Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (25 page)

*

The day had not yet dawned when Dylan could be summoned to the White House to play for presidents. On 4 July 1976, on America’s 200th birthday, he was neither seen nor heard. A few weeks later he would succumb to an aimless interview with
TV Guide
, a journal of cultural affairs then at its multimillion-selling peak, in an effort to support the
Hard Rain
concert film. ‘I sometimes dream of running the country and putting all my friends in office,’ Dylan would tell the man from the magazine. ‘That’s how it works now, anyway.’
⁸
Beyond that, he had nothing to say about the state of the nation. He took no public part in the celebrations for the birth of the republic or its two centuries as democracy’s shining light.

Bob Hope was on TV wrapping himself in the flag in an NBC ‘spectacular’ that July weekend. On the Fourth itself, President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s hapless substitute, was in Philadelphia addressing patriots as distinguished as the actor Charlton Heston. Ford was declaring: ‘It is right that Americans are always improving. It is not only right, it is necessary.’ In New York Harbor, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was reviewing a fleet of tall ships while six million people, or so the
New York Times
estimated, looked on. That night fireworks would light up the Statue of Liberty. Across America, as the newspaper reported, it was ‘A Day of Picnics, Pomp, Pageantry and Protest’. Restored steam locomotives were meanwhile pulling a travelling historical exhibition entitled ‘the American Freedom Train’ around the country. Not a city, town or village in America was untouched by the festivities. The nation was awash with speeches and souvenirs.

Gil Scott-Heron, the radical self-styled ‘bluesologist’, maker of
Winter in America
and
From South Africa to South Carolina
, introduced one of the few audibly sceptical voices amid the summer’s celebrations with a piece entitled ‘Bicentennial Blues’. In it he nominated 1976 as ‘A year of hysterical importance’, one in which the public had been ‘bludgeoned into bicentennial submission’. Scott-Heron reminded anyone who happened to be listening that the facts of racism, poverty and injustice had ‘got by’ too many Americans, not least those contemplating a vote for the ‘Hollyweird’ Ronald Reagan, then just a grinning former conservative governor of California. On the weekend of the Fourth itself, Scott-Heron was performing his ‘Bicentennial Blues’ poem, all eight minutes and forty seconds of it, before a Boston audience for a concert album,
It’s Your World
. His was not the voice of the majority.

The year had opened with another nuclear test in Nevada. Inflation, still perilously high at 5.75 per cent, had nevertheless subsided a little; official unemployment stood at 7.7 per cent. One day before the Bicentennial itself, the Supreme Court had ruled that the death penalty, suspended during the four previous years, was not inherently ‘cruel or unusual’ and no offence to the constitution that bound together 218 million Americans. Crime was still a preoccupation for politicians and the media – ‘wars’ on wrongdoers abounded during political campaigns – but making a living was the main concern for hard-pressed law-abiding citizens. Another long recession had ended, statistically speaking, in 1975, but the economy remained weak as the country staged its birthday party. Only with federal help had New York City survived a brush with bankruptcy. Amidst it all, something was stirring.

The novelist Gore Vidal had observed the essentials of the phenomenon in an essay published in the year before the Bicentennial. Describing his experiences delivering provocative ‘State of the Union’ lectures to audiences caught between bemusement, amusement and outrage, Vidal had written of encountering among his fellow Americans a ‘general hatred of any government’. He told of ‘the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: we hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how’.
⁹

Among conservative Americans, the mood was being articulated loudly. Some believed they had found an answer to their problems. Reagan’s failed challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination would be remembered long afterwards as the prophetic moment. Earlier in the decade, right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Political Action Conference and the American Conservative Union (all founded in 1973) had sprung into existence. By 1976, the influential monthly magazine
Commentary
had completed its shift from left to right and confirmed itself as the house journal of what would come to be known as neo-conservatism. Political reaction would produce action in due course. Preposterous as it might have seemed at the time, the not-so-strange death of ’60s liberalism was all but complete.

Dylan gave no sign that he noticed or cared. This didn’t make him immune, however, to what was going on in his country. Congressional Democrats had done predictably well in elections in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate. Their party’s candidate, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, would win the presidency on 2 November 1976. During his nomination acceptance speech in New York on 15 July, the new candidate (or his speechwriters) would misquote ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ comprehensively, asserting that ‘We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying’. The artist would respond like a jaded elder statesman through the august pages of
TV Guide.
‘People have told me there was a man running for president quoting me,’ Dylan would say. ‘I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But he’s just another guy running for president.’

Carter’s eventual victory would prove to be a kind of illusion and the briefest of respites for liberal Americans. In time, their Democrat president would become even less popular than Nixon, a phenomenon unthinkable in 1974.
¹⁰
As the artist had mentioned almost casually to
People
magazine back in October, ‘The consciousness of the country has changed in a very short time.’ Out in the American heartland political conservatism and yet another evangelical Christian revival were growing in strength, hand in glove. And Dylan had always harboured a weakness for a deity.

*

In November, on Thanksgiving Day, he would appear at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco for what was billed as The Band’s ‘farewell’ concert. It was a last farewell, in reality, to the youthful comradeship that had once bound the group together. When Dylan’s former backing musicians returned to touring in 1983 it would be without Robbie Robertson, the guitarist whose perceived high-handedness and self-regard – there were plenty of other allegations – had alienated his colleagues long before the affair known as
The Last Waltz
was being organised. By 1976, in any case, Robertson had decided he was weary of life on the road. The other members of the quintet would continue to believe, in contrast, that he had broken up The Band for purely selfish reasons, furthering his own career – under the guidance of one Albert Grossman – while keeping a tight grip on their joint legacy.

Many years later, all of drummer Levon Helm’s bitterness towards Robertson would spill forth in his autobiography. Among other things, Helm would contend that he received not a cent from the show, album and Martin Scorsese documentary movie each known as
The Last Waltz
. In an afterword to his book published after his passing in 2012, Helm would be quoted by his co-writer claiming that Rick Danko, The Band’s bass and fiddle player, had died prematurely because of sheer overwork (the 1999 autopsy settled for drug-related heart failure). In Helm’s disgusted opinion, Danko had worked too hard for too long because ‘he had been fucked out of his money’. Levon said:

People ask me about
The Last Waltz
all the time. Rick Danko dying at 56 is what I think about
The Last Waltz
. It was the biggest fuckin’ rip-off that ever happened to The Band – without a doubt.
¹¹

Dylan would remain forever fond of Levon – the feeling was reciprocated – but in late 1976 these were not his problems. For the purposes of album, movie, money and valediction, Robertson appeared to have enlisted any prominent musician who had ever been associated with The Band. There were a couple of others, vapid Neil Diamond conspicuously, whose relationship with anyone other than the guitar player was hard to identify. On Thanksgiving night at Winterland there were poets, turkey dinners for 5,000, ballroom dancing, seven high-end 35-mm cameras and a crew of experienced cinematographers to meet Scorsese’s demand that every last second be captured on film. Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Paul Butterfield and Dr John were among the performers. There was no possible doubt, however, about the identity of the star guest.

Dylan did his job in the end, but not without almost wrecking the entire production. At the last minute, so it was said, he announced that he would not be filmed. As the tale was afterwards told, he did not want his appearance to steal any thunder due to the concert sequences in
Renaldo and Clara
.
¹²
Since Warner Bros. had only agreed to finance Scorsese’s lavish array of cameras because of a promise that Bob Dylan would be in the movie, this posed a problem for Robertson and the show’s promoter, Bill Graham. The Band were no longer a hot item in their own right by 1976. The $25 tickets for the evening had only begun to move, in fact, after Graham had leaked details of the guest list to the
San Francisco Chronicle
.
¹³
Only some feverish negotiations during the intermission – while almost everyone else busied themselves with vast drifts of cocaine – and the intervention of one of Dylan’s lawyers saved the show, the movie and the album.

The Last Waltz
would duly become known as ‘the greatest concert film ever made’. Very fine it is too, in places. Dylan’s performance was as good as most and far better than some, if a long way short of his finest. ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ (twice) and ‘I Don’t Believe You’ were done with sufficient conviction. One of those ineradicable anecdotes-with-no-source prefaced with the word ‘reputedly’ probably catches the artist’s real attitude best. In this tale, Neil Diamond is leaving the stage. ‘Follow that,’ he supposedly says to Dylan. The artist replies, ‘What do I have to do, go on stage and fall asleep?’

*

He was not exerting himself unduly. Whether because he was still refusing to admit the truth about his marriage or because he knew the miserable truth beyond doubt or dispute, Dylan had fallen into a fit of indolence. He still had
Renaldo and Clara
to see to, but he was not giving his full attention to the editing process. He would turn up here and there – at The Band’s concert, at a riotously intoxicated Leonard Cohen recording session in June of 1977 – but in terms of his career history only one fact would be pertinent. Between the release of
Desire
in January of 1976 and the summer of 1978, Dylan would fail to produce an album in the studios.
Hard Rain
, the record intended to document the 1976 spring tour, had been released in September of the year, doing only modestly well in America but reaching number three in Britain. A mostly pointless single from the album, ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ (with the entirely pointless ‘Rita May’ as its B-side), had failed utterly in November. The rest, save for the sound of approaching lawyers, was silence.

The end was ugly, the aftermath worse. In the papers she would lodge during the divorce, Sara Dylan would state that in Malibu, at the still ‘unfinished’ Point Dume house with its copper onion dome, the quarrels became ceaseless. She would further assert that she began to fear her husband, that she locked doors against him and his volcanic temper. The real issue was other women. Sara would claim that in February of 1977 one turned up at her breakfast table who seemed to be living on the estate. His wife gained the impression, as lawyers say, that Dylan wanted this latest flame to reside in the main house. In the ensuing argument, so it was alleged, he struck Sara on the face and ordered her out of the house. This would be the story released subsequently to the press by one of Sara Dylan’s lawyers.

Court papers would be sealed, however, after she filed for divorce at the beginning of March. We therefore do not know Dylan’s response, if he had one, to the central allegation. What is known is that Sara Dylan moved out immediately and hired Marvin Mitchelson, one of the many celebrity lawyers who seem to constitute a major part of the Southern Californian economy. The community property laws of that state meant the artist was always likely to lose heavily, in financial terms, in any divorce settlement. Mitchelson would make sure of it. Sara, in any case, knew just about all there was to know about Dylan. There were plenty of stories she could have told. Some of those involving the couple’s recent married life were not pretty. She had – and there’s no denying it – tolerated a lot and suffered for her tolerance. It was in Dylan’s interest to yield.

When the divorce papers were filed Sara demanded custody of the five children, child support, alimony, the Malibu house and, the most expensive item of all given Californian law, a division of Dylan’s wealth. The papers listed the ‘Malibu complex; other and diverse property including residence, farmlands and acreage in New York City; East Hampton, Woodstock and Greene County, New York; Minnesota and New Mexico; and undetermined interests in publishing companies, subsidiary and residual recording rights, royalties and literary copyrights’. Sara also wanted a restraining order against her husband. In the bloodless language of the filing, the ‘respondent, Robert Dylan, is hereby restrained and enjoined from harassing, annoying, molesting, or in any way interfering with the peace and quiet and personal privacy of the petitioner, Sara Dylan’. Her demands would fail in only one detail. Because the artist could claim, accurately, to be working on
Renaldo and Clara
in Point Dume’s editing suite – and because he wanted desperately to keep the house – he would be allowed to go on living there. Beyond that, it was no contest.