by Bell, Ian
All of this must have worked on Dylan’s imagination as he stood where Hemingway and Picasso had stood before him, contemplating another birthday and his estrangement from his own Sara. Her name, it seemed, had mystical associations that he would soon enough enlarge and explore. Sara e Kali, a saint not recognised by the Church of Rome, would meanwhile find herself in the service of the gods mumbo and jumbo thanks to the blasphemous ‘theory’ that she served not only Mary Magdalene but the offspring of Christ supposedly born in Gaul.8 A more interesting fact is that the Manouches, as the French know the Romani, had their origins in the Indian subcontinent, that the rituals for Sara e Kali relate to the worship of the Hindu goddess Kali, and that they have a common linguistic root in the name: Kali, from kāla, meaning blackness, time, death and change. Thus: ‘One more cup of coffee ’fore I go / To the valley below.’ Whether Dylan knew all this ethnographic detail or not – his songs concerning his wife suggest he had more than an inkling – he had been deserted, as he believed, by a woman associated with a goddess.
The glimpse of Rivera’s affected ‘gypsy’ style as she walked a New York street was serendipitous, then, but almost guaranteed to engage Dylan’s attention. The musical flavouring that her fiddle would give to Desire was, equally, more than just an experiment or an artist’s whim. The journalists who would style the Rolling Thunder Revue a ‘gypsy caravan’ got closer to the contents of Dylan’s imagination than they realised. He had met the Romani ‘king’ in the Camargue. The aged personage had never heard of the singer, but the possessor of, allegedly, 12 wives and 100 children had been another unwitting contributor to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. After they had rehearsed, Rivera, for one, understood that Dylan was ready to record, and perhaps to perform. Whatever the collaboration with Levy involved, however it bridged the gulf between partners, intentions and abilities, the process was beginning to bear fruit. The crop would vary in quality somewhat.
If a larger plan was emerging, meanwhile, it amounted to this: yet again Dylan would trust to instinct and to luck. Auditioning musicians found on the street was hardly standard practice. Picking co-writers on the basis of chance meetings on corners or in Greenwich Village bars was not risk-free. Recruiting a band and a supporting cast from club-dwellers and drinking pals was surely tempting fate. To do all this with no apparent thought for the roles to be filled, the cost involved, the structure of the performances to be given, the personnel to be managed, the music to be made or the compatibility of those being hired was nuts. It was exactly what Dylan did, nevertheless, in the summer and autumn of 1975, with only charisma, ample funds and a couple of ideas to sustain him. His break for artistic freedom would become a gargantuan and costly undertaking. Then again, making money from the Rolling Thunder notion was his second thought, not his first.
He might well have felt the need for help with his writing in such a circumstance. Levy meanwhile seems to have had no qualms about his fitness for the work, or over his right to be treated as a partner, with that 35 per cent share – since he wrote none of the music – in the songs produced.9 Nevertheless, if Dylan had misplaced some of his self-assurance at the end of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s, he had not lost his habit of assuming that anything he cared to attempt would come good in the end, somehow or other. Not for the first time or the last, he was ready to take a risk.
Whether Dylan’s troupe of friends, acquaintances, hired hands and hangers-on understood his logic is less certain. Suddenly the ascetic self-discipline that had characterised the making of Blood on the Tracks was gone. It was as though he needed the change for the sake of his rest. Equally, you could find prior evidence for a recurring pattern in Dylan’s behaviour to explain his improvisations in mid-1975. He had been this way before, veering from the hard, painstaking graft of The Times They Are a-Changin’ in the second half of 1963 to the drunken, album-in-a-night exercise that was Another Side of Bob Dylan on 9 June 1964. Later he had switched, suddenly and without warning, from the bacchanalian improvisations with The Band in the spring and drowsy summer of 1967 to the austere, sculpted delicacy of John Wesley Harding towards the end of that year. It amounted almost to a personality trait: tension and release, tension and release. Besides, who could have borne a career forever on the raw edge of existence, devoted only to the universe of Blood on the Tracks?
In the summer of 1975, Dylan’s planning might as well have been based, as perhaps it was, on the opaque Chinese wisdom of the I Ching and its cosmic bar codes. One discarded version of the song ‘Idiot Wind’ certainly made explicit reference to the oldest of self-help manuals. By the summer, Dylan was improvising, trusting to luck and fate, whatever they represented. It caused him no intellectual problems; quite the reverse. Even before God made His appearance at stage right, the artist was as susceptible on occasion to esoteric waffle as the next counter-culture survivor, despite his advertised aversion to all things hippy. Within a couple of years he would be explaining to a reporter from Rolling Stone, for one example, that Jesus had taken on ‘the bad karma of all the people he healed’.10 His own sleeve note for the Desire album – written as though to prove that the world can never have too many Allen Ginsberg impersonators – would announce that Dylan had ‘A WHOLE LOT OF KARMA TO BURN’. This time, Indian religions would take the fall for his understanding, if any, of causality and eternity. In practice, he was rolling the dice.
As Rolling Thunder coalesced around him, mere ancient wisecracks seemed to have become his creative strategy. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine,’ he had said back in 1965, dictating still another entry in pop culture’s dictionary of quotations. ‘It’s like I accept him; does he accept me?’ Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, his interlocutors from the New York Post, had been further informed that ‘Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.’ In 1975, Dylan’s album and his tour would test this seductive, risky theory to its limits.
General confusion became a characteristic of this phase in his career, and of the Rolling Thunder carnival. The roadshow was intended as some sort of statement, but what was said meant different things to different participants. Dylan would take inspiration, some of the time, from a pair of French movies. One was Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), the other François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), otherwise known as Shoot the Piano Player. The young playwright Sam Shepard, a former lover of Patti Smith hired by Dylan to ‘work on a proposed film with the Rolling Thunder Revue’ by ‘providing dialogue on the spot’ – though that idea ‘very quickly dissolved into the background’ – would be questioned specifically about his knowledge of the works when he arrived amid tour rehearsals in October.11
Both pictures are, to summarise grotesquely, studies in performance, revolving around ideas of acting, disguise and identity. Carné’s piece of romantic ‘poetic realism’, written by the poet Jacques Prévert – of whom Dylan was well aware – involved the tale of four men in pursuit of the same beautiful woman. One man was an actor, one a mime artist, one a master criminal, and the fourth, it is generally supposed, the allegorical representation of Nazi occupation in the person of a villainous aristocrat. You could equally describe the four as aspects of human desire. Only the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, was entirely pure in heart, his whitened face an unblemished canvas. Whatever else he took from Carné’s romance – interconnected relationships, unattainable love – Dylan would seize on that idea.
In fact, he took a great deal more. In this instance, the artist would not be shy about his influences. Carné, still a very-much-alive 69-year-old when Dylan’s troupe began to shoot over 100 hours of film for what became Renaldo and Clara, would be reminded, if he cared, that there is no copyright in ideas. Whiteface? Check. ‘Woman in White’, a flower motif, certain resonant passages of dialogue, the old contrast between performance and backstage reality, the actual and the imagined? Dylan overlooked very little. On the other hand, he would not attempt to conceal the fact. The only small details he would miss, according to most criti
cs of Renaldo and Clara, were Carné’s cinematic daring, his lyricism, his staging, his ability to inspire magical performances and his self-knowledge.
Shoot the Piano Player is a crime story, in the main, but it too turns on the erasure of identity. As depicted by Charles Aznavour, the piano player is another figure attempting to escape from his past. Who is he exactly? ‘Bob Dylan’ liked that kind of question. Beneath the gangster movie plot, the picture veers abruptly between tragedy and farce, at one minute sedate, the next furiously paced. There is an improvisational quality, too, in Piano Player that must have appealed to Dylan, not least given Patti Smith’s comments on the origins of Rolling Thunder and her claim that he was ‘thinking about improvisation’. Though Shepard’s job would amount to nothing important, he was not misinformed. Not content with preparing for an album and plotting a tour, Dylan had a movie in mind. Obviously, Bob Dylan would be its star, but someone else would pretend to play ‘Bob Dylan’.
*
Saigon had fallen – or been liberated – in the last days of April amid humiliating scenes of panic. The overloaded choppers had staggered from the compound of the Defense Attaché Office and the roof of the US embassy while the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front closed in. Military radio had played Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, oblivious to any and all symbolism, as a signal to Americans that the evacuations had begun and that it was time finally to leave.
Before the end, President Gerald Ford, broom to Nixon’s dust, had ordered the evacuation of 2,000 orphans, a mere handful of the tens of thousands of children set adrift from their homes and parents, Caucasian, black or Asian, during the upheavals of America’s longest war. Over 100,000 Vietnamese adults – civilian employees, common-law wives, dependants, the rich and formerly powerful – had also managed to escape, but many more desperate people had been abandoned as the US withdrew its last representatives. Reprisals and massacres had been feared before the helicopters had scurried away. There had been a concern, too, that the people of the city would turn against their former protectors once it became clear that the Americans were deserting the country. The last US Marines had left the embassy just before 8 a.m. on 30 April.
What had it all been worth? Even the question soon began to sound banal. Vietnam had dominated the lives of Dylan’s generation. It had defined and divided them, for or against, for better than a decade, with eight miserable years of fighting at its heart. Combat deaths, at a minimum 47,000, had almost matched the number of American dead on the battlefields of the First World War and easily exceeded the total of those killed in action in Korea. In one manner or another, 58,000 young Americans had died in South East Asia and over 300,000 had been wounded. It would take years for America to come to terms with Vietnam, far less to honour the fallen. Returning veterans felt they were spurned, at best ignored. In 1975, many of them believed that their country didn’t want to know about them, what they had done, or why – willing or not – they had done it. Suddenly the country seemed to be repressing every memory.
Three million had served; a million and a half had seen combat. For all that, the entire military might of the US had failed against a small and often primitive nationalist movement, a ‘fourth-rate power’ in the hubristic words of Henry Kissinger. Too often, the psychological effects on those young Americans who otherwise survived were profound, indelible. It took a distinct collective effort to set their experiences and their memories aside. That, nevertheless, became the burden of the veterans’ complaints while the politicians pretended to draw their strategic lessons.
The larger effect, the abiding effect, was a wholesale loss of faith in government. Until they began to hear and believe that amends could somehow be made for Vietnam through still more military power and preparedness, Americans doubted their leaders. If you got your news from rock and roll, as so many young men in combat had got their news, Dylan’s doubting songs and his spurning of politics could seem like good, simple common sense.
By 1975, in any case, the erstwhile New Left was old news. In January, an attempt by the remnants of the Weather Underground to bomb the Department of State building had been a last gesture by one fragment of a fractured movement. Perversely, radicalism had seemed to draw its only strength from Vietnam. With the war’s end, people drifted away from left politics, new or old. Feminism seemed more relevant and more valuable to many women. Environmentalism struck others as a more important cause than any. The escapism implicit in ‘alternative lifestyles’ seemed more attractive to a lot of people than street protests. Radicalism survived, of course, but it became diffuse. By 1975, the self-contradictory appeal of single-issue politics was everywhere. This was the audience for whom the 34-year-old Dylan was making a record and preparing a tour.
*
The first recording session for Desire was held on 14 July, just before Dylan and Levy retreated to quaint but filthy-rich East Hampton on Long Island’s South Shore to resume their songwriting workshop. The session at Columbia’s New York studios was a fruitless affair, at best a testing of the waters. Nothing would be kept for the album. Instead, a trivial and slightly unpleasant Dylan-Levy joke at the expense of the lesbian radical-feminist novelist Rita Mae Brown – ‘How’d you ever get that way?’ – took up a large part of a long night. For reasons best known to himself, the artist would persist with the ‘comic’ song ‘Rita May’ [sic], but a reported seven attempts to achieve a usable recording on the 14th pointed to a problem. A later version of the track would wind up as the ignored B-side to a flop single at the end of 1976, but the song’s sole claim to anyone’s attention was in demonstrating that the writing partnership was successful only fitfully. More than once during the collaboration, whether at Levy’s urging or because he had nothing better to offer, the artist would lower his standards. Some of the results would end up on Desire.12
Dylan’s explanation for the absolute failure of a night’s work had less to do with the songs than with the music. Rivera, the borrowed band of the Traffic founder Dave Mason, sundry backing singers and some fine session players had been unable to give him the sound he wanted. Disappointment and frustration, it is sometimes asserted, then caused Dylan to think seriously about assembling his own ensemble. Given that Rolling Thunder was already sounding in his head, however, it was all but inevitable that he would have to get around to picking a few musicians. And why stop at a few?
Several unsuccessful attempts were also made on that first night to capture the song that would become known as ‘Joey’. Dylan might later seek to distance himself from the work, but here was another problematic aspect to the writing partnership. Levy, naturally enough, had his own interests and enthusiasms. One of those arose from an indulgent view of the blood-spattered wiseguys and cynical goodfellas of organised crime in New York City. In the figure of the gangster Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo, Levy detected – presumably by ignoring every readily available documented fact – a kind of folk hero. Dylan, always a sucker for a righteous outlaw, went along with it; most New Yorkers who knew anything about the Mob would be less forgiving. As romantic fiction, the song would have required no justification. As a presentation of historical truth, involving a recently dead hoodlum with whom Levy had been acquainted, it was less dubious than laughable. This would be pointed out forcefully.
Dylan should in any case have known better. He understood the multiple complications of topical song. They had caused him to quit the public-comment game, after all, with an undisguised relief. Back in 1963–4, his ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ had achieved emotional truth at the expense of several facts. With ‘Joey’ he and Levy would sentimentalise reality, as pop music does, and make a cartoon cliché of Italian American life. Was that worth a memorable chorus? The finished version of ‘Joey’ remains one of the better musical things on Desire, but its tangential relationship with truth, its fake mythology and synthetic emotions, were echoed in some fairly dismal writing, certainly on Levy’s part. As one couplet has it, ‘
Sister Jacqueline and Carmela and mother Mary all did weep / I heard his best friend Frankie say, “He ain’t dead, he’s just asleep.”’ Any self-respecting director of a real gangster movie would have dumped that last piece of dialogue. Creative-writing tutors would have winced in honest collective pain, meanwhile, at the B-minus fake-archaic ‘all did weep’.
The fact that Dylan-Levy, joined at the tediously hip, were also turning out material as risible as ‘Rita May’ should have alerted the artist to the risks he was running. No one else was likely to care. For fans and acolytes, a Bob Dylan song was a Bob Dylan song, a nonpareil beyond all categories. Only the artist could take responsibility. Instead, he and Levy would in one instance produce what they regarded as a piece worth keeping after playing an aimless word game. It seems the contest was to see who could find the most rhymes for Mozambique. Magnifique – as an example of professional writing technique – the song was not. Undaunted, Dylan took the resultant effort into the recording studio.
A fundamental question would thereafter be set aside by most fans when Desire topped the American charts and lingered there for fully five weeks. Were the results of these cooperative songwriting ventures actually much good? Levy’s vaunted theatrical instincts and Dylan’s taste for the ‘cinematic’ would be – and still are – much discussed. A hit is a hit, meanwhile, but the texture of the verses themselves, the lines, couplets, images and rhymes, would too often slip through the critical net. Even in its best moments, the writing on the album is rarely startling and never audacious in the quicksilver manner Dylan had once made his own. Sometimes the lyrics read and sound like sentiment-by-committee, imagery-by-numbers.