On the Road with Bob Dylan (13 page)

Joan smiles. “It was the size of the hall. That’s the massive part of it, that determined quite a bit. That determined that it would be an old-timey feeling instead of a star show. Family versus star.”

“You know who deserves a hell of a lot of credit?” I ask.

“Neuwirth,” Baez anticipates correctly.

“He just set the stage. Totally egoless!”

“None of us is egoless,” Joan corrects. “But he did a great job of m.c.ing and holding it together and keeping the ego thing for all of us. That’s pretty hard because anyone who walks on the stage has an ego larger than the average person who doesn’t go onstage. So you’re dealing with a bunch of fucking freight trains and when they’re going like this and like that on the same track together everybody has a little squabble here and a squabble there. It’s a basic theme. It’s hard to keep it cool, ya know, and people have
made an effort to do it and I think it’s good training, it’s a good lesson.”

“I think it was so great to see Neuwirth and Dylan on the same stage.”

“It wasn’t great,” Joan gently chides, “it was lovely.”

“It was amazing.”

“It wasn’t amazing, it was just lovely.”

“To me it was amazing,” I stand firm.

“The show was relatively electrifying. I don’t go to too many shows so I don’t know what to compare it to. I don’t know very much about music. I don’t go very many places. I’m a mother; I stay at home. I put the guitar away between tours. I don’t play it again until the next tour. The first night I walked into rehearsal my fingers were made out of rubber. I hadn’t touched it in two months. See, basically, I’m not your intense musician.”

“But you’re writing more now.”

“I haven’t written for a while, yeah, but I did start writing five or six years ago then I recorded everything I’ve written—that period. I never wrote up till then. It’s not easy.”

“That first song is nice.”

“The ‘Diamonds and Rust’ thing?” Joan allows a warm smile. “Yeah, I would like to just get back into writing music, but, there are too many parts of my life, you know. I’ve temporarily dropped the campaigns on the streetcorners because I wanted to be a good mother in the important years of my son’s life. It’s important enough to me that he’s gonna join us toward the end of the tour because a month in a five-year-old’s life is more like a year. So I called this morning at school to wish him a Happy Halloween, and he’s going to be the Road Runner tonight.”

“He’s going to join the tour?”

“Yeah, ’cause that will have been four weeks away from him and beyond that it ain’t good for him …. He’ll be fine, another person will be with him and as long as I’m there he’ll have a good time.
He sleeps a lot, it wears the shit out of him. I remember him through the
Diamonds and Rust
tour last summer, he’d come and sit on the amp during the last songs ’cause he’d be standing there and it was the part where I was at the end and I was loud enough for him to come out and he’d come and sit on the amp and he’d say ‘Yeah, yeah, only one more now, Momma.’ To him it’s ‘I wish she’d be with me.’ He loves the drums, he loves the guys, he’ll have fun, maybe there’ll be another kid around. Where most musicians are into being a musician sixteen hours a day, I’m into being a mother and a woman and doing a lot with the house, lately, and I’ve been trying to write a book. I have two songbooks to do that I’ve been putting off. I’ve given politics a rest. It has to, it’s not fair to my music, my kid. But it’s still there. I’m a rabid pacifist. I’m a nutcake radical-pacifist. I’ve been assured one couldn’t make statements like this because people change but I’ve been a nonviolent soldier since I can remember, since I could verbalize it, at sixteen …. But the concept of moving in another direction from that doesn’t exist in my mind. I’ve felt these things since I was ten.”

“Were you a red-diaper baby?”

“What’s that?”

“Did you come from an old Communist Party family?”

“No, my parents were Quakers. They became Quakers when I was five. To them I owe the fact that I have no country. For that I’m eternally grateful. ’Cause what I think has fucked most of our heads around is the fact that we can think of ourselves as Americans. It’s an accident that I’m an American. So that gives you a little bit of humility.”

“‘A Simple Twist of Fate,’ huh? Are you going to do that song, by the way?”

“I thought about it. He doesn’t want to do it. He has mixed feelings about me mimicking him. But I love doing it. I love to tease him.”

At that, Joan smiles, asks if I have some sense of what she’s about, and when I nod, she gets up, says goodbye, walks over to the terrace,
vaults out onto the sand again. The interview concluded, I lay out on the terrace for a few minutes, soaking up the Massachusetts sun, then call Gene. He lumbers up, escorts me to my car, and I leave the Sea Crest and all its secrets behind.

That night there are some empty seats in the auditorium, about 150, as Guam, the newly named backup band, starts into their warmup set. And in honor of Halloween Neuwirth and then Jack Elliot come out in masks. After Jack’s set, Dylan bounds on, in black leather jacket, long Indian scarf, and a grotesque, transparent plastic-sequined life mask. He seems totally relaxed tonight, clowning with Neuwirth during “Masterpiece,” then almost crooning the new arrangement of “It Ain’t Me Babe.” He’s so intense that he forgets one small detail as he starts into the harmonica break: it’s hard to blow harp through a mask. A quick swirl, the mask goes, and the audience explodes at the sight of the familiar face.

The performers are much looser tonight, Dylan bantering more with the audience, dedicating a song to David Crosby, “who’s out there somewhere.” Baez, who seems more comfortable following Dylan’s often impetuous leads in their duet segment, does a wonderful imitation of Lily Tomlin, sings an old old folkie standard, “Mary Hamilton,” then undercuts the preciousness with a newer song, “Love Song to a Stranger,” written “after I had cast my Madonna image to the winds.” The band is burning, everyone seems on, yet strangely enough, tonight’s audience is much more reserved. In fact, after the finale, the cheers go on for a minute or two and then quickly peter out. I turn to Jacques Levy, who’s had the responsibility of stage-directing the show. “What a reserved audience. They don’t seem to have any enthusiasm,” I note ruefully. Jacques smiles. “It’s better, everyone’s exhausted on stage. It’s better.” He looks out at those who continue to applaud. “Stop applauding,” Jacques laughs. “Go home and fuck.”

S
aturday and we sleep late. I roll out of bed around noon but George is up already, so we drive over to Johnnie’s for breakfast and run into Lisa again. She’s been working the hotel, trying to get to someone close enough to the tour to know the next few days’ itinerary. So during breakfast, she’s pumping us for info, confirming where that night’s concert is, double-checking on where the tour’s staying, jotting down driving directions. I ask for some change for the jukebox. “You cheap Jew,” she fumes, “you’re just like Dylan. He’s cheap too. When I saw him in the Village, he asked me for fifty cents for smokes.”

We decide to get an early start and arrive early for the night’s gig in North Dartmouth. This is going to be an important concert, the first date on a college campus, before an exclusively student audience. After an hour and a half’s ride, we pull into Southern Massachusetts University, a sprawling modernesque campus. The concert will be in the gym, and already, two hours before showtime, a line has formed, snaking its way around the building.

At 6:30 the sound check starts, but in the lobby the odd pair of tickets are still being sold. Jerry Seltzer, a nice middle-aged Jewish man who’s in charge of ticket sales and advance work for the tour, is chatting with Ava Megna, a diminutive, attractive blonde, whose job is to run the box office at each venue. The talk turns to tonight’s audience. “These aren’t Dylan’s generation,” Seltzer tells me, “this is a college crowd. I’ll be interested in seeing their reaction. The first two shows when Dylan walked on, many people in the audience had no idea who he was.

“You should have been here last Sunday, though,” he continues.
“We went around the campus awakening the kids. Went to every room and gave out handbills announcing the concert. And we had the film crew with us.”

Is this a way to run a tour? Run around like meshuganas a week before the concert, passing out handbills as if for the hottest massage parlor in town? Wake up kids, stick a leaflet in their hands, and film it? “Wait a minute,” I buttonhole Seltzer, “just what is the philosophy of this tour anyway?”

Seltzer just smiles. “I don’t discuss that, that’s not my major.”

At 7:05 the doors open and the kids scramble past us, fighting for spots on the floor close to the stage. About four thousand kids will cram their way into this gym, filling the open areas on the floor, the seats, the bleachers on the side, even watching from the overhanging balconies behind the stage. I’m about to start for a seat when a reporter for the local college paper who’s been eying us gets up enough nerve to ask what we do. Seltzer and I explain our functions but then the journalist, who’s named Jerry, launches into a critique of the first shows.

“Look, I didn’t like those first shows, I thought they were decidedly mediocre. Number one, Bob Dylan can’t sing duets with anyone. He’s got a distinct style and a voice and no one can match it. Number two, they try to feature each artist and it doesn’t come off too well, it’s too disjointed. Ramblin’ Jack, for example, was on too long. Number three, Roger McGuinn’s solo spot was excellent, he should do more. Number four, all the backup musicians are good, but they should stay in the back. Maybe the whole spirit is wrong, I can explain it in different ways but I still don’t like it. I didn’t think Dylan’s performance was inspired.”

That pronouncement over, I lunge into a counterattack, but Jerry interrupts.

“Dylan’s stagnant. He selects this state to start running around in because it was the only state for McGovern. He sounds like the Beach Boys to me. He doesn’t change his music at all. He doesn’t change his political consciousness at all either; he never talks about
anything. He’s not political anymore; I think he’s just a joker. And that ‘Hurricane’ song. That’s bandwagon, he’s just jumping on Hurricane’s bandwagon. Who was there before Dylan? Ali, Jessie Jackson,
People
magazine, a long time ago. Dylan’s like better late than never. It’s too bad. I wasn’t into early Dylan, but I really dug
Blonde on Blonde
. All that speed and acid shit.”

It’s too late to hope to find a seat so George and I walk back to the sound booth and stand next to Louie Kemp. And two days into this tour, it’s clear that Kemp will be the press’ main adversary. Already the media have had problems getting tickets, getting an itinerary, getting access to the performers, in short, in performing their functions. The hotels, as I found out, are off limits, the penalty being a charming afternoon locked up in a vacant RTR room with two burly security guards at your door and no phone contact to the outside world. At least that’s what happened to one particularly obnoxious
Village Voice
reporter at the Sea Crest.

Kemp found that incident so amusing that he can’t keep from telling it to everyone he sees and he begins to regale George and me with the data and with the tragic footnote that the
Voice
reporter was so hungry for a piece of the Thunder pie that he wrote Louie a note telling him that he understands the whole thing and by the end of his miserable missive was actually thanking the fishman for locking him up and keeping him straight.

Louie laughs heartily and I notice his plastic ID badge, the standard tour identification. Only there’s one thing strange about this one. In the picture, Kemp is smiling sardonically, and giving the camera the finger.

This is the first large hall and the band is really pumping out a full sound, especially Ronson whose style is much more suited to amphitheaters. Stoner, too, is pulling out all the stops, playing Dylan’s unrecorded song about Catfish Hunter, doing a neat bass solo between verses. “Fuck,” George nudges me, “Stoner was born to be a rock ’n roll star.” By this time a fairly large crowd had gathered
in the sound booth, Chris O’Dell, Jacques Levy, Ronee Blakley, all cheering the proceedings.

And when Dylan walks on, the audience erupts, giving him a standing ovation before the first notes of “Masterpiece” ring out. During “It Ain’t Me Babe,” Jerry the journalist finds us. “Who arranged this,” he gushes breathlessly, “I really like it.” Dylan plows through the same set as at Plymouth, but with tremendous assurance. I move down to stage left and from that angle Dylan looks like a caged animal, stalking the stage, punching out the words to “Isis.” At one point he turns his back and gestures, arms outstretched, and he looks like the IWW symbol, breaking chains like they were made of paper. He finishes “Isis” and exits to a standing ovation, and a waiting Barry Imhoff, who towels him off and walks him to the dressing room.

I watch the second half from a balcony behind the stage as Dylan roars through “I Don’t Believe You,” his foot keeping desperate time with the lyrics of betrayal. The band comes back and they sound like a machine, so tight and precise, especially Wyeth who’s hitting his vast array of drums with the regularity of a drill press. The sweat is pouring off Dylan’s face now, as he croons “Just Like a Woman,” with stiletto-sharp phrasing. “But you break just like a little girrrlll …” he sings, and at once, the lights fly on as McGuinn, Neuwirth, Baez, Blakley, Ginsberg, and David Blue race on for the finale. By 11:05, it’s over, the performers already hurtling toward the Sea Crest in their buses, the crowd slowly filtering out, and Jerry Seltzer, running through the kids like a banshee, shrilling that tickets are still on sale for next week’s concert in Providence.