On the Road with Bob Dylan (3 page)

Inside the Kettle we took two tables, Dylan, Eric Frandsen, a folksinger friend, Muffin, and me at one; Kemp, McGuinn, Levy and Mike at the other. Dylan and Frandsen were talking about obscure songs and movies, and Dylan seemed really animated. He reached for his Remy and it tipped over. “Oh, I must really be drunk,” Bob moaned. Kemp ordered another one, and Dylan started to talk about his new album. I told him about Jake and the Family Jewels, a great Village band ripe for a big breakout. “Have you heard my new band?” Bob interrupted. “They’re great. That Rob (Stoner), he’s got such a pretty voice.” “Did you ever see his Elvis collection?” I asked Dylan. “He’s got this incredible Elvis scrapbook, with really rare articles.” “Hey listen, Larry,” Dylan leaned in, “you wanna go on the road with us and cover the tour?” “Sure,” I pondered, “I could probably cover it for
Rolling Stone.”
“Hey Louie,” Bob screamed back at Kemp, “Larry’s going to go out with us; sign him up. It might as well be him, I’d rather have him do it than anyone else.” Dylan swung back and leaned across the table at me, preoccupied with Hurricane again. “We’re gonna get him out in ninety days.” “Did ya hear what Ali said at Trenton the
other day?” I asked Dylan. “He predicted that Hurricane would be free in three days.” Dylan didn’t blink, “We’re gonna get him out in ninety days, that’s our slogan, ninety days or we fight.” “You mean ninety days after the single’s released,” I corrected. Dylan smiled. “Yeah, after release.”

Bob seemed restless and his hungry eyes scanned the room. “See that painting up there.” He pointed to a canvas over the bar. “I remember coming in here in the ’60s and always seeing that painting.” The talk then turned to old friends, songwriters Phil Ochs and Kinky Friedman.

“Keenky,” Bob mimicked, “who’s Keenky?”

“C’mon, you know Kinky. You love him.”

“Well, Kinky’s all right, but he’s too sensitive. You know what Kinky’s problem is, he came just a little bit too late.”

It was 4
A.M.
and Kemp made his move. “C’mon Bob, let’s get out of here, we got a lot to do tomorrow.”

Dylan looked hurt. “Aw, c’mon, lemme finish this drink, then we’ll split.” I mentioned that Thursday night there was going to be a surprise birthday party for Folk City owner Mike Porco and Dylan’s eyes lit up. “Hey Lou, you got that man, a surprise party for Porco Thursday night, what time man?” I gave him the details and he got up and said good-bye to me and Roger. Dylan and his entourage filed out of the Kettle leaving me, McGuinn, and Levy and a bevy of astonished patrons.

McGuinn still looked stunned. “And you didn’t want to go to the Other End. You schmuck,” I laughed. Roger managed a nod, and we shook hands and stepped out into the MacDougal Street morning. It was raining hard now so McGuinn hailed a cab as I walked home to the sound of thunder. Rolling thunder.

I
t was a different Village that Dylan returned to in the summer of ’75. On MacDougal Street, instead of the Gaslight Cafe, where Kerouac had read his jazz-backed poetry, Lord Buckley had spun his moralistic word-weavings, Hugh Romney (later to be Wavy Gravy of Hog Farm fame) had done stand-up comedy routines, and countless folksingers, Dylan included, had sung and strummed for whatever the basket that circulated in the audience could reap, there now was a Middle Eastern boutique with a special on strawberry incense. Across the street at the Cafe Wha?, which once boasted the sounds of Jimmy James, later to be known as Hendrix, was a months-old marquee and a shuttered door. Further up the block at the historic junction of Bleecker and MacDougal, the Figaro, the archetypical Beat-era coffeehouse, had been closed for years. And the Blimpie Base that seemed a harbinger of the decay of the early ’70s—even that had gone out of business. The Cafe Au go go, where Tim Hardin, Odetta, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers first tried out their acts in New York, was long gone too.

In their wake, the sleaze merchants had scurried in, with armful after armful of schlock Indian garments, head-shop paraphernalia, falafel stands, and T-shirt emporiums. The music was gone, with the hard rockers heading east for the grime of the Bowery and the new bars that dotted the derelict strip. For the sophisticates the chic venues were the gay-dominated discos and nightclubs, places like Reno Sweeneys and Les Jardins, all further uptown. The only club that was still thriving in the Village was the Bottom Line, and to get a booking there you usually had to have a record contract and support from the label.

But in June, the old Bitter End, long a folkies hangout and closed for a year or so, reopened as the Other End, featuring a bar and restaurant next door to a few-hundred-seat cabaret. The Village music scene quickly coalesced around Paul Colby’s place, so it was no surprise that Dylan was drawn to the club. But it was quite a shock to see Dylan actually hanging out, munching on a hamburger, talking to strangers, shuffling across the sawdust-strewn floor over to the cabaret section to soak in some music. The reclusive icon, he who retreated hermit-style to Woodstock after a much-publicized motorcycle crash, who holed up in the upstate mountains, only coming down every few years to release an album, who swooped out to the West Coast to play an enigmatic role in a movie his friend Kristofferson was shooting and then settled by the beach in Malibu, still the recluse, who relished his privacy and was never known to make a foolish move, what was he doing hanging out, soaking up the street vibe, haunting the old haunts? Something was, as they say, blowing in the wind.

Dylan was about to create. After all, it had been almost a year since the sessions that produced
Blood on the Tracks
, an album that many had felt was a triumphant comeback for Dylan. And the
Basement Tapes
, which Columbia had released that summer, were, as everybody knew, a compilation of years-old demo tapes that Bob and the Band had recorded the year he was recuperating from the accident. And when you’re carrying a muse like Dylan’s, sometimes you have to pick up the guitar, pack up the suitcase, and let the road bring you back to the starting point.

So Dylan was back, walking down the same streets, drinking in the same old bars, meeting some of the same old people. And as the word spread, some of Dylan’s friends began to seek him out. One of them was Sheena, a raven-haired itinerant singer-songwriter, who had known Dylan for a few years, once even writing a song with him about Krishna consciousness called “Come to Krishna,” a song that Bob gave her. Sheena started peppering Dylan’s studio with notes that read, “Please contact me,” and she left offerings and incense.
Then early one afternoon in June the phone rang in her Lower East Side pad.

“Sheena?” a male voice.

“Yeah,” Sheena replied, fighting off sleep.

“This is Bob.”

“Bob who?” Sheena questioned.

“The real one,” Dylan replied.

And what a surprise, since a moment earlier she had actually been dreaming about him, so she went right into a discussion of her new band, and told Dylan about this dynamite black female bass player she found. “Wow, that’s just what I’m looking for,” Dylan bubbled and they made plans to meet for coffee and talk.

“Bob said he wanted to check out my band,” Sheena related, “so we went up to my friend’s loft on Seventh Avenue and it was a heavy trip, they didn’t know Bob was coming, so we just strolled in. And he was wearing this black leather jacket that he was so excited about, he kept saying, ‘How do you like my new leather jacket.’ It was from 1968 or something from his first motorcycle or maybe the accident, someone had sent it back to him. So this guitarist in the band who is really an uptight envious jerk walks over to Bob and says, ‘You look like what’s-his-name, Bob Dylan. I can’t stand that guy’s music, I think he stinks.’ And Bob was just looking at him so I said, ‘It’s time to go.’ But I’ll tell you something about Dylan, whatever situation he’s in, he is completely there. He gets completely wherever he is at the moment. I mean there is no other moment. So already he was buying a loft like the one I brought him to.

“So anyway we decided to leave the place, and we were riding around and I said, ‘Where do you wanna go now?’ and he said, Well, I would really like to go visit my friend, how’d you like to go to Paterson, New Jersey, with me? I got this book from this guy who’s in jail, his name is Rubin Carter.’ But we decided it wouldn’t be the best thing to do to take a woman to jail so now we were gonna go to Harlem to hear some music. Like he was literally searching for musicians. I took him to see the bass player I was playing with but
she was real big and fat and he took one look and said, ‘Uh uh, she’s not the bass player I was thinking about.’”

So they hopped back into the car, Dylan behind the wheel and Sheena peering out the window, talking animatedly about her band. They drove aimlessly now, down Second Avenue, heading toward the East Village, when Dylan spotted this woman with hair down to her waist, carrying a violin. “I know what you need for your band, you need a violinist,” he enthused. “Should we stop?” Sheena assented and rolled the window down, as Dylan screeched to a stop.

“I asked her where she was going and she said she was going to a rehearsal uptown and I asked her if she could play that violin and she said yeah,” Sheena remembered, “and I asked her if she needed a ride, it was almost as if I was seducing her in a roundabout way, ’cause Bob was so shy, he didn’t say a peep and I’ve got a big mouth. She told me later that she thought I was a prostitute and Bob was my pimp and we were trying to get her into the ring. But she got into the car and we told her my name was Sheena and his name was Danny and we had just come back from Europe and we were from Hungary and we were so hungry. Bob and I were both laughing, talking about how hungry we were, really piling it on her.”

Once in the car, the threesome headed over to the Village, to Dylan’s studio, and once there, the violinist, who told them her name was Scarlett Rivera, took out her instrument and started playing. Dylan picked up a guitar and started into “One More Cup of Coffee,” a new song as yet unrecorded, and Scarlett joined in. “Hey man,” Dylan nudged Sheena, “she ain’t bad, she’s good, she’s real good.” By now Scarlett had recognized “Danny’s” voice, having grown up on his songs, and she was a bit dazed, jamming with Dylan being a far cry from her current gig making twenty dollars a night playing in a Latin band. A friend of Bob’s dropped by and the foursome headed uptown to a jazz club, but first they stopped by the Other End where Dylan eagerly introduced Scarlett around—“She’s in my band, she’s gonna be in my band,” he boasted.

Dylan was a familiar sight that summer in the Village, walking down MacDougal Street, sometimes with guitar in hand, usually with a notebook. And he began to make all the music scenes, catching Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and, one night at the Other End, the rage of punk rockdom, a twenty-eight-year-old rock poet Patti Smith. Patti, a gamine Keith Richards look-alike, had always dreamed of meeting Dylan, and when she heard Dylan was in her audience she began playing the set to him, throwing him lines like, “Don’t you go near my parking meter, Jack.” And afterward, Dylan headed backstage to meet the New Guard. “He just sat there and didn’t say a word the whole show,” Faris Bouhafa, a Columbia Records employee, remembered, “and afterward, he went backstage, opened the door, and Patti was sitting there by herself. And a couple of photographers. It was weird because as soon as he walked in, she looked up, they were introduced, and suddenly this weird ballet started taking place. The participants were the two photographers, Dylan, and Patti. They were just circling, almost like slow motion. Nobody was saying, ‘Hey I want you to take my picture,’ they were all trying to avoid the cameras. And the photographers were trying to line them up, and they were all sort of dancing around the room, with a shy kind of smile, almost bashful. Finally Patti said, ‘Fuck it, Bob, let’s take a picture,’ and she grabbed his shoulder and that broke the ice, they started talking. They didn’t seem to have that much to say to each other. She was happy and he was smashed so it all worked out very well.”

One of the people that Dylan bumped into that summer was Jacques Levy, an affable, fortyish, off-off Broadway director, who gave up a promising career as a clinical psychologist to direct avant-garde plays like
Oh! Calcutta!
But in his music circles, Levy gained recognition as Roger McGuinn’s lyricist, penning numerous songs over the years with the ex-Byrd. And as Dylan and Levy renewed their friendship at the Other End, a collaboration was discussed. So the two trekked over to Levy’s loft, just around the corner from the club, and Dylan began performing some of the songs he was
working on. “We were just sitting, just talking, then he sang something and then he went to the piano, sat down, and he started to play ‘Isis,’” Levy recalled later. “But it was a very different style of ‘Isis’ than you hear now, it was almost a dirge, slow, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, slow, obviously setting you up for a long story. So the two of us started working on that together. I started writing words, then he would say, ‘Well, no, how about this, what about that,’ a totally cooperative venture. It was just extraordinary, the two of us started to get hot together. And we began to work on this thing and we just kept going with it, and we’d stop and we didn’t know where the story was gonna go next.”