Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  It would all become very complicated indeed, its richly satisfying post-structuralist debates undermined just a little only when, now and then, Dylan did in fact seem a tiny bit bored with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ number several-hundred-and-counting. A better bet was that he was wedded from the start to the practices of his real spiritual fathers, the bluesmen, those musicians who failed to repeat themselves because they didn’t know how to manage such a thing. Like Dylan, they did not understand music in those terms. If each moment in life was different, each performance, or at least each tour, must surely reflect the fact. The precise, album-perfect copy was the real ‘construct’. The attempt to play the same song in precisely the same way night after night, city after city, was the truly eccentric and truly noxious habit. It was also camouflage, by no coincidence, for superstars who were supremely bored and utterly cynical. The problem with Dylan’s method, if it can be called a method, is that the artist has to be brave and brilliant to pull it off. He also has to care. In the autumn and winter of 1975, Dylan cared.

  *

  Out on the road, barely a week into the tour, Larry Sloman would run into a bitterly angry Sam Shepard. The playwright was discovering that there was less to his contracted role, if there was anything at all, than he had been promised. He was thinking of quitting – as he did, before too long – mostly because ‘they’ had made ‘some assurances to me in terms of money’ and those assurances, he said, had not been fulfilled. In Sloman’s account, Shepard would rage against the ‘anti-money, anti-establishment position’ that allowed the unnamed ‘they’ to ‘rip you off and it’s all right ’cause it’s an anti-materialist thing’.26

  The point would become a source of press speculation. How much was Dylan spending on this ‘guerrilla tour’, this vagabond’s gesture of artistic dissent, and how much, in fact, was he making? Taxed on the issue by Rolling Stone, Lou Kemp would say only that ‘everybody’s on salary. We’ve got 70 people to house, move and take care of. We gotta pay for this film that’s being shot and that’s costing an arm and a leg. So far Dylan has not seen a penny. He’s the only one who hasn’t gotten paid yet.’27

  Expenses must certainly have been high, with ten members of Guam on the payroll and 15 people assigned to movie-making, plus all the rest. Equally, the romantic idea that Dylan was to play only small ‘theatres’ would fade quickly after the tour’s first week. Columbia had refused to underwrite the revue; some of the big names had entirely satisfactory contracts; a lot of bills had to be met. By the fifth show in Providence, Rhode Island, the ‘low-key’ Rolling Thunder Revue was playing to crowds of 12,000 in a single hall. Variety, the entertainment industry’s inimitable journal of record, had already taken note of an apparent change of heart in its edition at the beginning of November, its headline asking sweetly if Dylan was suddenly ‘interested’ in money.

  Venues capable of containing audiences ranging in size from 10,000 to 16,000 (as in Toronto) became the rule rather than the exception. With tickets priced at a standard $7.50 – towards the high end, but not unreasonable, though they would later rise to $8.50 – most journalists could do the arithmetic.28 By now, Larry Sloman was under orders from his Rolling Stone editors to keep a close eye on the box office and the money that was assumed to be rolling in.29 In the mid-’70s, the cry of ‘sell-out’ was still a curse. It did not simply mean that every last precious ticket had been sold. So where was the ‘integrity’ invoked by Joan Baez? Like Dylan’s revenues, a lot of it would wind up, albeit briefly, on the cinema screen.

  The fact told a story of its own. The original notion cooked up in the Village of four old friends hopping aboard a bus to ‘travel around and sing’ as the ragamuffin mood took them had become a slightly comical memory even before the New York skyline was out of sight. There was certainly a Rolling Thunder bus. It became home from home for most of the troupe, even if that meant exhausted souls taking turns to grab one of the few bunks available amid all the drinking, drugs, revelry, singing, squabbling and snoring. Depending on the anecdote, life on the bus was either one long party or hell on wheels. Dylan, in contrast, travelled in his own private motorhome and didn’t often socialise with most of the employees.

  In an obvious sense, he couldn’t be blamed for that: everyone wanted a piece of ‘Bobby’. A lot rested on his shoulders during this tour. Those songs didn’t rewrite themselves. Jacques Levy might have been investing the concerts with a theatrical structure while everyone worked hard for the sake of protracted shows. But to the artist fell the job of filling that giant ‘Bob Dylan’-shaped hole at the centre of everything. He was entitled to respite and to privacy. If nothing else, his mystique demanded it. Still, that deluxe motorhome destroyed anyone’s lingering illusion that Dylan could ever again be first among bohemian equals.

  He had last fulfilled that role at the end of April 1962, when the first recording sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan began. The old Village days, when all were broke and all were hustling for work, could only have been revived if the democracy of poverty and youthful ambition had been restored. In what sane world was that remotely possible? Then as now, fame in pop music was built on hierarchies, not on egalitarianism. For all its musical strengths and all its dazzling performances, the Rolling Thunder Revue was an alternative-lifestyle fiction sold to big crowds who still wanted to believe in the promise, whatever it once had meant, of ‘Bob Dylan’.

  If he was making any money at the box office, the artist’s honest excuse was that the ‘evolving’ movie was indeed costing what his fish-merchant friend called an arm and a leg. Dylan was bearing the entire monumental cost. It is a pity, therefore, that he failed to pay enough attention to what was going into his picture. Keeping Sam Shepard happy and writing scenes worth filming would have been cheaper by far than all those clumsy improvisations shot on a wing, a prayer and the artist’s dime. Soon enough – in the middle of May 1976 – Dylan would be handing an importunate Allen Ginsberg $15,000 in recognition of his work on Renaldo and Clara. The older poet would reckon he was entitled to the cash for ‘acting in [the movie] and setting up the scenes and dialogue’.30 Even those who admire the film might struggle to justify that invoice. Those who admire Ginsberg can meanwhile ask themselves what happened to all that anti-materialist Buddhist ‘non-attachment’, all that radical ’60s rhetoric.

  The incident gives a rough clue, nevertheless, to the kind of money Dylan must have been paying to Baez, McGuinn and all the others working for love and whatever else was specified in their contracts. The Guam band was a big, expensive proposition in its own right. Ravaged Elvis Presley, his last studio recordings behind him, was also out on the road that year. He too could summon better than 30 individuals to the stage, what with a six-piece band, eleven singers and a small touring orchestra, all flogged onwards yet again by the insatiable Colonel Tom Parker. But a ticket to see Presley was costing $10 in 1975 and the King was due to mark New Year’s Eve in front of 60,000 people at the Pontiac Silverdome, a football stadium in Michigan, picking up $300,000 personally for just an hour’s work.31

  Dylan was trying to face in two directions. On the one hand, he wanted his modest, understated, friends-making-music show with its ‘anti-money, anti-establishment position’. On the other hand, he was trying to run a big, even grandiose touring ensemble on a scale Elvis would have recognised while footing the bill for a horribly expensive movie. ‘Theatrical’, like the picture business, didn’t come cheap. How much was he making? Plenty and not enough.

  *

  What with cocaine on demand, the adrenalin rush of performance, the looming, ever-watchful cameras and the usual oppressive intimacy of life on the road, almost everyone involved with Rolling Thunder went a little crazy. Often they had a real camaraderie, it’s true, but there were some big personalities among them, with egos to match. Baez, with her own guaranteed spot on the bill and a pleasantly superior dressing-room – fruits of that detailed contract, no doubt – could be imperious. Neuwirth’s needling humour
was not to all tastes on all occasions, especially after drink (or whatever) had been taken. As Joni Mitchell would observe on first boarding the bus, they could seem like ‘cruel people being cruel to each other’.32

  This troupe were under an unspoken obligation to behave as a tightly knit group – as if life on the bus allowed any other choice – but they were also expected to defer instantly, automatically, night after night and day after day, to a wholly unpredictable individual. Musicians by trade, they became hostages by habit, like all touring bands. The difference for the Rolling Thunder ensemble was that its members would also find themselves turned into actors, after a fashion, for scenes in a movie Dylan did not readily discuss, far less explain. Some of those involved failed even to realise that one day they would be listed as ‘characters’ – though this might have been the artist’s droll choice after the fact – in Renaldo and Clara.

  Neuwirth as ‘The Masked Tortilla’? T-Bone Burnett as ‘The Inner Voice’? Ginsberg as ‘The Father’, David Mansfield as ‘The Son’, and the visiting old Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins – this was surely labouring a point – as the unholy ghost, ‘Bob Dylan’? But then, everyone involved in Rolling Thunder was a character, in the several senses of that word. The fact that they had to come up with their own lines while their lives became anecdotal, if not ‘legendary’, was presumably part of the point the artist was trying to make about existence as performance. The interesting question is whether the nominal director – the name ‘Bob Dylan’ would occupy that role in Renaldo and Clara’s credits – exempted himself from his own strictures.

  Plymouth, Dartmouth, Lowell, Providence, Springfield, Burlington: the old New England towns, the places where America began, came and went as the Bicentennial approached. From the start, Ginsberg had been promoting the idea that the semi-evolved film should attempt some sort of comment on the state of the nation, but an idea so coherent and obvious suited neither the tastes nor the talents of Dylan’s movie-making collective. Renaldo and Clara would wind up, as cineastes rarely say, as a bit of this, a bit of that and a portion of something else entirely. The film would combine those inept improvisations with remarkable concert footage and an assortment of interviews. For many, the old cliché about the whole and the sum of its parts would spring to mind. It became a tour movie, in short, with pretensions. Anything worth saying about the American experience would be said, as ever, in Dylan’s songs.

  At Lowell in Massachusetts, during the tour’s third stop, he had paid homage at Jack Kerouac’s grave. It turned out to be one of Renaldo and Clara’s best sequences. Ginsberg had recited one of his lost friend’s favourite poems, Shakespeare’s 97th sonnet: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! / What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!’ The poet had then quoted a few lines from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, in its turn a Dylan favourite. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, the two men had then improvised a slow blues with guitar and harmonium. Momentarily, Dylan had paused to pick up a fallen autumn leaf and store it in his pocket. The lurking, ever-present movie camera had caught it all, of course, but Dylan, clearly moved, had seemed able to ignore the apparatus for once. The nature of the debt had altered with the years, but he owed much to the Kerouac whose work had once set him afire, and helped to set him on the road.

  Still the Rolling Thunder Revue pressed on. Whatever the financial concerns behind the scenes, Dylan seemed to the paying public to be enjoying himself. Suddenly he was almost garrulous on stage. His song introductions began to resemble a comedy turn. In Providence, Rhode Island, the audience was told that ‘Isis’ was ‘a true story’. Just before the opening bars of ‘Romance in Durango’, innocent customers were invited to remember that ‘raw lust does not hold a candle to true love’. In Burlington, Vermont, the venerable, much-analysed ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was dedicated ‘to all psychology students’.

  On 15 November, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ was delivered, supposedly – and why not? – ‘for Gertrude Stein and Modigliani’. In New Haven, Connecticut, before ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, the audience was informed: ‘This song is dedicated to da Vinci.’ At one show, ‘Oh, Sister’ was performed ‘for Henry VIII’; at another, Dylan decided that ‘Durango’ was for ‘D.H. Lawrence, if he’s here tonight’.

  In Hartford, Connecticut, the artist said of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’: ‘I wanna dedicate this to Wallace Stevens from Hartford, a great renowned poet. Wherever you are now, we wish you the best of luck.’ In Quebec, the song was performed for the benefit of ‘the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud’. In New York’s Madison Square Garden, on the final night of this wandering vaudeville tour, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ would be sung ‘for Herman Melville, who’s sitting …’

  It wasn’t all comedy. Almost without fail, something was said by Dylan, night after night, about the plight of Rubin Carter. The show staged in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 19 November was typical: ‘This song is called “Hurricane”. If you got any political pull you can help us get this man out of jail and back on the streets.’ Dylan would also tell a New England crowd of learning ‘that Massachusetts was the only state that didn’t vote for Nixon. We didn’t vote for him either.’

  Perhaps the funniest moment came in New Haven on 13 November. A shout – ‘Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’ – had gone up from someone in the crowd. The artist, preparing to perform a revised ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, had replied deadpan: ‘No, I don’t think so. I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone else.’

  In New Haven, meanwhile, Joni Mitchell joined the show and the motley crew on the bus. She would stick with both all the way to the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ at Madison Square Garden, reputedly becoming the sole participant in the revue to pay her own way. Bruce Springsteen was also to be seen at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven on 13 November, but the chances of a performance ended, it seems, when Dylan ruled out an appearance (what with one thing and another) by the full E Street Band. On 2 December the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, an ice-hockey arena capable of accommodating more than 16,000 customers, would see performances by Ronnie Hawkins, plus Mitchell, plus Gordon Lightfoot, all in addition to the existing vast cast and their leader. Some 54 songs were performed by various artists during that second Toronto show. Things, it could be argued, were getting out of hand. Only Leonard Cohen brought a breath of elegant good sense to proceedings when he declined politely to participate in the Montreal concert on 4 December on the grounds that it would be ‘too obvious’.

  At some point, just to complicate matters further, the film-makers Alk and Howard decided – or so Howard later asserted – that it would be a nicely ‘creative’ idea to bring Sara Dylan and her husband together for the sake of the movie. It led to uncomfortable scenes and a degree of slapstick backstage when, more than once, the artist’s girl of the hour was hustled out through one door while his wife entered through another. Sara Dylan had neither the taste nor the aptitude for life on the road. By then she and Dylan were married in name only, joined as parents – when he had the time – and by what once had been held in common. How he persuaded her to drag herself from California to New England in such a circumstance remains a mystery.

  Nevertheless, Renaldo and Clara thus began to develop into the tale, roughly speaking, of a triangular relationship with, supposedly, mythological overtones. Dylan played Renaldo (obviously), alongside Sara/Clara and Baez as ‘The Woman in White’. Sympathisers would argue that the piece thereby achieved emotional tension and coherence, particularly in its original near-four-hour version. They could never explain away the fact that amateur actors – Sara Dylan had some slight experience, it’s true – tend invariably to produce amateur dramatics. Dylan might have had complicated ideas for his picture, but he, of all people, seems not to have realised that complexity is best expressed by professionals.

  *

  Rubin Carter wasn’t getting out of jail
any time soon, despite anything Bob Dylan might have to say about the matter. The struggle to win the boxer a second trial would end horribly in December 1976 when he and John Artis were once again convicted, but on the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ – Monday, 8 December 1975 – hope still remained. Thanks in part to Dylan, Rubin’s case was a cause célèbre liable to attract celebrity liberal attention even, or especially, from those who did not necessarily understand every last detail. As the New York Times would report, all of a sudden any number of ‘prominent political figures’ had found time to show support for Carter and claim places on the guest list at Madison Square Garden. Famous athletes commanded excellent seats while ‘among the show-business personalities’ the likes of Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon and Melba Moore were spotted. There would be more speeches at the Garden than the artist would tolerate in normal circumstances, but he was given little choice. On this night, despite his best efforts, ‘Mr Dylan’ – the Times house style altered for no man – was a long way from the ‘reaffirmation of the old Dylan rootlessness’, as the paper described it, that had been part of Rolling Thunder’s avowed point and purpose.33

  John Rockwell, the writer of the piece, found it necessary, in fact, to dish a little dirt amid some judicious praise for the Carter benefit. Rolling Thunder had grown into an arena show, like it or not. Its size, wrote the journalist, had ‘provoked some cynicism and charges of hypocrisy, especially since Mr Dylan’s friends and tour members have been more enthusiastic than usual with their populist rhetoric and assertions of Mr Dylan’s selflessness’. Rockwell continued: