Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (17 page)

He has declined to perform four of the album’s nine songs since 1976. ‘Oh, Sister’ made it to 1978 before disappearing from the artist’s concert repertoire. ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ – entirely his own, significantly or not – has popped up intermittently, as has, very rarely, ‘Romance in Durango’. ‘Joey’ was revived briefly in the summer of 1987, largely thanks to the urgings of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, but a handful of live performances in that dismal period served only to prove how very little Dylan could remember of all the words he had not written. The song turned up again, like a freak winter weather event, at a show in Toronto on 14 November 2012, but that was probably just a case of the playful artist keeping his band on their toes.

Desire
is not central to his body of work. That might be because of the album’s curious creative origins, or because it evokes memories of public controversy and private misery. Equally, the artist who has always been his own best critic – in hindsight, at any rate – has probably made a judgement. These days, Dylan has well over 600 self-composed songs to choose from when he takes his abraded vocal folds before a microphone on the public stage. The nine songs from
Desire
do not, generally speaking, meet his specifications. Clearly, he is not attached to them, personally or professionally. Yet in 1975 these songs represented the course he had chosen after the cold, mostly calm perfection of
Blood on the Tracks
.

Where did it all begin to go wrong for Bob Dylan? Late in 1975, the question would have seemed ridiculous. Surely this was the year, if any, when the tide of genius returned, when every claim ever made about him could be reasserted. The fact remains that after Dylan’s first triumphs in the 1960s doubts had crept in periodically, in waves. Soon enough they would affect the artist himself. Before too many years they would overwhelm him. Perhaps it was inevitable: there is no such thing as an unblemished career save for those who die too soon, or take the Rimbaud route of creative self-annihilation. Knowing what the 1980s and 1990s would bring, it can therefore be asked of Dylan: when and where?

Some would select the long absence from public performance after the motorcycle crash in July of 1966. Others would nominate the supposed nadir of the
Self Portrait
album four years later. In fact, of course, he recovered from each of those setbacks to demonstrate, whether in the basement tapes or in
Blood on the Tracks
, that his creativity was intact. From the mid-1970s onwards, however, something began to happen to the man himself, to the interlocking series of personality changes he had accepted as the next best thing to an identity. It was as though he began to lose the signal. His private frequency seemed to disappear in the static.

Perhaps the failure began in a pre-dawn moment on 1 August 1975, just after he had sung his song to his wife. Then, at the last, probably just before 4 a.m., he got a final take he thought was good enough for ‘Isis’, that mystical rumination ‘about marriage’. Then, barring a little overdubbing, he concluded he had made an album from all the studio chaos, the hack collaboration, and the familiar, fragile sandpainting known to him, as to everyone else, as Bob Dylan. Patti Smith barely understood the half of it when she spoke of improvisation. Henceforth, the artist would spend long decades trying to work out why his art had ever truly mattered to him.

*

With
Desire
complete and its last, discrepant track still echoing in their heads, Dylan and his wife took their children to the Minnesota farm for a holiday. As in ‘Sara’, as in so many troubled marriages, the presence of the youngsters enabled the parents to coexist, or so it seemed, for a while longer. Dylan was nevertheless set on returning to the road, even if his wife’s heart must have faltered at the prospect. Did she protest? There are no facts to be had concerning these private matters; only guesswork is possible. One guess would nevertheless be that any lingering hope of saving the Dylan marriage was not likely to be enhanced by his return to the old, vagrant, insufferable rock and roll lifestyle. It is equally possible – and mere speculation, once again – that each of these people was resigned to the inevitable. A holiday for the sake of the children, the pretence accepted by estranged couples in every age and place, was probably the best that could be managed.

In early September, Dylan summoned a minimal three-piece band – Scarlet Rivera, the bassist Rob Stoner, the drummer Howie Wyeth – for a TV engagement in Chicago. As ever where broadcasting was concerned, the artist’s sole motivation was a sense of personal obligation. He did not do these things because he enjoyed them. To this day, the old man will not countenance the possibility of being seen on the giant Jumbotron screens that are otherwise deemed essential parts of the stadium-rock experience. In 1975, an appearance on
The World of John Hammond
, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) tribute to his first producer, mentor and teacher, was Dylan’s way of paying a debt.

In the footage he looks about as comfortable as he ever did in a TV studio. The band, given scant notice and little chance to rehearse, are meanwhile learning, as all his musicians have had to learn, that keeping up with the boss demands intuition, quick wits, daring and an ability to improvise. On this night – or rather, in the early hours of the morning – their efforts are not entirely successful. He makes no allowances: none. In one sense, Dylan takes these skilled players for granted. In another sense, he trusts them implicitly. As ever, he thinks it redundant to look ahead before he makes his leaps.

In the WTTW studios in Chicago, on 10 September, ‘Hurricane’, a rewritten ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, and ‘Oh, Sister’ – dedicated to ‘someone out there tonight … She knows who she is’ – are performed with a kind of distracted intensity. Dylan, sweating visibly, manages to look pained throughout, as though he should be anywhere but under the TV lights. Somehow, nevertheless, he leaves the viewer with the sense that without his unwilling presence a cold vacuum will be all that remains. In these scraps of footage Dylan reveals himself, yet again, as a necessary artist. The Chicago renditions give no real clue, of course, of what is to come. That would be too easy.

Shower arose from the N.W. hard thunder caught us in a verry hard rain

John Ordway, Lewis and Clark expedition, June 1805

Michael contended against Satan in the rolling thunder …

William Blake,
Milton
, ‘Book the First’

SOMETHING TO DO WITH RAILROADS? SOMETHING TO DO, PERHAPS,
with the relentless, fruitless mid ’60s high-altitude bombing campaign waged by America against North Vietnam? Was this roadshow inspired by the Shoshone celebrity shaman who had given his name to a very successful book amid all the New Age outpourings of 1974? Was it a borrowing from the title of a 1972 album by the Grateful Dead’s drummer? Or did the Rolling Thunder Revue acquire its designation just as the artist described?

I was just sitting outside my house one day, thinking about a name for this tour, when all of a sudden, I look up into the sky and I hear a boom. Then, boom, boom, boom, boom, rolling from west to east. Then I figured that should be the name.
¹

Larry Sloman, reporting manfully for
Rolling Stone
, would describe Dylan punching the air, ‘like a prize-fighter’, to illustrate the sounds he remembered having heard at that moment. The artist’s description of the event was, in any case, just as good as any other. The tour’s chosen title was an apt enough metaphor for rock music, for the explosive noise that could seem, sometimes, to fill the air, to echo, resonate and decay. The tag also seemed to catch the sense of a changed emotional climate in an America hovering on the edge of its 200th birthday, its ‘Bicentennial’, after all the civil-rights upheavals, the long nightmare of the war in South East Asia, the disgrace of Watergate and the economic turmoil enveloping working people as the western world’s long, paradisal post-1945 boom came to an end. Rolling thunder: an approaching disturbance in the atmosphere. It was not a sound that could be ignored easily.

You can read too much into such things, of course. Where the Rolling Thunder Revue was concerned, many did. Amid the sophomoric philosophising and the grandiose claims of consciousness-raising effects – Dylan was less guilty of the offence than Ginsberg and certain others, to be fair – it was just a concert tour. A lot of cocaine was taken along the way. Groupies descended on the strolling players like hungry camp-followers. Egos grew inflated or became bruised according to the mood or the occasion. As with any concert tour, some nights were a
lot
better than others. The artist had meanwhile prepared a new album whose sales would prosper wonderfully in the wake of all the attention. Ginsberg, typically, might have announced to Sloman that the revue was ‘the vision of the Sixties becoming real’, but we should be wary of the gilded legend.
²

Most of the big names in attendance, and some of the smaller fry, had a well-developed sense of how to sell a show and a healthy respect for the magical powers of hyperbole. Bobby Neuwirth, that satellite forever in Dylan’s orbit, the acolyte who traded ineradicable ebullience against his modest talents, would give
Rolling Stone
’s Nat Hentoff both barrels full of bullshit as the first phase of the carnival neared its end. In this version, the entire Rolling Thunder project had materialised at the bottom of a glass or three one night at The Other End. Neuwirth, co-conspirator with Dylan back in the days when the artist was subjecting hapless victims to his rhetorical ‘mindfucks’ in Village bars, laid it on thick for Hentoff, but he knew no other way. If Dylan was involved, nothing else could possibly compare with what had been devised.

Me and Bob and Ramblin’ Jack decided we were going to go out and tour in a station wagon, go out and play Poughkeepsie. That didn’t turn out to be possible. So we did this instead. And this ain’t no Elton John show, you know. This ain’t no fucking one-fourth of the Beatles show or nothing like that. This show, we got it all, man. Between us we got it all. And it just gets better and better and better.
³

Neuwirth, joking or not – probably not – was invoking the erratic cross-country trip Dylan and three stoned courtiers had undertaken in a powder-blue station wagon in February 1964. By the 1970s, the odd little journey had become part of the artist’s expanding mythology, a Kerouacian (supposedly) expedition into the American heartland long before
Easy Rider
and the peregrinations of all the happy, hippy pilgrims. Neuwirth had joined that 1964 trip as a substitute sidekick just as it neared its end. Late in 1975, somewhere in New England, he was telling the man from
Rolling Stone
– ‘I think you have to see Neuwirth to remember his singing,’ Hentoff would note, dropping dry sand on his page – the fantasy tale of how Dylan had almost played little old Poughkeepsie, that blameless butt of New York snobbery and jokes. Instead, here were a group of elite performers who just got ‘better and better and better’.

In another version of Rolling Thunder’s genesis, Dylan had been contemplating this kind of tour for a long time. There is only anecdotal evidence for that claim, and not much of it. Howard Sounes asserts in his ample 2001 biography – without the usual copious documentation – that ‘For years Bob had been talking to friends about a touring-revue show, maybe travelling by train, playing small towns’.
⁴
Sounes concludes that Dylan’s juvenile fantasy of itinerant musicianship and carnival life, the one best expressed in his 1963 song ‘Dusty Old Fairgrounds’, had stayed with him. If so, all those talks with ‘friends’ – The Band’s Robbie Robertson was doubtless one, though he mentioned the matter only after Rolling Thunder had come and gone – failed to lead anywhere in particular.
⁵
Tour ’74, Dylan’s first real effort at live performances since 1966, had found no use whatever for small towns or railroad trains.

On the first page of his book about the revue, Larry Sloman merely offers a strictly rhetorical ‘who knows?’ in answer to the question of inspiration, adding that ‘a hundred different versions’ were available according to who was doing the talking. In his Dylan biography Robert Shelton, only partly confirming Neuwirth’s tall tale, wrote that the idea ‘took fire’ during the hot summer nights of 1975.
⁶
Sean Wilentz, in his
Bob Dylan in America
, would later quote an anecdote from Roger McGuinn’s blog in which the artist and the former Byrd are tossing a basketball around in California in the spring of ’75. Out of the blue, apropos of nothing at all, Dylan announces a desire to do ‘something different’, ‘something like a circus’.
⁷

People
magazine, having interviewed the artist for a cover story just before the tour began, was given a clear idea by
someone
of what the Rolling Thunder Revue would entail. Dylan was not named as the source, though the journalist was astute enough to mention, as an afterthought, that he ‘creates in a genre in which minimal art is almost impossible’. Nevertheless, according to
People
, the ‘itinerary would detour the megabuck impresarios, the multiseat superdomes, the computerized ticket networks and re-create the modest small-club mini-tours that characterized the years when he first left Hibbing, Minn.’
⁸

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s biographer meanwhile offers a verbatim statement by the artist, presumably one drawn from Elliott’s memories of the night in question.
⁹
As they drank together on 3 July after the Other End show in which ‘Abandoned Love’ was first performed, Dylan had sounded his old friend out about a notion. Thus: ‘Neuwirth and I were just talking about an idea, where we’d get a bus and travel around and sing and do little concerts in little halls.’ Ramblin’ Jack was then asked, as though the question was necessary, if he was ‘in’. Neuwirth had, not for the first time, embroidered his story just a little, but Elliott was as good a source as any. He could identify the when, if not the why. As to that, Sloman, writing after the tour’s end and publishing in 1978, was probably closest to the truth. No one but the artist truly knew or yet knows what he heard in the thunder.