Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Directed by Marcel Carné, written by the sometime surrealist poet Jacques Prévert, and starring Jean-Louis Barrault, Children of Paradise is a long film about the world of the popular theater in Paris during the 1820s and 1830s, when revolution was very much in the air. (Made furtively during the Nazi occupation and completed in 1944, the film held its own claims as a statement of resistance through art.) Garance, a beautiful, lusty courtesan played by the great French actress Arletty, is pursued by four men: a womanizing actor, a thief, an aristocrat, and Barrault’s character, the mime Baptiste Debureau. Baptiste is the key. Wearing the whiteface of the stock pantomime character Pierrot, Baptiste performs at the Théâtre des Funambules (or “tight-rope walkers”), one of many theatrical venues on the crowded, working-class Boulevard du Temple. In an early scene, Baptiste appears before the milling spectators outside the Funambules—dressed and painted in white from head to toe, a thin scarf tied loosely around his neck, and wearing a broad-brimmed white hat decorated with white flowers.

  At different points in the film, the irresistible Garance becomes briefly involved with all four of her suitors, but she also insists on her independence—and when they try to impose love on their own terms, she leaves them. Her most tragic liaison, though, is with Baptiste. After overcoming a rocky relationship with his father, the mime becomes an enormous star, particularly popular with the fun-loving, rambunctious denizens perched in the second balcony, way up with the “gods” (and thus known as the children of paradise). Unlike his rivals, Baptiste loves Garance purely and wholly, and one night she all but directly invites him into bed—but he runs away. The film then proceeds through a long series of ricocheting intrigues. Baptiste, his stardom ever rising, marries another woman and starts a family. But years later, Garance (now the aristocrat’s kept woman) reappears in Baptiste’s life, and the two finally spend the night together. Discovered the next morning by Baptiste’s wife, Nathalie, Garance flees by carriage along the boulevard, now crowded with carnival celebrators in full costume. Baptiste becomes engulfed by the revelers. The film suddenly ends as a mock theater curtain descends over the screen.

  Was the story of Baptiste and Garance—the shy, forlorn star and the woman whom he desired, then from whom he ran away—lodged in Dylan’s mind when he blocked out Renaldo and Clara? It’s possible, although the convergence cannot be taken too literally. Jacques Levy later recalled that Dylan wanted to make “a kind of Children of Paradise” and was interested mainly in “the atmosphere—and having a love story go through it.” When Shepard asked him if he wanted to make a film like Carné’s or Truffaut’s, Dylan replied simply, “Something like that.”16

  Still, as various critics have pointed out, the two films are intimately connected. A leitmotif of a lover’s flower in Carné’s film also turns up in Dylan’s (where, Dylan has said, it symbolizes the vagina). Baptiste/Barrault’s whiteface is an obvious link, as are his scarf and flowered hat, as, indeed, is the bevy of masks that appears throughout Children of Paradise. The second part of Carné’s film is entitled “The Man in White” (although Dylan might well have borrowed his Woman in White from the spooky novel of the same name by Wilkie Collins). The star performer Renaldo/Dylan physically resembles the thin but wiry star performer Baptiste/Barrault, in his face as well as his body, just as the characters played by Baez and Sara Dylan vaguely resemble Garance and Nathalie. (As the Woman in White, Baez even affects a French accent from time to time.) In a climactic, confrontational scene, Baptiste/Barrault’s wife, who has found him snuggling with his long-ago love, Garance, bids him to be honest with her; in a corresponding scene near the very end, the Woman in White (the long-ago love) confronts Renaldo/Dylan (who has been snuggling with his wife, Clara), and both women in the triangle tell him to decide, and to say, directly, which of the two of them he loves. The configurations, as well as the outcomes, are different, but the scene in Renaldo and Clara strongly echoes the one in Children of Paradise.

  Left: Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste in Les enfants du paradis, 1945. Right: Bob Dylan in whiteface during the Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975. (photo credit 5.8) (photo credit 5.9)

  Above all, the two films share a distinctive theatricality. Barrault’s Baptiste performs several brilliant pantomimes that are closely knit thematically with the rest of Children of Paradise. Likewise, the concert sequences of Dylan performing in whiteface are intrinsic to the dreamscape of Renaldo and Clara. One layered sequence out of many, late in the movie, begins with Renaldo staring at an actual newspaper photograph of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, appearing together in the Rolling Thunder Revue. The film then abruptly cuts to Dylan and Baez onstage, singing “Never Let Me Go.” Next we see and hear Clara talking about the newspaper photograph as a picture not of Dylan and Baez but of Renaldo and the Woman in White; then Renaldo starts daubing himself with his white makeup before the next performance. All along, deep in the background, we can hear “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” from Blonde on Blonde, as recorded during the Rolling Thunder rehearsals—a love song, Desire had since disclosed, that Bob Dylan wrote for Sara Dylan.

  The concert footage in Renaldo and Clara should not be interpreted as standing distinct from the film (although, much like his earlier movie appearances, Dylan’s best acting in Renaldo and Clara, by far, is in his musical performances). Yet that footage also stands up extremely well on its own, as powerful, at times stunning recordings of Bob Dylan singing, playing, and even miming his heart out in the Rolling Thunder Revue, much as I remember him at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. And here, the film’s tone and texture, as informed by the plebeian theater in Children of Paradise, help to further explain the Rolling Thunder Revue. At one point during the tour, Dylan referred, in an interview, to sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte as one of the conceptual models for the revue, and he could easily have mentioned many other models, including the Bauls of West Bengal. But backstage in New Haven, when Bruce Springsteen’s girlfriend inquired about why he was wearing whiteface, Dylan muttered about having seen something once in a movie.

  “Hurricane” ended as an instrumental footrace between Rivera’s violin and Dylan’s harmonica, pushed along by Howie Wyeth’s pounding drums and cymbals and Rob Stoner’s bass. Suddenly everyone reached the finish line in a tie, the music slowed for a split second, and the final chord changed the key from minor to major, which always sounds hopeful. Musically, the show had hit a peak. “One More Cup of Coffee,” the next song, was a comedown, a slow melody bearing words I could hardly make out, mainly because Dylan’s artfully wavering vocal, early on—singing that sounded distinctly Hebraic, like a cantor’s High Holy day cantillation of sacred text—threw me off. Later, I would read the song’s lyrics and realize I was mistaken, but at the time I wondered if Dylan had actually composed a song about the Middle East.

  “Sara” was much softer—Dylan singing with his guitar, along with Rivera on her violin, and with Wyeth and Stoner providing a tactful rhythm line. It was also a much sadder tune, shifting the key from E minor to C major for the chorus but then reverting. Knowing nothing about the state of the Dylans’ marriage, I didn’t at first comprehend that the song was a plea for Sara’s unending love as well as an avowal of his own. By any standard, it was a gripping, graphic sorrow song, and for Dylan it was startlingly autobiographical, full of vivid, loving family memories and adoring images of his wife.

  Yet the song’s reconciliation plea rang hollow. Even as he rhapsodized about Sara’s charms, wisdom, and devotion, Dylan seemed self-absorbed and all too willing to place responsibility chiefly on her for the marriage’s souring. Apart from some superficial self-abasement—“You must forgive me my unworthiness”—the lyrics lacked contrition, and at one point even affected cluelessness about why things had gone wrong. “Whatever made you want to change your mind?” Dylan sang, as if he didn’t know. When the song told of how Dylan spent several sleepless nights in the Hotel Chelsea writing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for Sara, it sounded as if he thought
he was handing her some sort of trophy, by telling the whole world that she and she alone was the muse behind his masterpiece.

  There is more emotional humility (and economy) in Dave Van Ronk’s version of “Come Back, Baby,” which at least asks the woman in question to talk things over “one more time.” Still, the fans in New Haven seemed deeply affected by “Sara,” and judging by their whistling, cheering response, they were entirely in Dylan’s corner. The references to the Chelsea and “Sad-Eyed Lady” elicited scattered appreciative yips of hip recognition from some of the rowdier male patrons, in an audience that, as I recall, was mainly composed of men. Then came some shouted requests. The show was drawing to a close.

  The New Haven Rolling Thunder afternoon show has not been described by Dylan’s chroniclers as one of the musical highlights of the tour, in part because it included none of the solos by Baez, McGuinn, Elliott, and Mitchell that brightened other shows, and in part because it was not professionally recorded. Aside from the four duets with Baez, the New Haven matinee was all Dylan, all the time. Yet that yielded some treats, including the first public performance ever of “Tangled Up in Blue.” And by the time the troupe reached Connecticut, it was following a strong regular set list toward the end of the concert, which led from Dylan’s current anguish in “Sara” to his song of despair from Blonde on Blonde, “Just Like a Woman.”

  If “Sara” has been too easily accepted as simply a loving, autobiographical tribute, “Just Like a Woman” has come in for a good deal of unfair scorn. Some lyrics in the chorus—above all, those that say the woman in the song “breaks just like a little girl”—have caused critics and ordinary listeners to hear the entire song as one of Dylan’s acidic put-downs, and they have even prompted some to denounce him as a misogynist. In fact, the song is more like a flashback to a howl, recounted after the protagonist has numbed the pain.

  The song is the mirror image of “Sara,” describing a man trying to break off a relationship gone haywire. The singer describes how he fell in love with a passionate woman who was wreathed in fog, amphetamine, and pearls, but then came to realize that she was fragile, afflicted, and deceptive, playing the little girl, and that the affair was a train wreck in the making. The song shows him struggling to express his feelings honestly and find the proper parting words, although he is never quite definite. In all of Dylan’s songs, there are few lyrics more distraught (as well as technically sharp) than the bridge section in “Just Like a Woman” and the lyrics immediately after:

  It was raining from the first

  And I was dying there of thirst

  So I came in here

  And your long-time curse hurts

  But what’s worse

  Is this pain in here

  I can’t stay in here

  Ain’t it clear that—

  I just can’t fit

  Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit.

  The lyrics that follow are calculating as well as sad: the couple will certainly meet again, and he asks her not to shame him, but to be discreet about their past, when he was down and the world was hers. The lines actually intensify the song’s pathos.

  The performance of “Just Like a Woman” on Blonde on Blonde emphasizes the bridge: Dylan’s singing builds in volume and passion, then falls into hushed resignation at “just can’t fit.” In New Haven, Dylan and Guam produced the same effect, only now Dylan actually did howl and wail—“suh-oh I came in heeeeee-ah-uh-ah-uh-ah-uh,” “long time CURSE HURTS but what’s WORSE,” “AIN’T IT CLEEEEEEEEEah”—before dropping.

  The chord changes for “Just Like a Woman” moved effortlessly, beneath the crashing applause, into “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” already a reliable crowd-pleaser. Roger McGuinn sang the solo on the second verse, the entire ensemble gathered for the chorus, then dramatically halted, waiting out a pause, slowly took up a sweet instrumental interlude, and finally sang one more chorus.

  The Rolling Thunder Revue finale, 1975. (photo credit 5.10)

  The troupe then fell into unconcerted milling onstage. A fast fiddle line floated up. The stars gathered in front of the band for a disheveled grand-finale singing of what had become the counterculture’s national anthem, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The relief among the smiling performers was obvious: another closing, another show. Joan Baez took a verse of the song, McGuinn took another, then Jack Elliott, and then Bob Neuwirth. Baez teased the audience that the performers knew no more songs, and won some loud cheers with a couple of her high-soprano flourishes. There the show ended, in a tribute to Guthrie, concluding where Dylan’s proper artistic career had begun—a beginning more than fifteen years earlier, by which time much of the romance evoked by the Rolling Thunder Revue had already entered Dylan’s soul.

  Moving from commedia dell’arte to Marcel Carné to Woody Guthrie cut a huge swirl through time and space, far bigger than assembling the Greenwich Village folk revival with newer musical currents and then making a movie out of it. Meant to make history, or at least make a statement about the past and the present, the Rolling Thunder Revue had plenty of historical elements embedded in its spirit. Allen Ginsberg acted as a kind of historical consultant as well as poet to the troupe—Ginsberg was especially taken with the never-executed idea of pairing Hurricane Carter’s travails with the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in some form of musical-poetic homage—and he worked out some of what he thought of as the tour’s strange patriotic bicentennial implications. The revue began and ended, after all, during the autumn following the two hundredth anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, outside Boston. New England was already gripped by what Sam Shepard would call “Bicentennial madness, as though desperately trying to resurrect the past to reassure ourselves that we sprang from somewhere.”17 During the summer after the tour—when, as it happened, the revue would regroup for a second, southern swing—the entire country would undertake a gigantic celebration of 1776 (or an attempt at celebration, in the sour public mood that lingered after the Watergate affair). Now Bob Dylan, who had picked up the American bardic cudgel from Ginsberg, who had earlier picked it up from Walt Whitman, would kick off the patriotic commemoration by making music, theater, film, and poetry with his friends on a tour that wound its way past village and farm in the very cradle of the American Revolution. Dylan would steal a march on the culture. Ginsberg told his father that Dylan was making “a Bicentennial picture.”18

  Dylan had long had his own strong, if surreal, historical sense of early America, as he had written it out in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” on Bringing It All Back Home—a cut-up story inspired as much by Herman Melville and Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” and Ray Stevens’s “Ahab the Arab” as by any book of history. The song begins with the singer describing how he had hit the American shore after riding on the Mayflower with Captain Ahab/Arab and his crew. And sure enough, as the Rolling Thunder tour began, there was Dylan aboard the modern replica of the Mayflower, parked in Plymouth harbor, gazing out over the waves with a crew that now consisted of Roger McGuinn and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, among others. In a semi-scripted encounter, which would become a long passage in Renaldo and Clara, the revue also visited a gathering of Tuscarora Indian families in a run-down meeting hall (and with a chief, Rolling Thunder, who added another dimension to the tour’s name). In the movie, the musicians also gather for what looks like a sundown ceremony by the sea, mixing American Indian drums and Buddhist chants with improvised doo-wop. It could all have been a Dada Thanksgiving, with Dylan (or Renaldo in the movie) acting kindly to the awestruck Indians but also striding about as the true star: Miles Standish as celebrity troubadour.

  There was another, even richer historical layer to the tour, more out of the American 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, at the outer edge of Dylan’s own experience and just beyond it, sheltered in some of the old redbrick New England towns and cities where the revue played, like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Waterbury, Connecticut. Here was an America that had all but disap
peared, flattened by structures such as the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, hollowed out by time and tide, much as Dylan’s hometown had been. A few Rolling Thunder shows took place in grand big-city arenas, including Madison Square Garden, to help recoup costs and build up Rubin Carter’s defense fund, but for the most part the tour’s setting and atmosphere—the little theaters, not unlike the old Lybba in Hibbing; the very fact that the performers and the entourage traveled by bus and car—turned this into an adventure out of another time.

  At the center of the tour’s historical romance, though, was what Dylan had first mentioned to McGuinn, the American circus or carnival—and a particular romance of popular entertainment. This circus would have nothing to do with the star-studded, one-off Rock and Roll Circus that the Rolling Stones had staged for television in London a few years earlier. Rolling Thunder would be more like the real McCoy; among other things, it actually would roll from town to town. Children of Paradise added a thematic and cinematic gloss to the theatrical romance, but the Rolling Thunder Revue had most in common with an American caravan lodged deep in Dylan’s imagination.

  In the tall-tale versions of his show-business past that he bandied about during his early days in New York, Dylan claimed that he had been rousting with the circus for a long time. (He actually knew a lot about the details and mentioned one troupe in particular, the Roy B. Thomas Show.) In a radio interview early in 1962, he told Cynthia Gooding that he had spent six years, “off and on,” in the carnival, working all sorts of odd jobs, learning about reading playing cards (which he didn’t trust) and reading palms (which he did, “for a bunch of personal things, I don’t … personal experiences”).19 A year later, at Town Hall, he debuted “Dusty Old Fairgrounds,” a song mostly about work and travel—he told the audience it was “a route song”—but also about camaraderie and magic and fate: