Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (20 page)

Most who saw the shows have maintained down the years that even multiple bootlegs (Dylan’s crew taped everything), footage from
Renaldo and Clara
and the 2002 album
Bob Dylan Live 1975
do not give an adequate impression of the Rolling Thunder Revue. On-the-spot journalists such as Sloman tended, as reviewers do, to piece together their notes from phrases like ‘and the crowd goes wild’. As with a lot of Dylan’s concert work, a determined effort of deduction, grasping at echoes and old shadows, nevertheless allows the semi-educated belief that, some of the time, something special was going on. Crudely, the artist did not disappoint. Often enough, he did a lot more, singing with a sureness and commitment that revealed the strained, stentorian efforts of Tour ’74 for the contrivances they were, a commitment that could often dispel any doubts over the
Desire
material. Dylan’s fearlessness in reworking his own songs, even the works treated as holy relics by too many fans, was meanwhile remarkable in itself.
Live 1975
is proof enough that, at their best, the Rolling Thunder ensemble justified all the glowing reports.

Dylan would perform perhaps five numbers with Guam as his first offering. Then the yellow stage curtain, a curious affair designed to mimic a proscenium arch, emblazoned above with the name of the show and decorated below with joke images of jugglers, strongmen and gymnasts, would fall: intermission. The homage to Carné’s
Les Enfants du Paradis
was plain enough to anyone who knew the picture. Then, just before the curtain rose again, two familiar but invisible singers could be heard. As the tab went slowly upwards, ‘an amazing sight’ was revealed: Dylan and Baez together again. Here was Jacques Levy’s cherished
coup de théâtre
, corny as hell but undoubtedly effective. ‘Close your eyes and it could have been Newport in 1963,’ said a certain dazzled journalist.
²⁵
That was, no doubt, the general idea.

Invariably, the pair would commence their evening’s collaboration with ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, or with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. The degree of calculation was self-evident, though few in the audiences cared. Dylan was employing Baez to evoke memories. He might have been averse to nostalgia, but he was not afraid to risk the disease for the sake of the show. After four or five songs together, he would leave Baez to continue with the help of Guam and sometimes with the aid of Roger McGuinn. Often, as though in a display of pride, she would perform her own ‘Diamonds & Rust’, a wistful song (one of her few compositions) about that long-gone affair with the star of the show. McGuinn would then offer a song or two: ‘Chestnut Mare’ or ‘Eight Miles High’, another big hit for the Byrds. Finally, Dylan would return for a half a dozen more songs, never forgetting ‘Hurricane’, before proceedings were brought to a close, on almost every occasion, with ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’. There were no encores.

Things would change as various celebrity guests joined the tour for one night or more, but not by much. After the first shows had granted the audience close to five hours of music-as-theatre in exchange for their $7.50 tickets, Levy managed to tighten things up a little. Nevertheless, Rolling Thunder was always a long night. Dylan’s own, unimpeded performances might embrace no more than a dozen songs and last not much more than an hour in total, sometimes to the annoyance of paying hecklers who had not come to see Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, McGuinn or Ronee Blakley, but that was the deal. Rolling Thunder was a revue. It said so on the last-minute posters that appeared just before tickets were briefly put on sale by hall managers sworn to secrecy – any breach would result in cancellation, or so ran the promoters’ threat – weeks before. Audiences saw and heard what Dylan wanted them to see and hear, even if that meant listening to Bobby Neuwirth or Mick Ronson’s glam-rock guitar. Anyone whose patience wore thin could always spend their time wondering what the artist meant by it all.

He gave them plenty to ponder and digest in Rolling Thunder’s first phase.
Desire
had not yet been released, after all. Thanks to Columbia’s twitchy lawyers, the final version of ‘Hurricane’ had been recorded only six days before the revue’s opening night. It would not be in the stores until November, when the tour was deep in chilly New England. Around half a dozen of the pieces Dylan performed in the concerts would be entirely new to audiences who tended to learn every syllable of his work by heart. It seemed inescapably obvious, too, that he was amending the style of his old songs to suit both his new band and his new material. Revision, as in rethinking and rewriting, had become the order of the day. For Dylan, Rolling Thunder was still another new beginning.
Blood on the Tracks
, whose songs were given only minimal exposure on the tour, was already far behind him.

Reviews were pretty good; some were very good indeed. Though Lou Kemp tried to keep most of the reporters at bay – and seemed to enjoy giving Sloman a tough time – any Dylan tour was a media event. The idea that he, Neuwirth, Elliott and Baez could ever have gone rolling around the back roads of America like merry prankster troubadours untroubled by baggage of any description had always been a nonsense. Dylan and the Rolling Thunder troupe could not even alight on small towns like Plymouth, Durham in New Hampshire, or Augusta in Maine without causing a fuss. In fact, precisely because such places never saw an authentic superstar the fuss became inevitable. Legends, as someone probably said, are not born but made. Spontaneity can take a lot of planning.

Dylan, though, was as disloyal as ever in his performances to any key in which any given song might once have been recorded. Sometimes – and this is apparent on bootleg recordings – the key would change from night to night. Sometimes it could change in the middle of a song. Tempo could also seem entirely arbitrary, a matter of the artist’s intuition or mood. It is a tribute to the Guam musicians that they learned an essential thing about Dylan as a performer: he did what
felt
right, in the moment. By common consent a weight of responsibility therefore fell on Rob Stoner, the bass player, to watch the maestro’s every muscle, anticipate the impending changes if he could, and guide his colleagues. The artist’s instincts became the band’s instructions. They could not rely on what they had learned or thought they knew about a piece of music. It was unprofessional behaviour on Dylan’s part, in the usual sense, but it was art. Most of the time.

Here began the generation-long audience game of spot-that-tune. Writing of the very first show, for example, Sloman would describe a rendition of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ – entirely correctly, if recordings of the Halloween concert and subsequent tapes are a guide – as ‘almost
bossa nova
’.
Live 1975
opens with an account of ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’, to take another example, in which every word of the
Nashville Skyline
original save the chorus has been rewritten, while a wistful melody has been pummelled into the shape of a rock song. ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ meanwhile became the unlikeliest of candidates – though the transformation was unimpeachable – for retooling as a ferocious, straightforward piece of rock and roll. Even the newer pieces from
Desire
were not immune to this seemingly arbitrary treatment. In fact, they seemed to be prime candidates for refurbishment only weeks after they had been recorded, as though Dylan was already bored with their musical settings, or – more likely – already dissatisfied with what had been managed in the studio.

So it was that in 1975 yet another theory about the artist began to emerge. This one held that he did not mess around with favourite songs just to keep himself awake. Instead, he was creating art anew while the audience looked on. After the so-called Never-Ending Tour was inaugurated in June of 1988 and began to become a fixture in the lives of Dylan’s most devoted fans, the theory grew steadily more elaborate. The artist, so we heard, was asserting that a song only truly exists in performance. He was reminding us that no song – no piece of art? – is ever complete in any real sense. Dylan was demonstrating that concerts and concert tours were creative works in their own right. ‘Bob Dylan’ and what he was presumed to intend were parts – this kind of chatter caught on quick – of a construct.

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’.