Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Come 1978, Dylan would devote a lot of time to interviews in an attempt to persuade audiences to give his film a chance. He didn’t always help his case. Ron Rosenbaum of Playboy would be lectured on ‘the essence of man being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn, he has to go outside himself. You can almost say that he dies in order to look at time and, by strength of will, can return to the same body.’4 Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone – who found Renaldo and Clara ‘adventurous and mysterious’, ‘intimate and evanescent’ – would be told that ‘Art is the perpetual motion of illusion’.5 Dylan, who wouldn’t try to take this tale to Poughkeepsie, went on (and on):

  I’ve had this picture in mind for a long time – years and years. Too many years … Renaldo is oppressed. He’s oppressed because he’s born. We don’t really know who Renaldo is. We just know what he isn’t. He isn’t the Masked Tortilla. Renaldo is the one with the hat, but he’s not wearing a hat. I’ll tell you what this movie is: it’s like life exactly, but not an imitation of it. It transcends life, and it’s not like life … I’ll tell you what my film is about: it’s about naked alienation of the inner self against the outer self – alienation taken to the extreme. And it’s about integrity.

  Even in the mid-’70s, this kind of talk was hardly guaranteed to sell a movie to the average Bob Dylan fan, far less the average popcorn-muncher, even if the music was better than pretty fair. It is worth observing, too, that this artist would never have discussed his songs in such a manner. He had always understood, instinctively and perfectly, just how destructive such chatter can be. Struggling to explain Renaldo and Clara, he sounded like nothing so much as an extra-intense Dylan ‘scholar’ picking the symbolic bones from the carcass of ‘Desolation Row’. You could speculate, in fact, that the picture might have done just a little better at the box office had he kept his high-flown thoughts to himself.

  What was almost touching in such interviews, nevertheless, was Dylan’s intense belief in the film. In a forgiving mood you can argue that it starts pretty well, with Dylan in his strange transparent mask singing ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, Neuwirth in tow. Then comes a scene in a hotel lobby with reliable Larry Sloman trying to get a room, Blue chatting at his pinball table, then Dylan as our hero sitting in a garage playing his guitar, then a scene – the scene – at The Other End. All of this could pass for intriguing. But suddenly there’s Bobby Neuwirth in a silly Zorro mask, then Sara Dylan and Baez as (presumably) whore-goddesses. Joan Baez grew tired quickly enough of that last juvenile conceit and you can hardly blame her. Long before the supposedly symbolic triangular relationship has manifested itself, the last of a viewer’s hope has fled. The Dylan fan sticks it out, if she or he is honest, for the same old reason: the music. When the final credits are followed by the usual bland legal statement that ‘persons and events in this film are fictitious; their relationship to other persons and events is unintentional’ the only fair response is sarcasm.

  Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, and still maintaining that he had another movie in mind – ‘If we could make a deal with a studio …’ – Dylan already had certain excuses prepared. If the film had flaws, it turned out, those had been the fault of others. Clearly, the difference between the movie in this director’s head and what wound up on the screen was vast. That wasn’t his fault, however.

  The film could have been much better if people could have had a little more belief, been a little freer. There was a lot of conflict on this film. We had people who didn’t understand what we were doing, but who were willing to go along with it. And we had people working on the tour who didn’t understand and weren’t willing to go along with us. It hurt us. It was good for the show, but it hurt the film.6

  Interviewed at around this time by the Canadian weekly Maclean’s, Dylan would attempt to maintain that no one in the audience would have guessed the fictional scenes had been improvised had he not said as much. Later in the conversation, a little self-knowledge would begin to manifest itself. Though the chances of his beloved movie failing had not been mentioned, he said:

  Whether it’s a failure or not, I don’t know. It could be. Maybe the movie isn’t for everybody. Maybe there are only two or three people in the universe who are going to understand what it’s about.7

  Even at his most defiantly romantic, the loner against the world, Dylan had not gambled for a career in music by backing those odds. Over the years he would spend a lot of time claiming to be misunderstood and claiming that he didn’t care. In reality, rejection of his work never sat easily with him. When Renaldo and Clara paid its brief visit to cinemas he would suffer one of the sharper rebuffs in his creative life. Years later, kind souls and diehard fans would attest that he was right, that he had been misconstrued, that (among other things) he had managed a homage to bohemianism itself with his movie. Obscure and ancient Beat experiments would be adduced. His remarks about Carné and Truffaut, remarks both sincere and calculated, would thereafter keep a few people busy. That wasn’t wholly unreasonable. Like an eager film-school student, Dylan had obviously studied the use of motifs, the implicit arguments over the nature of identity, the jump cuts and the sequencing evident – perhaps only too dazzlingly evident – in Les Enfants du Paradis and Shoot the Piano Player.

  The result, in a strange way, was like Tarantula all over again. He had wanted to write a novel; he was, so they said, a genius with words. So why couldn’t he just write a novel? He loved movies; he believed he understood movies; some of his songs, they said, were very like movies. So why couldn’t he just make a movie? Perhaps because Dylan’s gift for songwriting had seemed to come without effort for so long, he fooled himself into believing that any art could be conjured easily.

  A better verdict might be that with Renaldo and Clara he came closer to making his dream-movie than most critics were prepared to allow. There have been worse films. Given a chance he would, no doubt, have learned from his numerous mistakes. But he was Bob Dylan, songwriter. A great many people were very clear about that. They were not prepared to allow the artist to abdicate from the duties they had defined. In effect, the reaction to Renaldo and Clara, like the reaction to Tarantula, was an attempt to put him in his place, to force him back to his true calling. In 1978, after his picture was released at last, no studio would be found to offer him a modest budget and a sound stage to call his own.

  *

  The day had not yet dawned when Dylan could be summoned to the White House to play for presidents. On 4 July 1976, on America’s 200th birthday, he was neither seen nor heard. A few weeks later he would succumb to an aimless interview with TV Guide, a journal of cultural affairs then at its multimillion-selling peak, in an effort to support the Hard Rain concert film. ‘I sometimes dream of running the country and putting all my friends in office,’ Dylan would tell the man from the magazine. ‘That’s how it works now, anyway.’8 Beyond that, he had nothing to say about the state of the nation. He took no public part in the celebrations for the birth of the republic or its two centuries as democracy’s shining light.

  Bob Hope was on TV wrapping himself in the flag in an NBC ‘spectacular’ that July weekend. On the Fourth itself, President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s hapless substitute, was in Philadelphia addressing patriots as distinguished as the actor Charlton Heston. Ford was declaring: ‘It is right that Americans are always improving. It is not only right, it is necessary.’ In New York Harbor, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was reviewing a fleet of tall ships while six million people, or so the New York Times estimated, looked on. That night fireworks would light up the Statue of Liberty. Across America, as the newspaper reported, it was ‘A Day of Picnics, Pomp, Pageantry and Protest’. Restored steam locomotives were meanwhile pulling a travelling historical exhibition entitled ‘the American Freedom Train’ around the country. Not a city, town or village in America was untouched by the festivities. The nation was awash with speeches and souvenirs.

  Gil Scott-Heron, the radical self-styled
‘bluesologist’, maker of Winter in America and From South Africa to South Carolina, introduced one of the few audibly sceptical voices amid the summer’s celebrations with a piece entitled ‘Bicentennial Blues’. In it he nominated 1976 as ‘A year of hysterical importance’, one in which the public had been ‘bludgeoned into bicentennial submission’. Scott-Heron reminded anyone who happened to be listening that the facts of racism, poverty and injustice had ‘got by’ too many Americans, not least those contemplating a vote for the ‘Hollyweird’ Ronald Reagan, then just a grinning former conservative governor of California. On the weekend of the Fourth itself, Scott-Heron was performing his ‘Bicentennial Blues’ poem, all eight minutes and forty seconds of it, before a Boston audience for a concert album, It’s Your World. His was not the voice of the majority.

  The year had opened with another nuclear test in Nevada. Inflation, still perilously high at 5.75 per cent, had nevertheless subsided a little; official unemployment stood at 7.7 per cent. One day before the Bicentennial itself, the Supreme Court had ruled that the death penalty, suspended during the four previous years, was not inherently ‘cruel or unusual’ and no offence to the constitution that bound together 218 million Americans. Crime was still a preoccupation for politicians and the media – ‘wars’ on wrongdoers abounded during political campaigns – but making a living was the main concern for hard-pressed law-abiding citizens. Another long recession had ended, statistically speaking, in 1975, but the economy remained weak as the country staged its birthday party. Only with federal help had New York City survived a brush with bankruptcy. Amidst it all, something was stirring.

  The novelist Gore Vidal had observed the essentials of the phenomenon in an essay published in the year before the Bicentennial. Describing his experiences delivering provocative ‘State of the Union’ lectures to audiences caught between bemusement, amusement and outrage, Vidal had written of encountering among his fellow Americans a ‘general hatred of any government’. He told of ‘the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: we hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how’.9

  Among conservative Americans, the mood was being articulated loudly. Some believed they had found an answer to their problems. Reagan’s failed challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination would be remembered long afterwards as the prophetic moment. Earlier in the decade, right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Political Action Conference and the American Conservative Union (all founded in 1973) had sprung into existence. By 1976, the influential monthly magazine Commentary had completed its shift from left to right and confirmed itself as the house journal of what would come to be known as neo-conservatism. Political reaction would produce action in due course. Preposterous as it might have seemed at the time, the not-so-strange death of ’60s liberalism was all but complete.

  Dylan gave no sign that he noticed or cared. This didn’t make him immune, however, to what was going on in his country. Congressional Democrats had done predictably well in elections in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate. Their party’s candidate, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, would win the presidency on 2 November 1976. During his nomination acceptance speech in New York on 15 July, the new candidate (or his speechwriters) would misquote ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ comprehensively, asserting that ‘We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying’. The artist would respond like a jaded elder statesman through the august pages of TV Guide. ‘People have told me there was a man running for president quoting me,’ Dylan would say. ‘I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But he’s just another guy running for president.’

  Carter’s eventual victory would prove to be a kind of illusion and the briefest of respites for liberal Americans. In time, their Democrat president would become even less popular than Nixon, a phenomenon unthinkable in 1974.10 As the artist had mentioned almost casually to People magazine back in October, ‘The consciousness of the country has changed in a very short time.’ Out in the American heartland political conservatism and yet another evangelical Christian revival were growing in strength, hand in glove. And Dylan had always harboured a weakness for a deity.

  *

  In November, on Thanksgiving Day, he would appear at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco for what was billed as The Band’s ‘farewell’ concert. It was a last farewell, in reality, to the youthful comradeship that had once bound the group together. When Dylan’s former backing musicians returned to touring in 1983 it would be without Robbie Robertson, the guitarist whose perceived high-handedness and self-regard – there were plenty of other allegations – had alienated his colleagues long before the affair known as The Last Waltz was being organised. By 1976, in any case, Robertson had decided he was weary of life on the road. The other members of the quintet would continue to believe, in contrast, that he had broken up The Band for purely selfish reasons, furthering his own career – under the guidance of one Albert Grossman – while keeping a tight grip on their joint legacy.

  Many years later, all of drummer Levon Helm’s bitterness towards Robertson would spill forth in his autobiography. Among other things, Helm would contend that he received not a cent from the show, album and Martin Scorsese documentary movie each known as The Last Waltz. In an afterword to his book published after his passing in 2012, Helm would be quoted by his co-writer claiming that Rick Danko, The Band’s bass and fiddle player, had died prematurely because of sheer overwork (the 1999 autopsy settled for drug-related heart failure). In Helm’s disgusted opinion, Danko had worked too hard for too long because ‘he had been fucked out of his money’. Levon said:

  People ask me about The Last Waltz all the time. Rick Danko dying at 56 is what I think about The Last Waltz. It was the biggest fuckin’ rip-off that ever happened to The Band – without a doubt.11

  Dylan would remain forever fond of Levon – the feeling was reciprocated – but in late 1976 these were not his problems. For the purposes of album, movie, money and valediction, Robertson appeared to have enlisted any prominent musician who had ever been associated with The Band. There were a couple of others, vapid Neil Diamond conspicuously, whose relationship with anyone other than the guitar player was hard to identify. On Thanksgiving night at Winterland there were poets, turkey dinners for 5,000, ballroom dancing, seven high-end 35-mm cameras and a crew of experienced cinematographers to meet Scorsese’s demand that every last second be captured on film. Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Paul Butterfield and Dr John were among the performers. There was no possible doubt, however, about the identity of the star guest.

  Dylan did his job in the end, but not without almost wrecking the entire production. At the last minute, so it was said, he announced that he would not be filmed. As the tale was afterwards told, he did not want his appearance to steal any thunder due to the concert sequences in Renaldo and Clara.12 Since Warner Bros. had only agreed to finance Scorsese’s lavish array of cameras because of a promise that Bob Dylan would be in the movie, this posed a problem for Robertson and the show’s promoter, Bill Graham. The Band were no longer a hot item in their own right by 1976. The $25 tickets for the evening had only begun to move, in fact, after Graham had leaked details of the guest list to the San Francisco Chronicle.13 Only some feverish negotiations during the intermission – while almost everyone else busied themselves with vast drifts of cocaine – and the intervention of one of Dylan’s lawyers saved the show, the movie and the album.

  The Last Waltz would duly become known as ‘the greatest concert film ever made’. Very fine it is too, in places. Dylan’s performance was as good as most and far better than some, if a long way short of his finest. ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ (twice) and ‘I Don’t Believe You’ were done with sufficient conviction. One of those ineradicable anecdotes-with-no-source prefaced with the word ‘reputedly’ probably catches the artist’s real attitude best. In this tale, Nei
l Diamond is leaving the stage. ‘Follow that,’ he supposedly says to Dylan. The artist replies, ‘What do I have to do, go on stage and fall asleep?’

  *

  He was not exerting himself unduly. Whether because he was still refusing to admit the truth about his marriage or because he knew the miserable truth beyond doubt or dispute, Dylan had fallen into a fit of indolence. He still had Renaldo and Clara to see to, but he was not giving his full attention to the editing process. He would turn up here and there – at The Band’s concert, at a riotously intoxicated Leonard Cohen recording session in June of 1977 – but in terms of his career history only one fact would be pertinent. Between the release of Desire in January of 1976 and the summer of 1978, Dylan would fail to produce an album in the studios. Hard Rain, the record intended to document the 1976 spring tour, had been released in September of the year, doing only modestly well in America but reaching number three in Britain. A mostly pointless single from the album, ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ (with the entirely pointless ‘Rita May’ as its B-side), had failed utterly in November. The rest, save for the sound of approaching lawyers, was silence.