On the Road with Bob Dylan (41 page)

“You played with him at Newport, didn’t you?” Ratso manages to slip a question in.

“Yeah, after that the next thing was Newport, meanwhile I joined the Butterfield Blues Band and Albert managed Bob and me, and I figured he’s the manager, he’ll tell me what band he wants me to play with best, he’ll tell me where it makes the most sense. So my druthers was to play with Butterfield, I mean I had absolutely no interest in playing with Bob ’cause I saw that I would be merely a shadow. First of all, I’m a bluesman and the music would take me in no direction that I wanted to go in and I would be a shadow of this guy that I was finally beginning to see was an immensely popular star, and that held no interest for me at all. So we were in Newport and it sort of came down that I was gonna play with Paul, I was gonna join his band, and I think Bob felt betrayed or pissed, or he assumed I wasn’t gonna play with him and I assumed that there was gonna be a business decision made by Grossman, but if I had my choice I was gonna play with Paul and I did.

“So we set up to play, and Barry Goldberg wanted to play with
Bob too, and we were all at Newport, Kooper, me, Barry, and this
schwartze
Jerome from the Butterfield Band playing bass, and he can’t play and he’s fucking up everything, and we’re practicing there in a room and Odetta’s staring at us and Mary Travers is there and we’re playing and it’s sounding horrible and finally it’s time for the gig and Barry and me are throwing up in these outhouses, literally outhouses, built like wood shithouses and we’re smoking joints and throwing up in there and we get up onstage behind Bob and we play and I think we went over fabulous. I had a fabulous time, I see the lights, the flashbulbs popping, I hear screams and yells. Did I in my wildest dreams, would I have known that we bombed? I thought, hey, rock ’n roll circus, man, heaven, and a year later I found out that we had bombed. I thought we were fabulous. And so Dylan goes up there again after we came down, he’s got a yellow shirt on with a tie pin, he’s dressed like a fucking Pachuco, some kind of Puerto Rican from the West Side of Chicago. He looked very weird with the black leather coat, the tie pin and the shirt without the tie, real spic clothes, so he goes up there and he sings ‘Baby Blue,’ or something, some folk song, and Peter Yarrow apologizes for him and I didn’t even pay attention, see, I was there with the Butter Band and I was gonna play with Joan Baez, too, I was the only electric guitar player there, I would have played with anybody, did I give a fuck? And I thought we had done real well but apparently we had bombed. The next time—”

“What was Dylan’s reaction that day?” Ratso interrupts.

“He was uptight all day. He was uncomfortable, I think he knew that this was a much more serious thing than I did. To play with anyone at a folk festival, I would have plugged my guitar into Pete Seeger’s tuchus, really man, and put a fuzz tone on his peter. You know what fucking Pete Seeger was doing? He brought a whole bunch of
schwartzes
from a chain gang to beat on a log and sing
schwartze
songs, chain-gang songs, and he was doing that, can you believe this guy? Here’s a white guy, got money, married to a Japanese woman, beating on a log with
schwartzes
singing All I hate
about lining track, whack, this old chain gwine break my back,’ actually saying ‘gwine,’ whack, and Seeger’s doing this and he’s pissed off at us for bringing electric guitars to the fucking folk festival. He brings murderers from a
schwartze
prison to beat on a log! Oh, I couldn’t believe how fucking crazy it was, man!

“And fucking Theodore Bikel, he’s drunk. But Albert was cool, though. He beat up Alan Lomax because Lomax gave the Butter Band this rank introduction and man, they had a stone fucking punchout, rolling on the dirt, Albert was really ballsy, kicked the motherfucker’s ass, I loved it. He went to Lomax and said, You know, man, you’re a dumb fucking prick’ and Lomax sucker-punched him and Albert kicked his ass. I was delighted to see that.”

“But didn’t you get any feedback from Dylan right after?” Ratso tries to focus Bloomfield’s narrative.

“No man, we thought we did great. Maybe Bob knew we were booed.”

“What about the rumors that Bob was crying when he came offstage?”

“I didn’t know, I was with Barry and I said, ‘How do you think we did,’ and he said, ‘Oh, we were fabulous,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I thought so too,’ and then he’s up there playing ‘Baby Blue.’ And when I saw him afterward, he looked real shook up and I didn’t know the nature of what made him all shook up but the next night he was at this party and he’s sitting next to this girl and her husband and he’s got his hand right up her pussy, right next to her husband, and she’s letting him do this and her husband’s going crazy, so Dylan seemed quite untouched by it the next day.

“So the next time I saw him, I was playing with Butter in the Café au Go-Go and Dylan comes in with Robbie Robertson and he says, ‘I want you to meet the greatest guitar player in the world,’ and he introduces Robbie to me, Robbie who I had already known! And I’m looking at him and thinking, Oh, you little prick, you little dork, uh huh, this is where it’s at, and oh God, it never got clear to me, if he wanted me to play with him he should have said, ‘Man, I
want you to get in the band with me.’ He was talking about playing with this one and that one. He should have been real clear to me, ‘Want a gig?,’ ‘Fabulous, how’s it going down?’ But if he had asked me I would have turned him down anyway ’cause I’m a blues player, I wouldn’t have done it, who needs the craziness? It would have been crazy for me.

“So after that we like drifted apart, what was there to drift apart, we weren’t that tight, but after that when I’d see him he was a changed guy, honest to God, Larry, he was. There was a time he was one of the most charming human beings I had ever met and I mean charming, not in like the sense of being very nice, but I mean someone who could beguile you, man, with his personality. You just had to say, ‘Man, this little fucking guy’s got a bit of an angel in him,’ God touched him in a certain way. And he changed, like that guy was gone or it must not be gone, any man that has that many kids, he must be relating that way to his children, but I never related to him that way again. Anytime that I would see him, I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t understand that game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put-down game. Who’s king of the hill? Who’s on top? To me it seemed like much ado about nothing but to Dave Blue and Phil Ochs it was real serious. I don’t think Blue’s ever escaped that time, in some ways it seems like he’s still trying to prove himself to Bob. I know David’s one of Bob’s biggest champions.”

Bloomfield pauses for breath and Ratso wonders how the guitarist evaluated Dylan’s music over the years as opposed to the almost Reichian character analysis he was painting.

“Well, I love it man, I love
Blonde on Blonde
, I love
John Wesley Harding
, and I like that album with ‘Day of the Locusts’ and I love ‘Spanish is the Loving Tongue’ and I love
Self Portrait
, I even like
Blood on the Tracks
, God knows I couldn’t play the fucking songs but when I heard the record I liked it. And yet, you know, none of those records are as good as they could be, none of them. I mean, if you look at his peers and look at what a Randy Newman record
sounds like, or any good writer-singer, or a Band record, or a Leo Sayer record, I can’t judge, it’s like saying Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, both fabulous, but as far as producing records, Newman’s records are the best-produced.”

“Why do you think he pays so relatively little attention to that?” Ratso had been dying to ask that of someone close to Dylan’s music, for years.

“Because the song’s the thing,” Bloomfield booms. “The medium isn’t the message, the message is the message and the medium is sort of ignored and I can’t understand it, because the nearest thing to a tight record was
Nashville Skyline
and
Blonde on Blonde
. As a matter of fact, my favorite Dylan record of all is
The Basement Tapes
, it’s got real good music on it, fabulous singing and good songs, good licks. I don’t know why he does it though. I mean if I was Bob Dylan and the Beatles were making records like
Sgt. Pepper
, I would want to make a record that was slightly more representative of where rock music was going at that time and maybe he did want to do that but as far as I can see an album has never come out by Bob that was musically equal to the content of the songs or the lyrics. And strangely enough, except for rare occasions, I would rather hear Bob sing his songs than cover versions, but I’d rather hear Bob singing his material better produced.

“I mean even Leon Redbone’s albums are better produced than Bob’s. Why do you think, Larry? Or why does he have sessions with Eric Clapton there and there’s thirty guitarists and that fiddler, she’s not the greatest fiddle player that walks, I know fifty better fiddle players than her. What’s the story? You must know. A friend of mine played at that session, he played acoustic guitar. He told me it was crazy, insanity reigned, just like that session I played in ’65, twenty guitar players playing at once, no one knowing what was supposed to happen, who took what, where and when. Why? What do you think? I mean I’m all for random chance and a Cageian theory that out of randomness, some kind of magic may happen, but fuck, man, he’s been in the studio enough times with Nashville
guys to see where it’s laid down without any randomness, to see what that’s like.”

“What do you think of ‘Hurricane’?” Ratso asked, remembering a previous conversation in which Bloomfield had been very knowledgeable about Rubin’s plight.

“I listened to ‘Hurricane,’ it’s a good song, I hope the
schwartze
didn’t do it ’cause if he did then it’s a terrible song. It’s a damned good song though, as a matter of fact, if I was producing that song I would have produced it as a reggae song ’cause that ‘Hurricane’ chorus always reminded me of something Mexican or Spicish, something reggae or spic. It bothers me. One could make a Dylan album that would be the definitive songwriter’s album, the definitive one, the greatest one of all. His singing gets better every year, his voice gets better, more accomplished, his range gets better, and to hear it not utilized is an annoyance. But he must think that as long as he got songs, he got albums, long as he’s got songs, he’ll go in there and put them down, so he should record by himself, why fuck around? Let him either record by himself or record right.”

“How did he contact you for the
Blood on the Tracks
thing?” Ratso backtracks.

“Someone from Columbia phoned and oh, it was so terrible, they told me that no one could come by the house, get everyone away, all the secrecy, who needs this? I’ve been with Mick Jagger, man, it wasn’t like that, it was pretty comfortable, he was a normal old dude, man, I was with him with a bunch of people around and with no one around and he was cool both ways. It was very uncomfortable with Bob and very intimidating, you know how Bob sort of taps his foot, man, like that very hyper foot tapping away, it makes you very uncomfortable, like ‘Let’s get on with it.’ But yet, get on with what? I couldn’t correspond, I tried with all my soul, and I read in
Rolling Stone
, I swear if I’m lying I’m dying, how Eric Weissberg and the guys that played on
Blood on the Tracks
couldn’t correspond either. They couldn’t do it, the same thing happened to them, they couldn’t play. Why? Why did he freeze up that way?
I can’t understand it, all it would take was a little time, not much, enough time to say, ‘Hey Bob, listen, one song at a time, let me learn it, and when I know it I know it and it’s done.’”

“Well, what was it like that day, I still don’t understand.”

“He took out his guitar, he tuned to open D tuning and he started playing the songs nonstop! And he just played them all and I just sort of picked along with it, and any attempt I made to say, ‘Hey Bob, stop! Do it from the beginning so I could learn it’ or ‘Let me write a chart up, play it for me just verse and chorus,’ but see, he was selling the whole song, and they weren’t short songs. He was singing the whole thing and I was saying, ‘No man, don’t sing the whole thing, just sing one chorus and if it’s not gonna change let me write it down so I can play with you.’ And he didn’t. He just kept on playing he just did one after another and I got lost; they all began to sound the same to me, they were all in the same key, they were all long, I don’t know, it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. And it really hurt me. I don’t mean it hurt my feelings, it hurt me though in some sort of way.

“He was pissed. I mentioned that I had done a session that took these horn players a whole long time to get the thing right and he looked at me and said, ‘Uh huh, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,’ and he gave me a dirty look, he was sort of pissed that I didn’t pick it up, but I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t a quick enough study or whatever. But if I was gonna teach somebody my tunes, I wouldn’t do it in that way, I would sit there slowly until they got it and then I would play it with them and when it was right, we’d know it and if they wouldn’t get it after enough time then I would have said, ‘Hey man, fuck you’ and split. But it made me feel weird, this may have been completely in my mind, but I just felt this big wall, this enormous barrier that was so tangible that there was no way you could say, ‘Hey man, how are you? You getting much pussy? Drinking a lot still? How are your kids? What’s your scene?’ because anything like that would seem like ass-kissing or an invasion of his privacy. It just made me feel very uncomfortable, Larry.”

“He doesn’t seem like that now,” Ratso reflects, “he seems pretty loose, pretty accessible …” But suddenly, all the fuckups the reporter’s encountered since that brandy-soaked night at the Kettle begin to flash before his eyes like trailers in a movie house.

“I feel the cat’s Pavlovized,” Bloomfield jumps in, “he’s Tofflerized, he’s future-shocked. It would take a huge amount of debriefing or something to get him back to normal again, to put that character armor down. But if he’s happy, who am I to say? I can’t judge if he’s happy, this might be his happiness. And God knows I bear no grudges. But I don’t know, I should know better. Were there times on the tour when he seemed accessible, stripped of that character armor, or is he just a very private person?”