On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “This way Bob, this way,” Andy is the advance man, trying to grab his attention.

  “Thanks for the concert,” one kid screams.

  “Bobby, Bobby,” another girl is near tears.

  “Hey man,” the black kid has caught up, “do you know where the Revue’s going next?”

  Dylan pauses. “The next one’s in St. Augustine.”

  “St. Augustine, Florida,” the kid repeats excited, “that’s my home town! I’ll sign up twenty million people to be in the Rolling Thunder Revue.”

  Dylan just nods distractedly and tries to eat a spoonful of cold beans off his paper plate, as they lead him to the elevator and the garage where the camper is parked.

  Ratso starts to head back into the party but nearly gets bowled over by a frantic Joni Mitchell. “All my gear is gone,” Joni frets, “I’m so confused. We put it in one room but I don’t know what floor it was on or nothing.” Without waiting for an answer, she speeds toward the elevator.

  “There’s something that’s so evident here,” Greg, the sound man, corrals Ratso as he walks back into the party. “Look at this,” he sweeps a hand over the party panorama, “you have to really understand the relationship between this year and Hollywood in the ’30s. The same magnitude and production that was involved then is involved now. It’s the same concept of stardom.” Ratso chuckles and looks out at the scene, a scene that could very well have come out of The Day of the Locust. A feeling reinforced as an almost comatose Roger McGuinn limps by, followed by Gary carrying Bob’s son Jesse over his shoulders, who’s followed by an even less conscious Phil Ochs.

  But, as incredible as it seems, this party is only a warm-up, a dress rehearsal for a more exclusive shindig that’s about to start uptown at a restaurant near the hotel. This late party is the real one, the farewell to the tour and everyone, from the sound men to the performers to security. Even Ratso has been invited.

  But by now, around 2 A.M., everyone seems to be partied out. Oh, they’re all going through the motions, some dancing, some drinking, some eating the tasty Italian fare, but without conviction.

  Outside on the street, a slew of crashers and would-be invitees are battling to get in, led by Phil Ochs, who eventually receives the OK nod. Which leaves Lisa, leaning up on her old reliable Chevy, as the Queen of the Shutouts. Ratso and Larry Johnson peer out at the street scene. “Look at Lisa,” Ratso marvels, “she’s still out there, still waiting, still hoping. Winner of the Rolling Thunder Persistence Award!” Both men lift their glasses and toast perseverance in the face of futility.

  But inside, things have picked up since Bob and Sara are walking around and presenting beautiful handmade Rolling Thunder medallions to the band members. The reporter passes by on the way to his table. “Love,” Sara puts a hand on Bob’s shoulder, “did you give Ratso his yet?”

  “What?” Slocum stops dead in his tracks.

  “Hey Ratso.” Dylan digs into a small bag and comes up with a velour pouch with a nameplate on it. “This is for you, man.”

  “I picked it out especially for you,” Sara smiles.

  The reporter digs into the pouch and pulls out a beautiful silver medal, inscribed on one side with “Rolling Thunder Revue” and boasting an eagle on the other side, with three gemstones embedded on it. “Far out,” Ratso whistles and slips the medallion over his head, adjusts it on his neck, smiles, and for the first time on the tour, feels like a white man.

  The party drags on for a while, with the hangers-on and guests, departing early, leaving the hardcorers to last it out till the bitter end. And slowly but surely it begins to resemble the endless hospitality suites. Why there’s Neuwirth over there talking to Ronson, Soles, and T-Bone. And Stoner and Wyeth drinking at the bar, Blakley chatting with McGuinn, Mitchell and Shepard tête-a-têteing in the corner, Dylan mysteriously slipping in and out.

  Ratso heads for another drink, and, at the bar, overhears two crew members deep in conversation.

  “You know, after all the stuff about brotherhood, and playing for the people, and spreading the word, and all that, I finally realized what the sound of Rolling Thunder is.”

  “What is it?” the other picks up the bait.

  “Just look,” he sweeps his arm over the room, “there’s Stoner, who was an unknown bass player, Wyeth, a journeyman drummer, T-Bone, an obscure Texas songwriter, Soles, an L.A. sessionman, Mansfield, a Quacky Ducker, Scarlett, fronting for a Latin band. Dylan takes ’em, they gig around for six weeks, maybe they do another tour, right, then they ride out those Rolling Thunder coattails. For them, the sound of Rolling Thunder is a ringing cash register, man.” And the two roadies crack up and order another round.

  Ratso stays up that whole night, hanging around the Westbury lobby, making long-distance calls, accompanying Gary for some corned beef sandwiches from the Star Deli at 8, then opening the Westbury coffee shop at 10. Later that afternoon, he calls on Robbie Robertson. Robertson has always been an intriguing figure for him, both because of his long association with Dylan as Bob’s guitarist in the mid-’60s, and his own tremendous work both musically and lyrically with the Band. So the first question that occurred to Ratso was how Robertson would compare this tour with Tour ’74, the last outing where the Band accompanied Dylan.

  “It was looser, it wasn’t done with as much seriousness,” Robbie says in sober measured tones. “The other thing we were trying to have a good time too but we were also doing a real tour and this thing has been a thing that Bob’s been talking about for years. I’m sure he would have liked to have taken it all the way and done it by train, he’s always wanted to have that kind of gypsy caravan situation happening where it was loose and different people could get up and do different things at different times and nothing would be out of place.”

  “How would you compare this to the ’66 period? That was the first time you guys went out with Bob and you got such abuse from the folk purists,” Ratso remembers.

  “‘Sixty-six was just off the wall to all of us.” Robbie rolls his eyes slightly behind his tinted glasses. “The guys in the Band, they didn’t know what the fuck that was about. We were just doing what we said we would do and whatever happened when we got there was beyond our control. It happened, it seemed really silly and bizarre at the time but I guess for the people who were really feeling it, it wasn’t silly at all. They meant it.”

  “What was Dylan’s reaction?”

  “I don’t know, normal reactions. Sometimes he thought it was funny, sometimes it made him angry, sometimes it was a little scary, sometimes it didn’t make a shit. It was just the usual, just like anybody would react to it. But the amazing thing about the whole thing was that he persisted. I mean everybody was running around in his ear saying, ‘Listen, it’s this group, they’re terrible, get rid of these fucking guys.’ Everybody was telling him that and the amazing thing was that he never went for it. I mean because we were playing so out of this world, we didn’t even know what the fuck we were doing, because he didn’t want to learn any of the songs. It was just play them.”

  “That’s what Bloomfield told me too,” Ratso blurts, “he told me that those Highway 61 sessions were just total chaos.”

  “Bob has always made records like that and the best thing you can do is get the most competent studio people so they’re flexible and fast. That’s his best for recording and always has been in that technique of just getting them down on tape. That’s the idea, so they feel good and you can hear all the words.”

  “Is that the way Planet Waves was done? How did that collaboration come about?”

  Robbie cracks a smile for the first time. “There was no collaboration. He just had a few songs and we were rehearsing for the tour.”

  “The tour idea came first?”

  “Oh yeah, the album had nothing to do with it. Bob had a few songs so we just went into the studio for a couple of days and recorded them all. But that’s a different thing. That’s after the fact, that’s after the Basement Tape period and
the other tours we had done with him. We already knew the game. We knew how to do it and it was just a matter of the songs after that, but that was effortless, we just went in and put them down on tape and that was that.”

  “What was that whole Woodstock period like?” The questions are literally pouring out of Ratso. “It seemed to me to be a reaction to the whole insanity of the ’66 tour, a retrenchment, a retreat …”

  “I don’t know what that was, the only thing I know about it was that Albert Grossman had a house up there, then Bob got this house and the first reason I went to Woodstock was that he was working on Eat the Document and he asked me to help on the film, and that’s what I did, I went up and lived at his house and worked on the film for a while, and Bobby Neuwirth was kind of in and out, he was one of the sound people on the film, and it seemed like a nice scene. We had been living in New York and there was nothing really happening outside of it being more of a pain in the ass than anything else, so Woodstock was a nice relief and we went up there and fooled around and it was kind of a fun thing and we ended up making it our base for a while. When the festival came along then it became a different thing, it was actually kind of a charming little place, then it became a haven for wayward dopesters and it kind of lost its littleness, its quaintness, it became a little bit of a cult number. It just became less and less interesting.”

  “Were The Basement Tapes originally demos or what?”

  “It was more fun than anything,” Robbie recalls, “it was done for no reason whatsoever and then as we got going it seemed that it might have some obscure use, and just as we went along once in a while, there’d be a real song come out of the batch, but most of it was for fun. We just sat there and laughed all day and all night. It was really a fun time in our growing up, that Basement Tape period, and we learned a lot from it, too.”

  “What was the impact of Dylan on you and vice versa. Was there an artistic ruboff?”

  “I think the basic thing is we just opened up some new worlds for one another and we both were very good at our own particular thing. We were just coming from two different worlds altogether and he was no more familiar with ours than we were with his. I mean we had listened to a minimal amount of folk music, and although he had listened to quite a bit of rock ’n roll, because it was closer to the surface than folk music was, he probably knew more about rock ’n roll and blues and what not than what we knew about folk, but we didn’t just know about it we knew how to really do it and we knew all of it, so we were both really well seasoned in our own bags and we just basically and accidentally showed one another a lot of things about different kinds of music and education.

  “You know, I think that although Bob’s initial impact on the whole music scene was lyrically, that’s what everybody really remembers the strongest, it wasn’t necessarily that way for the Band, ’cause the Band was a musical group and I don’t mean instrumental, I mean it was the musical hit that was either gonna get it or not get it for the Band and it wouldn’t matter whether someone was reciting the fucking Bible while they were doing it, the thing for us was that if it didn’t connect musically, it just didn’t matter what anybody was saying, saving the world just wouldn’t matter. The fact is Bob’s phrasing and his melodic connections were really extraordinary and it all had to do with the other thing, it just wasn’t some guy up there saying a bunch of lines that were kind of poetically enhancing. There was a lot more to it than that, but anyway people preferred to receive it on whatever level that they can and it seems like most people received it on an intellectual word level where we didn’t receive it that way at all so we weren’t nearly as impressed with that thing as everybody else was.

  “And, I’m sure that Bob was very aware of that too because we never remarked, ‘Oh, that third line in the fourth verse is such a whammy,’ I mean nobody cared about the third line in the fourth verse, we cared about how it phrased and connected and slid into that fourth line much more. If it said anything really incredible at the same time, terrific, that was a bonus. We came at it from the other side and that’s the level that we were impressed on. So it was just an education all the way around and we didn’t even probably realize it from the beginning, but after a while when I could actually think about it for a second, that’s the way it affected me.”

  “But your lyrics are great,” Ratso protests, “they’re not throwaways at all, they have real literary value.”

  “No,” Robbie smiles shyly, “but I don’t narrow that down. I think if you took those lyrics and isolated it with some music that didn’t make it, they wouldn’t make it. But I think you could have taken the same music and changed the lyrics to three or four different things and still made it work, that’s the emphasis where we were coming from. But from Bob the emphasis was always on the other side and it was even more so from the people that were listening to him. So when we played with him the people couldn’t hear the lyrics too well anymore, they were offended by us. They thought we were interrupting their lyrics.” Robbie lets out a hearty laugh, the first from the taciturn guitarist. “So it was all very simple when it came down to it but at the time it seemed confusing and silly.”

  “But from the other view, people also criticize Dylan for that musical spontaneity, they talk about it as sloppy musicianship,” Ratso turns around.

  “It is, it is, I mean people can criticize it all they want but the thing is whether it works or not. Whether you get the feeling from it, in the long run, whether it has the essence, that’s the whole thing and whether somebody makes a mistake or doesn’t know that the ending is coming, whatever it is, that’s beside the point if the essence is there, if it really feels good and it sounds right and you get the effect of it, then it’s OK. But if somebody criticizes it and says it’s sloppy, it is sloppy, but that’s not necessarily anything to get nervous about, there are incredible classic blues records that’re just sloppy but do you listen to it and say, ‘Ah, that’s sloppy, turn it off?’” Robbie laughs again, a warm, infectious laugh. “That’s not the point of the thing, the point still remains it’s some kind of tradition, the thing that Bob is into. And, also, it’s just really his lack of patience, I don’t think that there’s really any merit to the spontaneous thing. I don’t think it gets worse, I think it gets better, the music gets better. I think if you play the song twice and you learn it, that isn’t the best it’s gonna be to me, but Bob doesn’t want to mess with it anymore and if it’s got the essence there, then it’s fine. I agree with him.”

  “The Band’s stuff seems much more crafted.”

  “Our stuff,” Robbie pauses, searching for the phrase, “there’s a thing going on there, there’s a fine line we’re playing off of. You know, Bob’s music is ad-lib music except for the chords and the words, so that’s terrific, it’s all terrific as long as it comes out in the end.”

  Ratso senses Robertson is getting restless so he starts to wrap up the interview. “How do you relate to Bob’s new sound, with the violin … compared to the Sixties thing?”

  “I’m not even sure what that was.” Robbie sounds incredulous even today. “I don’t know. Anyway, with the violin thing, it’s fine, it’s all part of the picture, the gypsy caravan. It all has its place in the thing, it sounds great to me. A lot of the stuff at the Garden the other night sounded extraordinary to me.”

  “Yeah, the tour really built up a momentum …”

  “Yeah, there was no question, that’s what I mean that it gets better. I don’t think it gets worse, I don’t think you lose it, I think it gets better. People get to digest it and understand what they’re doing and they’re not just running on some nervous anticipation. That’s what the Basement Tapes are, just very spontaneous but without that nervous anxiety of ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen next?’ If you’re playing with that feeling it prevents you from just relaxing, you know, you’re not relaxed when you do it, you’re on your toes so much that it’s tight. The Basement Tapes are the loosest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, including any blues r
ecords or anything. That, to me, is the epitome of what looseness is.”

  Before he’d let Robbie go, Ratso had to interrogate him about Planet Waves, one of his favorite Dylan LPs and one that was woefully underrated by critics and public alike. Again, it’s the essence of Dylan’s art, some songs hastily written, some just fragments of songs, done up in a three-day period before the ’74 tour. And, to Ratso’s ears, one of the finest rock albums ever made.

  “It went by so quick,” Robbie smiles, recalling those sessions, “I mean, Planet Waves was as good as we could make it in the situation. Under the circumstances, Bob was not, I mean he really didn’t have a bag of songs there so it was just kind of a last-minute thing and it came off to me, under those circumstances, I thought that it was extraordinary. But if we had been doing the same thing, since then he’s written such songs of a lot more depth and zing to them. There were a lot of simple songs on that album, and people don’t necessarily want to hear very simple songs from him. I mean, every once in a while they take a ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ just to kind of get on with it, but basically what they want is a very complex song ….”

  “Something in the ‘Idiot Wind’ arena,” Ratso interrupts.

  “Right, and it wasn’t that kind of album at all, just songs like ‘Hazel’; they couldn’t be more simple.”

  “I thought ‘Hazel’ could have been a top-forty hit covered by somebody like Neil Diamond or Sinatra,” Ratso offers.

  “I like that song,” Robbie agrees. “I like a lot of them very much and I thought we played them very good and we got off some unusual stuff.”

  “Yeah, like that interplay on ‘Dirge,’ that was fantastic.”

  “But that’s just, we …” Robbie stammers. “I never heard that song before, and we sat down and we played it once and that’s it. But I know Bob’s thing by now, I don’t have to deal with that nervous anxiety of what’s gonna happen next. I know how to fake and slip to the left and slip to the right and it all sounds how it was supposed to be. I just learned it over the years, I guess, but I really enjoyed that album, we had a lot of fun doing it. Anything you do that fast is really rewarding, I guess. But it wasn’t an appropriate Bob Dylan album, that’s what the problem was, and it wasn’t super-unusual so it got a different kind of credit. People put so much weight on the words that it really limited that album, all those songs, ‘Going Going Gone,’ ‘Hazel,’ ‘Forever Young,’ very very simple, as simple as he’s ever done and people just thought that it wasn’t a real effort and the whole thing went onto him. I listened to that album in somebody’s house last week and there’s some extraordinary playing on it.”