Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (24 page)

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 so 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.

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 Paradi
s 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.