in some fluid, unspoken way that seems to be the message that all of us are picking up. In other words, what you pour into it was what it becomes. So what Louie and I talked about is that certainly Dylan had things like that in mind when he was saying ‘Let’s go to Plymouth,’ and it’s the bicentennial year, so obviously he had some historical notion in mind, so what we talked about was, wouldn’t it be great to kind of shape it into that, in other words to anticipate that, not to be just voyeuristic filmmakers recording the event of everyone’s freaking out over Bob Dylan which is frankly, as a filmmaker, very uncreative and boring.

  “So we came up with this idea to make an inspirational event out of the film independently of the tour, and to kind of give it all of that dimension and mythological connotation, because it was important to all of us and Louie was hip to that. So Louie said, one of the first things he said, was to buy Diamonds and Rust and listen to some of the songs, and they’ll give you kind of clues to Dylan and Baez and what it means for them to be coming back together and stuff. And from all this generalized talk we were saying we should filter out some of the best into a movie.”

  Mel yawns, as the bus finally rolls out, heading for the station downtown. “And with good reason, they hired the best documentary filmmakers and those are guys who are independent, wonderfully spirited cameramen, who have over the years covered every major event and made films about it. And they don’t really understand the fictional notion of having a game plan, sitting down and actually having a daily plan and inventing a film. To them, that’s somehow dishonest, the thing to do is to discover it as you go along. Now the problem with that, there’s long books about vérité and what is real and what is truth and it ain’t gonna be answered by us, the thing is that if you’ve been at it long enough, like somebody like Meyers, who’s been at it for many years and reputed by everybody to be the best, he makes a story, his energy, his determination, and his good humor and all of that, actually takes whatever the situation is and makes an event out of it. So is that more truthful than fiction? In fact, it’s not, to me. Because what often comes out of that is people just being grotesque for the camera, trying to be funny, they’re on. So to me, a lot of the stuff that we were shooting in New York and at the beginning was stuff that was conventional and worse than that, it was stuff that … fuck Dylan as a person, whom I grew to love, but at that point I didn’t give a shit, but Dylan as a symbol for something that we all needed, an inspiring man with brains who was able to look at the world and say ‘Fuck, man, this is what’s happening,’ to take the opportunity that rarely comes to any communicator, artist, writer, I mean all of us had this incredible opportunity, in a sense, on his coattails, to say something. To take that opportunity and just parade him around as though he were some lame dick and everybody’s gonna freak out over him and we can take funny movies of girls giggling, that to me was lame and a drag.”