Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (10 page)

‘Then this car comes up and cuts me off,’ Rivera (born Donna Shea in the Romani heartlands of Chicago) would tell the magazine early in the following year. ‘Some ugly green car. The guy driving asked me if I really knew how to play the violin.’ The violinist couldn’t make out the face, but recognised a famous profile. ‘Actually he had this woman next to him ask me. He asked her to ask me for my ’phone number, but I told her to tell him that I didn’t give out my number to somebody stopping me on the street.’

‘Come downtown and rehearse with me,’ Dylan then reportedly said. ‘I’m heading uptown,’ Rivera replied before roguishly demanding a ride to her destination. Once she was inside the car, Dylan turned downtown. Nevertheless, the two got on well, it seems, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at his rented rehearsal studio, playing songs of his that she had never before heard.

One was entitled ‘Isis’, another was called ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, a third ‘Mozambique’. Dylan was no longer likely to say that he ‘didn’t have anything’ in the way of songs. ‘One More Cup’ was, in fact, all his own work, written in May of 1975 as he reached his 34th birthday
during that desolate and debauched stay with David Oppenheim in the south of France. Dylan would tell Paul Zollo in the spring of 1991 that he had been inspired by a visit to a ‘gypsy’ festival, but that ‘the verses came from someplace else’. It was a place, no doubt, where marriages end. ‘No gratitude or love,’ said the parable’s first verse. ‘Your loyalty is not to me / But to the stars above.’

Dylan’s tale involves a few arresting coincidences. One is that the festival – in reality a religious pilgrimage – takes place in the small tourist town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, amid the marshes and lagoons of the Camargue, each 24 May. That date, it will be recalled, is Dylan’s birthday. The object of veneration among the thousands of Romani people who gather, moreover, is the statue of their adopted saint. They know her as Sainte Sara,
Sara e Kali
, ‘Sara the Black’. The name alone would have possessed a special resonance for Dylan. Each May, the saint’s effigy is carried from its shrine to the Mediterranean shore in a re-enactment of what one legend says was her arrival in Gaul, perhaps as a black Egyptian maidservant to one of the Three Marys – Magdalene, Salome, Jacobe – who had sailed from Alexandria after the crucifixion of Jesus with their uncle, Joseph of Arimathea.

All of this must have worked on Dylan’s imagination as he stood where Hemingway and Picasso had stood before him, contemplating another birthday and his estrangement from his own Sara. Her name, it seemed, had mystical associations that he would soon enough enlarge and explore.
Sara e Kali
, a saint not recognised by the Church of Rome, would meanwhile find herself in the service of the gods mumbo and jumbo thanks to the blasphemous ‘theory’ that she served not only Mary Magdalene but the offspring of Christ supposedly born in Gaul.
⁸
A more interesting fact is that the Manouches, as the French know the Romani, had their origins in the Indian subcontinent, that the rituals for
Sara e Kali
relate to the worship of the Hindu goddess Kali, and that they have a common linguistic root in the name: Kali, from
k
ā
la
, meaning blackness, time, death and change. Thus: ‘One more cup of coffee ’fore I go / To the valley below.’ Whether Dylan knew all this ethnographic detail or not – his songs concerning his wife suggest he had more than an inkling – he had been deserted, as he believed, by a woman associated with a goddess.

The glimpse of Rivera’s affected ‘gypsy’ style as she walked a New York street was serendipitous, then, but almost guaranteed to engage Dylan’s attention. The musical flavouring that her fiddle would give to
Desire
was, equally, more than just an experiment or an artist’s whim. The journalists who would style the Rolling Thunder Revue a ‘gypsy caravan’ got closer to the contents of Dylan’s imagination than they realised. He had met the Romani ‘king’ in the Camargue. The aged personage had never heard of the singer, but the possessor of, allegedly, 12 wives and 100 children had been another unwitting contributor to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. After they had rehearsed, Rivera, for one, understood that Dylan was ready to record, and perhaps to perform. Whatever the collaboration with Levy involved, however it bridged the gulf between partners, intentions and abilities, the process was beginning to bear fruit. The crop would vary in quality somewhat.

If a larger plan was emerging, meanwhile, it amounted to this: yet again Dylan would trust to instinct and to luck. Auditioning musicians found on the street was hardly standard practice. Picking co-writers on the basis of chance meetings on corners or in Greenwich Village bars was not risk-free. Recruiting a band and a supporting cast from club-dwellers and drinking pals was surely tempting fate. To do all this with no apparent thought for the roles to be filled, the cost involved, the structure of the performances to be given, the personnel to be managed, the music to be made or the compatibility of those being hired was nuts. It was exactly what Dylan did, nevertheless, in the summer and autumn of 1975, with only charisma, ample funds and a couple of ideas to sustain him. His break for artistic freedom would become a gargantuan and costly undertaking. Then again, making money from the Rolling Thunder notion was his second thought, not his first.

He might well have felt the need for help with his writing in such a circumstance. Levy meanwhile seems to have had no qualms about his fitness for the work, or over his right to be treated as a partner, with that 35 per cent share – since he wrote none of the music – in the songs produced.
⁹
Nevertheless, if Dylan had misplaced some of his self-assurance at the end of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s, he had not lost his habit of assuming that anything he cared to attempt would come good in the end, somehow or other. Not for the first time or the last, he was ready to take a risk.

Whether Dylan’s troupe of friends, acquaintances, hired hands and hangers-on understood his logic is less certain. Suddenly the ascetic self-discipline that had characterised the making of
Blood on the Tracks
was gone. It was as though he needed the change for the sake of his rest. Equally, you could find prior evidence for a recurring pattern in Dylan’s behaviour to explain his improvisations in mid-1975. He had been this way before, veering from the hard, painstaking graft of
The Times They Are a-Changin’
in the second half of 1963 to the drunken, album-in-a-night exercise that was
Another Side of Bob Dylan
on 9 June 1964. Later he had switched, suddenly and without warning, from the bacchanalian improvisations with The Band in the spring and drowsy summer of 1967 to the austere, sculpted delicacy of
John Wesley Harding
towards the end of that year. It amounted almost to a personality trait: tension and release, tension and release. Besides, who could have borne a career forever on the raw edge of existence, devoted only to the universe of
Blood on the Tracks
?

In the summer of 1975, Dylan’s planning might as well have been based, as perhaps it was, on the opaque Chinese wisdom of the I Ching and its cosmic bar codes. One discarded version of the song ‘Idiot Wind’ certainly made explicit reference to the oldest of self-help manuals. By the summer, Dylan was improvising, trusting to luck and fate, whatever they represented. It caused him no intellectual problems; quite the reverse. Even before God made His appearance at stage right, the artist was as susceptible on occasion to esoteric waffle as the next counter-culture survivor, despite his advertised aversion to all things hippy. Within a couple of years he would be explaining to a reporter from
Rolling Stone
, for one example, that Jesus had taken on ‘the bad karma of all the people he healed’.
¹⁰
His own sleeve note for the
Desire
album – written as though to prove that the world can never have too many Allen Ginsberg impersonators – would announce that Dylan had ‘A WHOLE LOT OF KARMA TO BURN’. This time, Indian religions would take the fall for his understanding, if any, of causality and eternity. In practice, he was rolling the dice.

As Rolling Thunder coalesced around him, mere ancient wisecracks seemed to have become his creative strategy. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine,’ he had said back in 1965, dictating still another entry in pop culture’s dictionary of quotations. ‘It’s like I accept him; does he accept me?’ Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, his interlocutors from the
New York Post
, had been further informed that ‘Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.’ In 1975, Dylan’s album and his tour would test this seductive, risky theory to its limits.

General confusion became a characteristic of this phase in his career, and of the Rolling Thunder carnival. The roadshow was intended as some sort of statement, but what was said meant different things to different participants. Dylan would take inspiration, some of the time, from a pair of French movies. One was Marcel Carné’s
Les Enfants du Paradis
(1945), the other François Truffaut’s
Tirez sur le pianiste
(1960), otherwise known as
Shoot the Piano Player
. The young playwright Sam Shepard, a former lover of Patti Smith hired by Dylan to ‘work on a proposed film with the Rolling Thunder Revue’ by ‘providing dialogue on the spot’ – though that idea ‘very quickly dissolved into the background’ – would be questioned specifically about his knowledge of the works when he arrived amid tour rehearsals in October.
¹¹

Both pictures are, to summarise grotesquely, studies in performance, revolving around ideas of acting, disguise and identity. Carné’s piece of romantic ‘poetic realism’, written by the poet Jacques Prévert – of whom Dylan was well aware – involved the tale of four men in pursuit of the same beautiful woman. One man was an actor, one a mime artist, one a master criminal, and the fourth, it is generally supposed, the allegorical representation of Nazi occupation in the person of a villainous aristocrat. You could equally describe the four as aspects of human desire. Only the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, was entirely pure in heart, his whitened face an unblemished canvas. Whatever else he took from Carné’s romance – interconnected relationships, unattainable love – Dylan would seize on that idea.

In fact, he took a great deal more. In this instance, the artist would not be shy about his influences. Carné, still a very-much-alive 69-year-old when Dylan’s troupe began to shoot over 100 hours of film for what became
Renaldo and Clara
, would be reminded, if he cared, that there is no copyright in ideas. Whiteface? Check. ‘Woman in White’, a flower motif, certain resonant passages of dialogue, the old contrast between performance and backstage reality, the actual and the imagined? Dylan overlooked very little. On the other hand, he would not attempt to conceal the fact. The only small details he would miss, according to most critics of
Renaldo and Clara
, were Carné’s cinematic daring, his lyricism, his staging, his ability to inspire magical performances and his self-knowledge.

Shoot the Piano Player
is a crime story, in the main, but it too turns on the erasure of identity. As depicted by Charles Aznavour, the piano player is another figure attempting to escape from his past. Who is he exactly? ‘Bob Dylan’ liked that kind of question. Beneath the gangster movie plot, the picture veers abruptly between tragedy and farce, at one minute sedate, the next furiously paced. There is an improvisational quality, too, in
Piano Player
that must have appealed to Dylan, not least given Patti Smith’s comments on the origins of Rolling Thunder and her claim that he was ‘thinking about improvisation’. Though Shepard’s job would amount to nothing important, he was not misinformed. Not content with preparing for an album and plotting a tour, Dylan had a movie in mind. Obviously, Bob Dylan would be its star, but someone else would pretend to play ‘Bob Dylan’.

*

Saigon had fallen – or been liberated – in the last days of April amid humiliating scenes of panic. The overloaded choppers had staggered from the compound of the Defense Attaché Office and the roof of the US embassy while the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front closed in. Military radio had played Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, oblivious to any and all symbolism, as a signal to Americans that the evacuations had begun and that it was time finally to leave.

Before the end, President Gerald Ford, broom to Nixon’s dust, had ordered the evacuation of 2,000 orphans, a mere handful of the tens of thousands of children set adrift from their homes and parents, Caucasian, black or Asian, during the upheavals of America’s longest war. Over 100,000 Vietnamese adults – civilian employees, common-law wives, dependants, the rich and formerly powerful – had also managed to escape, but many more desperate people had been abandoned as the US withdrew its last representatives. Reprisals and massacres had been feared before the helicopters had scurried away. There had been a concern, too, that the people of the city would turn against their former protectors once it became clear that the Americans were deserting the country. The last US Marines had left the embassy just before 8 a.m. on 30 April.

What had it all been worth? Even the question soon began to sound banal. Vietnam had dominated the lives of Dylan’s generation. It had defined and divided them, for or against, for better than a decade, with eight miserable years of fighting at its heart. Combat deaths, at a minimum 47,000, had almost matched the number of American dead on the battlefields of the First World War and easily exceeded the total of those killed in action in Korea. In one manner or another, 58,000 young Americans had died in South East Asia and over 300,000 had been wounded. It would take years for America to come to terms with Vietnam, far less to honour the fallen. Returning veterans felt they were spurned, at best ignored. In 1975, many of them believed that their country didn’t want to know about them, what they had done, or why – willing or not – they had done it. Suddenly the country seemed to be repressing every memory.