Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (19 page)

In 1987, in the first of her autobiographies, Baez would describe one of the little
Renaldo and Clara
vignettes she found so risible.
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In this scene, wearing a faded satin dress borrowed from ‘an old gypsy lady’ and expected to produce dialogue out of thin air, she would ask and answer her own questions. Such as: why had Dylan never told her about Sara? Such as: what would have happened if she and the artist had married ‘way back then’? Her answer: the relationship would have failed because she was ‘too political’ and because he lied ‘too much’. In Baez’s recollection, Dylan said nothing at all during this excruciating impromptu scene, certainly not while the cameras were running. Improvisation, oddly enough, was not his forte, in her opinion. In point of fact, he would reply – diffidently, it’s true – that he had married the woman he loved. On a cold, grey November day he would stand at the bar in the rural restaurant, one of Arlo Guthrie’s haunts, smiling fixedly but ‘embarrassed’, digesting news that was, Baez would write, no news at all.

The scene at Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge – in western Massachusetts, not in upstate New York, as Baez seemed to believe – would not be the main event of the day for most of those present. A lot of eating, drinking and off-the-wall singing would go on while Ginsberg wandered around reading
Moby-Dick
in memory of Herman Melville’s recent departure from the area. By then the troupe would have played two shows at the Springfield Civic Center, only the fifth stop on the tour. In the restaurant in the little town of Becket, in Berkshire County, Mama Frasca would be far more interested in her female guest than in Dylan. After chicken, spaghetti, liqueurs and some ad hoc filming, Guthrie would play old rock and roll songs on the house piano.
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It would make for a convivial day. Just like the artist, however, Baez would stand at the centre of her own small, private drama on the Rolling Thunder tour.

*

In Manhattan, while Dylan and Baez rehearsed, Larry Sloman noticed a couple of small details. They did not to strike the reporter as particularly odd. In fact, they involved two tiny gestures recorded by
the writer as though they were only to be expected and somehow only fitting. In the middle of the 1970s, the bastard genre called rock journalism was still struggling to shed its deference towards the demigod geniuses of pop music. (Sloman’s own book would aid the process greatly, ironically enough.) What the writer saw was Dylan in need of a cigarette and a cigarette appearing instantly, as if by unspoken command. Earlier, when the artist had shown symptoms of thirst, he had simply
pointed
, without a word, at a container of fruit juice. Sloman could perhaps have mentioned a line from a song that ought to have appeared on
Blonde on Blonde
in 1966, but inspiration passed him by. The line goes: ‘Yes, you, you just sit around and ask for ashtrays, can’t you reach?’

Dylan was at the point in his life when the idea of fetching his own cigarette no longer occurred to him. The notion that he should even have to ask for a drink had become strange. In October of 1975, he was just 34, still a young man, but he had been one of the bigger stars for better than a decade, for most of his adult life. This made him a perfectly normal member of the pop industry’s elect, but strange, perfectly so, to almost everyone else on the planet. Unlike most of the rock aristocracy, however, Dylan was proposing to venture out on the road amid the palpable fiction of a communal, cooperative enterprise. He was about to present himself, albeit as the main event, as one of a company of touring players.

There was a creative need behind his desire, but the desire involved an impossibility. It also involved the weird, evolving phenomenon the twenty-first century would know simply by the shorthand ‘celebrity’. Here was one artist beloved by many people who could never be one of them. Here was one, they said, who ‘spoke’ to them, but he could no longer speak, not in any simple, unmediated fashion, to a single one among them. For a poet, it was a bizarre predicament. Still some wonder why he donned masks or blanked out his face with deathly white makeup on the Rolling Thunder tour. Like the blank-eyed self-effacing painting of himself he had made for the cover of
Self Portrait
, it was one way, perhaps the only way, to say, ‘Listen to the music.’

It didn’t solve the riddle. The fact of Bob Dylan could no longer be undone. The artist would toy with an impossibility during the Rolling Thunder Revue while insisting on the centrality, in all things, of the intimidating name on the marquee. He would play around, indeed, with Arthur Rimbaud’s declaration, ‘I is another,’ donning his masks and his whiteface as though to disown each and every one of his colliding multiple identities while insisting on the words he sang in Bob Dylan’s name. This time, sometimes, he would manage the feat triumphantly. But it would certainly be the last time.

*

One week before the expeditionary force set off, a party was held at Gerde’s Folk City in honour of Mike Porco, the restaurateur turned club owner who had nurtured the young Dylan – though at no great financial cost – and helped him to secure his cabaret card back in the grubby, glorious days of 1961. Porco would sell Folk City before long, but as October drew to a close in 1975 he was delighted to have the Rolling Thunder crew join him for his 61st birthday celebrations. Fond memories could be rekindled; thoughts of the good old days, thoughts held in some quarters to be among the revue’s motive forces, could be given another airing. Honour could be done to Porco and to the past.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. Among those present, the spectre at the feast, was the ruin of the handsome man who had once been Phil Ochs. That October, so lost to unquenchable alcoholism as to be delusive and dangerous – psychotic, in the usual parlance – he had less than six months left before suicide became an invitation impossible to refuse. Once he had championed Dylan only to be spurned and mocked – yet sometimes praised beyond the skies – in return. Ochs, still on occasion presenting himself as a ‘topical singer’, was another kind of remnant of a shared past. In 1975, he was a reminder that not all memories were golden, that not everyone from the old Village had survived intact, if they had survived at all.

By October, Ochs had been banned once and for all from The Other End. Sometimes, without any of Rimbaud’s fancy poetic conceits, he believed himself to be another person entirely, a character by the name of John Butler Train. This individual, he would insist, had murdered the ‘real’ Phil Ochs. He began to carry weapons, hammers or knives, habitually. He was near to destitution and too often violent. Some old friends were in genuine fear of this character. That night at Gerde’s, wearing Dylan’s hat, desperate for attention and desperate to be added to the list of former comrades joining the Rolling Thunder Revue, Ochs turned in a shambolic performance that was, reportedly, by turns sad, brave and profoundly disturbing. In the footage that would appear in Dylan’s film
Renaldo and Clara
, capturing the final images of Ochs as he prepared to take the stage, he looked like the very sick man he was. There was no chance whatever of his being allowed to enlist with the troupe. The artist’s whims, if whims they were, did not test each and every boundary of sympathy, or of common sense.

He had been an obsession for Ochs from start to finish. In the beginning, Phil had simply exulted ceaselessly, joyfully, over Dylan’s talent. The
Highway 61 Revisited
album had caused this old-style singing activist to laugh in sheer delight at its daring. Ochs had defended Dylan resolutely against the obtuse Stalinist folk-left crowd after the great Newport ’65 ‘betrayal’. Amid all the doctrinal hair-splitting over electricity and popularity he had been eloquent and loyal. For thanks, the artist had dismissed this best of fans as a mere ‘journalist’, booting him out of a limousine for the crime of failing to praise an inferior pop single sufficiently. Ochs, always painfully sincere and desperate for friendship, could bring out the cruelty in Dylan for reasons the former never understood and the latter never bothered to explain.

Later, as incessant boozing turned every thought into a toxic mash, Phil would talk about Bobby endlessly, but the talk could alternate without warning between the old admiration and a vicious, drunken hatred. A
Rolling Stone
article at the end of August, a piece devoted entirely to Dylan’s return to the Village, had described the first performance of ‘Abandoned Love’ on 3 July. Almost in passing, the reporter had noted: ‘A staggeringly drunk Phil Ochs stopped by and yelled at Dylan for a few moments. Dylan didn’t seem to mind.’
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The incident could probably stand as a metaphor, if one were needed, for the artist’s relationship with a lot of people, fixated fans above all. He didn’t make Phil Ochs crazy, but his music and the fact of his genius didn’t help. Love and maddened anger were never too far apart.
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As ever, Dylan travelled on. One last stab at rehearsals would be attempted on Cape Cod, during a few days spent at a plush, secluded place called the Sea Crest Beach Motel in the northern end of the Massachusetts town of Falmouth. It was about a 30-minute drive away from the first concert venue. Incongruously, a fund-raising mah-jong tournament involving 165 little old ladies – or ‘nice Jewish mommas’, as Sloman would call them – was in full swing when the revue descended on the place. One evening, ready or not, the prim tile-tossers were treated to a few numbers by Rolling Thunder members, for the benefit of the cameras, and to the otherwise surreal spectacle of ‘one of America’s foremost poets, Mr Allen Ginsberg’ reading from
Kaddish
, his long and passionate elegy – ‘Proem, Narrative, Hymmnn [
sic
], Lament, Litany and Fugue’ – for his own Jewish mother.

In her memoir, Baez would remember the mah-jong but place the
event in Portland, Maine. ‘They didn’t know how to respond to this world-famous literary figure with the long beard,’ Baez would write, ‘who started out mildly enough but ended up shouting about bearded vaginas, his eyes growing round and wild behind his glasses.’
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Wild, perhaps, but whatever Baez heard that night her brief sketch was not entirely fair to
Kaddish
, or indeed to the Jewish women in the audience. The great poem is visceral, even gruelling, but deeply felt and, for some people, intensely moving.

At the motel, Dylan looked on silently as the cameras rolled and these elderly Jewish women, so much like his own mother Beatty Zimmerman, listened to the threnody for poor, crazed Naomi Ginsberg. As his biographer would write, ‘It was as if Allen was finally reading it to Naomi herself.’ No one doubted that the audience found the performance hard going, but Sam Shepard, for one, would remember the poet receiving a burst of applause at its end. Baez, who came on next to leave the women ‘charmed’ with the tedious, venerable ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, must have forgotten the detail.
²³

*

The Rolling Thunder Revue opened on 30 October in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in one of those little venues that were supposed to be the concert party’s reason to exist. The War Memorial Auditorium, seating perhaps 1,800 with the addition of temporary seating, was hardly a club, but it made an opening statement – the one that would count – about Rolling Thunder’s intended ethos. The town itself, where zealous if seasick Pilgrims had anchored their
Mayflower
in 1620, meanwhile provided a symbolic touch as America prepared for its 200th birthday. A decade before, Dylan had performed his ‘115th Dream’ on the
Bringing It All Back Home
album as a comedy wandering sailor fresh off the famous boat. One couplet contained a joke that had faded somewhat, for the writer at least, in the intervening years: ‘I said, “You know, they refused Jesus, too” / He said, “You’re not Him.”’

The first of the Plymouth shows was sold out, as was the second. On Halloween, the second night, he had his plastic Bob Dylan mask on, masquerading, but the disguise was a weird affair. All agree that the thing was transparent and seemingly moulded to his face. Sloman – who was present for most of the tour before getting himself fired – would make mention of sequins. In other words, you could see through this mask, it took the shape of ‘Bob Dylan’, but it was camouflage. Whatever the gesture was intended to convey, it was not conducive to the playing of a harmonica. On each of the occasions Dylan appeared in his plastic contraption he was soon forced to rip it off – and perhaps that was the whole point – in order to make music.

The shows had a shape and a structure to which they would more or less adhere for the remainder of the year. That much was Levy’s doing. Lighting cues, an intermission, support acts, curtains opening and closing, the slow revealing of the star as he emerged from the darkness: these were theatrical devices, simple as vaudeville, but powerful. Nevertheless, ‘theatrical’ was hardly a novelty in rock music by the middle of the 1970s; if anything, it was becoming the kind of curse that only punk’s avenging angels could lift. Exactly a year before Dylan’s opening in Plymouth, David Bowie had been in the middle of an extravagant seven-night run at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall during his Diamond Dogs tour. The people wanted ‘theatrical’? The angular Englishman had delivered it by the gross ton. On his vast stage Bowie had contrived a cityscape complete with skyscrapers, a movable catwalk, a giant hand, numerous dancers, a cherrypicker crane to raise the star on high, even some music: catching an audience’s attention no longer came cheap. Dylan and Levy were seeking something that was the opposite of grandiose, street theatre in contrast to the grand rock operatics of Bowie, but they were at one with the times. A single performer with just a guitar and a harmonica would have failed those new Dylan-Levy songs. That was a matter of opinion, of course.

The pattern of the first shows, the pattern that would remain, can be described easily enough. Guam would open with perhaps half a dozen non-Dylan songs amid Neuwirth’s banter. Ronee Blakley, the artist and singer who had spent part of the previous summer starring in Robert Altman’s
Nashville
– she was another who had cancelled a tour for Dylan’s sake after being noticed at The Other End – would generally take a solo spot or two. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would then perform a short set, in the early days of the tour with only his own guitar for accompaniment, before stepping aside, without preamble or introductions, as the artist strode from the gloom of the wings to deliver a pointed ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ with Neuwirth vocalising at his side. On the first night in Plymouth, by Sloman’s account, this ‘ironic song about the limitations on artistic achievement’ became a ‘heraldic [
sic
] triumph’.
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