Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Carter, perhaps significantly, is said to have been deeply involved in organising the Texas benefit even before the New York concert, despite the fact that very few people in Houston knew about his case and fewer still cared about some local New Jersey controversy.3 As it was, with an audience of 66,000 expected only some 30,000 tickets were sold. Air-travel bills of $45,000 for musicians, promoters, friends, hangers-on and anyone else who could cadge a ride, plus an eventual collective hotel tab of $36,000, were meanwhile on the wrong side of frugality. In the end, claimed expenses would run to over $428,000. Ticket revenues were put at slightly less than $380,000.

  The concert programme had promised Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue ‘also starring’, in descending order, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Dr John and Shawn Phillips, the Texan singer-songwriter. There would also be ‘many other surprise superstars’. The programme itself contained a long letter from Rubin asking concert-goers to write to the governor of New Jersey on the prisoner’s behalf, reprinted newspaper clippings concerning the Carter affair, and the lyrics of ‘Hurricane’. No amount of rhetoric prevented a fiasco.

  The sound in the Astrodome was abysmal and the concert ran, as these things do, for hour upon endless hour. Neither the star, the billed acts nor the ‘surprises’ – Stephen Stills, Carlos Santana, Richie Havens – seem to have impressed the locals greatly. If the pop reviewer from the Houston Post was any guide, the Rolling Thunder legend did not travel well. There was an omen in that. According to Rolling Stone, Bob Claypool’s verdict on the revue et al. was that ‘they stunk. A lot of people left even before Dylan came out. It was boring. People were leaving in floods. A gross event. Weird bullshit.’

  If true, it was a dismal moment at which to give ‘Hurricane’, that song born of rage and compassion, its last performance. It soon transpired that ‘Sara’ too had been dropped from the set once and for all, though the loss in that case was not great. In any case, the marriage song, whatever it was worth, had failed in its purpose. ‘Idiot Wind’ would take its place in the concerts given in 1976. The significance of the gesture hardly needed to be decoded.

  *

  Of itself, the Astrodome debacle did not seem to trouble Dylan greatly. The blame had not been his, not directly. Whether the public and the press saw things that way was another matter. For several months the artist had been identifying himself very publicly with Rubin Carter’s campaign. After all the legal problems, the ‘Hurricane’ single had been rush-released, at Dylan’s insistence, and become a minor hit, reaching number 33 on the Billboard chart. More to the point, the song opened and announced the Desire album. To a great many listeners that seemed, reasonably enough, like a perfectly clear statement of the artist’s concern and commitment. The name ‘Bob Dylan’ still counted for something.

  The Houston programme, with that name biggest and boldest at the top of the bill, had been plastered with Rubin’s campaign literature. At Madison Square Garden on 8 December Dylan had behaved as though the scandal of the man’s incarceration was a matter of the greatest urgency. After the Astrodome he seemed, quite simply, to walk away.

  He had other things on his mind, no doubt. Perhaps he believed he had done enough. Perhaps, equally, he had begun to develop just a few private doubts about Carter’s character and methods. It had never been Dylan’s habit, in any case, to linger in the vicinity of failure. The Houston show, even on the most generous possible interpretation, had failed badly. Nevertheless, the truly significant fact is that the artist ceased to perform ‘Hurricane’ just as the boxer’s fight against conviction was approaching a crucial moment. As coincidences go, that one tests credulity.

  On 9 February, with Carter and John Artis convicted yet again, Rubin received two consecutive life sentences. Dylan, like all the celebrities who had made speeches or taken those choice seats at the Garden, was nowhere near the courtroom. Hurricane’s battle would go on until 1985, but the singer who had been so vociferous, so righteous, was no longer prepared to offer so much as one song. So what became of ‘an innocent man in a living hell’?

  Dylan began instead to plan for a tour that would take Rolling Thunder around the cities of the Gulf of Mexico and out into the Midwest. Some of the places chosen were not his traditional territory – fans of the erstwhile folk singer had long tended to be concentrated on the coasts – but an artist with a number-one album doesn’t often pause over such considerations. Equally, Dylan did not pause this time around over the alleged attractions of the ‘small theatres’ that had generated so much chatter in 1975. The venues for almost all of his 26 dates between 18 April and 25 May, Lakeland in Florida to Salt Lake City, Utah, would be in the 7,000 to 12,000 capacity range. Some were a good deal bigger than that. Dylan was ‘interested’ – and why not? – in making some money.

  Tour rehearsals began early in April at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. Dylan had already wasted some time at The Band’s studio, Shangri-La, in Malibu, California, messing around – judging by some of the bootleg recordings – with Eric Clapton. Between them, the pair had managed to come up with a poor version of a dismally inconsequential Dylan song called ‘Sign Language’, a piece the Englishman would nevertheless see fit to record for his own No Reason to Cry album. Even back in Malibu, where Sara spent most of her time at the big, eccentric fantasy house Dylan had part-designed and built on the Point Dume peninsula after the cherished Woodstock establishment was sold in 1973, he had not been at home often. That life was at an end. His infidelities were continuous, relentless, utterly casual and conducted, as any amateur psychologist would have observed, with just a hint of desperation. The pattern of behaviour would not alter once the tour had begun.

  He brought Guam and most of the Rolling Thunder ensemble back together in Florida. To his evident dismay, however, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott discovered that his services were no longer required. Instead, the satirical country singer and self-styled ‘Texas Jewboy’ Kinky Friedman would join the touring party. Ramblin’ Jack never discovered the reason for his dismissal, nor what became of precious old friendships. Noting Friedman’s presence, he simply put two and two together. Dylan, with his own thoughts to manage, meanwhile chose to spend as little time as possible with his musicians.

  At first, this seemed like a natural reaction to the grim news from New York that Phil Ochs had hanged himself finally on 9 April. Dylan was badly affected, it appears, though whether by guilt because of the way he had often treated a former comrade and fellow musician or by sheer, impotent sadness it is impossible to say. He must have wondered, for all that, if his failure to accept Ochs into the Rolling Thunder community had been some version of a last straw for a man in desperate trouble. There had been no other realistic choice after that bizarre October night at The Other End, but what of it? Isolating himself in Florida, the artist had reason to ponder the impossible hopes that so many still attached to the idea they had of ‘Bob Dylan’. For his part, he began to keep strictly to himself. Communications with the Rolling Thunder troupe would henceforth be limited. Dylan’s reticence became, on many occasions, a stony, indifferent silence. The erstwhile bohemian ensemble were employees and given no cause to forget the fact.

  Something else had changed. As the first Florida shows would make clear, songs from Desire were to be less prominent than before, despite – or because of? – the album’s success. Pieces from Blood on the Tracks, transmuted and transformed, with ‘Idiot Wind’ providing the culmination of the basic set, would begin to return in numbers. The change in tone and attitude, impossible to avoid with the inclusion of that venomous diatribe venomously rendered, would become steadily more marked. In point of fact, more songs from Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde would be performed during the spring concerts than the remaining works from Desire. The touring company would still travel under the banner of the Rolling Thunder Revue; most of the same people would still be involved; but the difference between one season’s work and the next would be profound. Hard Rain,
the live album that would become the official record of the tour, boils still with splenetic fury.

  Dylan was on edge, on the edge, trapped suddenly in a misconceived tour, his marriage all but ended, his private life an aimless mess. Critics would notice the results, of course, and much of the time would not care for them. Southern audiences, equally, would often be short on enthusiasm. In due course Dylan would suffer the humiliation of having shows cancelled – Lake Charles in Louisiana, Houston and Dallas in Texas – thanks solely to miserable ticket sales. For some, the uncompromising performances would be very hard to take. Soon enough, word of mouth, travelling fast, would count against the artist, hit album or no hit album. The tour would meanwhile become an act of sustained wrath. As though trying to wring a secret from the instrument, Dylan would take to playing lead guitar. Or rather, for he never attempted to pass himself off as a virtuoso, he would take to attempting to play electric lead guitar.

  It would stand as an example of symbolism as the little universe of rock and roll understood the word. It would count, for all the artist’s ineptness with his instrument of choice, as the outward expression of inner turmoil and an assertion – this much every musician understood – of status. He was the star, take it or leave it. The trouble was, to paraphrase one of his own terrible jokes from a later period, that Dylan was not necessarily one of the few guitarists around whose playing was better than having no guitarist at all.

  Itemise each of the elements of the second Rolling Thunder tour and you have a recipe for an unholy mess. Strangely, it wasn’t quite like that. The artist was continuing to put his songs through a process of wholesale revision. This time the work was being rethought to suit his mood, and indeed his idiosyncratic guitar playing. Even the sacred ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was turned into a severe, visceral thing during a failed attempt at the Belleview Biltmore to produce footage for a proposed NBC TV special. Here the flower-decked fedora was gone, replaced by a voluminous yellow bandana that made its wearer look like a guerrilla fighter just arrived from the mountains. The song itself was, more than ever, a half-spoken, raging soliloquy, slower than before but deeper emotionally than it had been in a long time.

  Dylan had turned an artistic profit from his anger often enough before, but in the spring of 1976 he seemed to be going for broke, like a man with nothing left to lose. It seemed that finally all of it, ‘Bob Dylan’ first and foremost, had become too much for him. He should have been on top of the world with the success of Desire. Instead, he was lashing out. In the process, he would produce music of an integrity that only came to be understood, far less appreciated, after the Rolling Thunder Revue was long gone.

  The first attempt at a TV film having ground to a halt thanks to his furious dislike of the staging and much else besides, Dylan found himself committed to providing – and to paying for – a concert documentary while trying to keep his own show on the road amid dire spring weather. It was not a happy tour. The artist poured booze down his throat and his emotions into his performances, but failed to achieve a cure. When Sara turned up in New Orleans just before the show at The Warehouse on 3 May the battle between husband and wife resumed, sometimes in public. She left within a matter of days while Dylan endured the miserable humiliation of cancelled concerts in Texas and the pressure of preparing himself for the TV special. It had been conceived as a big-deal, prime-time affair, with a live album planned to appear simultaneously. Given that the tour had been treated with disdain in several quarters, it was hard to see what Dylan could produce to salvage the situation.

  When at last Rolling Thunder reached the chosen venue at Colorado State University’s Hughes Stadium to the north of Denver, the rains were coming down hard. The biblical deluge refused to stop. It poured for days; the stadium was open to the skies; the mountain air was freezing; and the artist was soon in a foul, black mood. Just as he was deciding that Rolling Thunder would play on, downpours or not, and that the film would be made come what may, his wife reappeared with his children and his mother in tow. It was the eve of his 35th birthday and he was in the middle of another affair. None of this was ideal.

  In their second-to-last show as an ensemble, soaked and freezing to the bone, real sparks and shocks coming from instruments that refused to stay in tune, the Rolling Thunder Revue played as though every cliché about last stands and dependent lives was a statement of fact. As a show it was anything but faultless, but it was a fiercely determined, even principled gesture. Unless you are precious about musical precision, you can hear as much on the Hard Rain album. Though TV critics would struggle to see much art in the fire and ice of the NBC special, you can still perceive the ragged glory of Dylan and his band on the film, too. At Fort Collins, Colorado, the local crowd, at least as cold and wet as the band, understood what they were witnessing and responded accordingly.

  It would count as the lasting mark of this last, impassioned phase of Rolling Thunder. A lot of people, accustomed to the musical purée that passed for rock and roll in the first part of the ’70s, had missed the point of the spring tour and would go on missing the point for many years. Those who were alert and eager for what was just around the corner caught the first sulphurous whiff, the first snatches and glimpses, from Dylan and his musicians when they were under siege in Fort Collins. It wasn’t punk, not by any stretch of the imagination, but in 1976 something of the spirit the artist had possessed in 1966 was recaptured and that was the next, better thing.

  At Fort Collins, Sara Dylan meanwhile watched her estranged husband perform ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘Shelter from the Storm’ in a manner, vicious and yet proud, defiant yet regretful, that provided a summation for the songs, for the tour and for their marriage. After one more show at a half-empty Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, a place far better suited to basketball and hockey, it was over. Dylan moved on without a backward glance. He had a whole other movie to complete.

  *

  After half a century and more, it is just about possible to divide this artist’s work into three broad categories. Some of the things he does are accepted instantly: a ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, a ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, a Modern Times. Other manifestations of his art take a while to gain recognition from his audience before the hosannas are heard: the 1966 tour, the country music, the Street-Legal album, his evangelical songs. In one small corner of hell, however, there are pieces of work so utterly tainted by critics’ first impressions, so encrusted with the residue of received opinion, they seem beyond all hope of redemption. The prose experiment Tarantula would be one example, the Self Portrait album a second and the film Renaldo and Clara a third. Each has been treated unfairly.

  Most who claim to know about the book have never read it closely, if they’ve read it at all. The album has rarely been given a proper hearing by people who take their cues in matters of taste from the award of tiny paper stars by critics who seem always to know what Dylan should have been doing instead (generally speaking, whatever it was he was doing before). The movie, by and large, has simply not been seen.

  That doesn’t make it a lost masterpiece any more than a good word for Self Portrait transforms the set into the greatest thing Dylan ever recorded. Nevertheless, the film he and Howard Alk began to assemble after the last echo of Rolling Thunder had faded away is not without merit. To indulge in special pleading: the sheer depth of the artist’s faith in this work should at least give more people pause. Dylan believed in the thing, and believed absolutely. He was passionate about it. He knew perfectly well that many people wouldn’t get it. Yet he persevered. It is surely worth enquiring after the reason.

  Anyone who says that Renaldo and Clara was simply a vanity project does not know much about the subject of their accusation – Dylan has scrapped better work than his peers could manage on their best days – or what the film cost him. He more or less abandoned Eat the Document, but he stuck with this one. His adventures in cinema have often been unhappy, to say the least of it. The question is therefore worth asking. Why did he care s
o much about a work that cost him so much time, money and effort and earned him only derision?

  It would not see the light of day until 1978. The earliest edit would have taken an entire working day out of any viewer’s life, but even in its first released version, at close to four hours in length, there was the implicit assertion that Dylan did not mean to be bound by Hollywood’s definition of the average attention span. He would lose that battle twice over, first when the long version was massacred by the critics and again when he sanctioned a near-meaningless two-hour edit late in 1978. By then it would be too late. Renaldo and Clara’s dismal reputation had already been made.

  So what do you get if you chance upon this work? In parts, a truly terrific concert movie. Should Dylan ever wish to pander to an audience that cares nothing for fancy ideas and improvised acting – a big enough constituency, then – there are still the makings of a remarkable, straightforward Rolling Thunder documentary within Renaldo and Clara. Given the sheer quantity of footage gathered during the tour, much more must be available than has been seen. Equally, the soundtrack to the 232-minute picture as it stands could form, with just a little attention, the album still desired by those who saw the revue or are these days obliged to traffic with bootleggers. Such projects were not even close to what Dylan had in mind. Still, they count as a start.

  Second, there remains a lot of cinéma-vérité material that is not without charm, drama or human interest. Evangelists raging on Wall Street and reproachful statues of Jesus, Allen Ginsberg reading his Kaddish, the scene at Kerouac’s grave, interviews with journalists, the singer David Blue playing pinball while telling old stories about the Village: these are neither meaningless nor dull. The fault with the film, the great fissure at its heart, is the attempt to fuse all the other elements into an enveloping drama while forgetting, or failing to understand, dramatic structure. The maker of Renaldo and Clara seems not to have understood that idea well enough even to subvert it. The fact that most of Dylan’s actors were rank amateurs might have been supportable if he had kept their parts simple and coherent. Movies made with non-professionals have worked often enough. Here the director, struggling to weld together different kinds of cinema, overwhelms his players with a ton of ill-explained big ideas while failing to support the actors with useful dialogue, or with any sense of actions and consequences.