On the Road with Bob Dylan (46 page)

“I don’t believe it,” Bob giggles.

“Prove it to him,” Ratso nudges her with an elbow.

“Sit down,” he offers Dylan a seat next to her.

“No, I don’t want to sit down,” the singer shyly refuses.

“C’mon, sit down,” Ratso insists.

“OK,” Dylan gingerly sits, “but I’m not too good with girls.”

“I’ll help you,” Ratso is generous, “I gave Peter Orlovsky tips.”

“Oh, give it a try,” Roger pipes in.

“I get too embarrassed,” Dylan’s rubbing his hands together.

“Oh, just ask her a question,” McGuinn suggests.

“A Jamaican Jew, is that right?” Dylan’s still shaking his head. “I thought you were getting married to that other girl, Ratso,” Roger smiles innocently.

“Hey, don’t get him in trouble now,” Bob warns. “He’s in enough trouble, as it is.”

“You know, Linda,” Roger suddenly asks Dylan, “Linda? My wife?”

“Yeah,” Bob laughs.

“She said she wants to be my friend tonight,” Roger announces proudly.

“Instead of your wife?” Bob asks, straight-faced.

“No, better,” Roger beams.

“She’s finally catching on, huh,” Dylan smiles.

Gary bursts in with a tequila report, no bottles to be found, but Ramblin’ Jack may be hoarding one.

“Call him, maybe he’s got some,” Dylan suggests then turns back: “So Linda’s gonna be your friend, huh? That’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, I’m happy,” Roger brushes his hair off his collar. “She’s even going down to Burt Sugarman’s office with a lot of eight-by-ten glossies to let him film them for a tribute to the Byrds.”

“So you worked it out so you don’t have to bring her eggs and bacon no more,” Dylan seems happy for his friend.

“Listen man,” Ratso starts to qualify something he had wanted to tell Dylan for weeks, “this is said out of all due respect for your music, but I think you should re-record
Desire
, you know, I mean I heard the originals and the band is so much hotter now, the songs all have another life ….”

Dylan frowns. “Hey man, a record’s a record. I got twenty of them. It’s just a record. Gary, how we doing on the tequila?” And with that, the elusive Mr. Dylan gets up and heads out in the lobby.

But a mere minute later, Ronee Blakley stumbles in, wearing a nightgown and two different socks. “I couldn’t go to sleep,” she moans, “I had to see what was going on.”

“Ronee,” Ratso shrieks, “that’s the same nightgown you’ve worn three nights in a row.”

Blakley fingers the garment. “I’ll have you know this is clean,” she sniffs and plops down on the couch.

“Rolling Stone
fucked me for the fourth time in a row,” Ratso moans, remembering the latest article, where his byline had been buried after three rewrite men.

“Anybody could fuck you, Ratso,” Ronson chuckles.

“Not over, though,” Blakley looks for something to drink.

Sylvia meanwhile has been sulking on the couch. “Dylan doesn’t like me,” she pouts to Ratso, and then heads out to look for her friend, who’s roaming the halls somewhere with Ronnie Hawkins. With that Ratso departs, shakes his head all the way back to his room, falls on the bed and passes out.

But luckily the reporter wakes in time to make the bus, which will take the troupe to the train station for a scenic ride to
Montreal. Ratso rushes into the lobby, throws his luggage on the rack, and hops aboard, settling into a seat in the rear next to Mel Howard.

Howard has seemed a bit preoccupied of late, and Ratso has just chalked it up to the imminent end of the tour, a prospect that has everyone involved as depressed as a bunch of campers at the end of the summer. In a way this was the ultimate camp, a traveling sleep-away bunk of thirty with a staff of counselors and a crew of fifty. There’s been swimming, plenty of recreation, and a canteen that serves liquor until eight in the morning. So to Ratso, Howard just looked like a kid who’s on the wrong side in color war.

“I’m bummed out about the film,” Mel confides in Ratso as the bus warms up outside the hotel. “What I’m concerned about is that I have an opposing point of view from Meyers and those guys and Alk, even though Howard’s a friend of mine.”

“What’s the dispute?” Ratso perks up.

“Well, let me give you some background,” Mel volunteers. “When I first met Louie Kemp, who’s an old friend of Dylan’s, grew up with him, loves Dylan, thinks Dylan is a special guy and it’s kind of if you’re someone from the neighborhood and there was a star, a local legend, and somehow if the guy stays connected to that local legend, that’s the kind of relationship Dylan has with him. Sometimes the kid, the joker, I mean, he was obviously the energy source of his crowd, and on another level, he’s half myth, and they’re all a little awed by him and Louie and some of the other guys I met from Minnesota seem to have a relationship similar to the guys I grew up with, a lot of put-down humor, a lot of irony, a certain kind of toughness that city kids get, and I think that Dylan having been a superstar for a number of years is cut off from those kind of roots. People don’t talk straight to him, he’s always gotta weigh and measure what everyone says because everyone’s out to impress him, win him, sell him, whatever, so I think if you do that long enough and have to maintain a public image as a performer, as a poet and as a supersensitive person, I think more and more
there’s a certain amount of illusion involved in it. Anyway, when Louie and I met what we talked about a lot was what Dylan meant to both of us. In other words, once we got past the formalities of my credentials as a filmmaker and his credentials as a friend who’s going to be a producer of the whole tour, in a sense, for Dylan, it then came down to what was my point of view going to be and what was his, ’cause he’s never made films and he was trying to ferret that out. Everyone was selling him on making another
Woodstock
with the million cameras, and what we connected on was a few spare things.

“Dylan to me, and of course Louie too, was a kind of icon, a mythological character who represented for us the rebellion that we all went through, searching for newer values, being more independent, trying to find a better way, and when Dylan came back in ’74 after having had a public breakdown, which was parallel to so many people I knew having broken down after the kind of enthusiasm and messianic quality of the ’60s, like we found the ultimate truth and then suddenly you find that you found nothing, you’re still scrambling, and a lot of people got broken by that, and, in a certain way, Dylan seemed broken by that and by degrees crawled his way back. Broken by the motorcycle accident, sure, but some of the albums, some of the music lost the fire, the sense of focus, and in a way, when he came back in ’74 he was transformed.

“When I saw him, the halting shy ironic kid was now a very sexual adult male who was taking responsibility. I’m reading a lot into this but by saying I want to play Madison Square Garden to twenty-five thousand fans and acoustically singing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and saying ‘How does it feel?’ in retrospect is a whole different thing than saying it as a bunch of kids sitting on MacDougal Street and saying ‘Let’s go out and bop.’ Here’s a guy saying, ‘Well, we all went through shit, stand up and be proud because this is what we opted for, it’s a wonderful thing that we’ve done.’ And it was an inspiration.

“And, incidentally, Dylan’s Jewish and the rumor was around
that he was interested in the JDL, and had gone to Palestine, and this and that. Louie wears a golden
ch?
, the symbol of life, and I’m heavily Jewish, I speak Yiddish, so there’s that, the mythology of Dylan as a latter-day Hassid, as a Cabalistic kind of poet, all that, and as a kind of extension of the whole idea of the wandering Jew, wandering poet, the person who is inspired and goes amongst the community to carry the message of inspiration and renewed faith and renewed hope. I mean I’m into that kind of mythology as a filmmaker and part of the malaise that we’re all suffering from is that nobody knew what to believe in anymore.

“So here comes Dylan, dumb enough, naive enough, beautiful enough, all of those things to say ‘Let’s go out and form a caravan and wake up the country,’ and in some fluid, unspoken way that seems to be the message that all of us are picking up. In other words, what you pour into it was what it becomes. So what Louie and I talked about is that certainly Dylan had things like that in mind when he was saying ‘Let’s go to Plymouth,’ and it’s the bicentennial year, so obviously he had some historical notion in mind, so what we talked about was, wouldn’t it be great to kind of shape it into that, in other words to anticipate that, not to be just voyeuristic filmmakers recording the event of everyone’s freaking out over Bob Dylan which is frankly, as a filmmaker, very uncreative and boring.

“So we came up with this idea to make an inspirational event out of the film independently of the tour, and to kind of give it all of that dimension and mythological connotation, because it was important to all of us and Louie was hip to that. So Louie said, one of the first things he said, was to buy
Diamonds and Rust
and listen to some of the songs, and they’ll give you kind of clues to Dylan and Baez and what it means for them to be coming back together and stuff. And from all this generalized talk we were saying we should filter out some of the best into a movie.”

Mel yawns, as the bus finally rolls out, heading for the station downtown. “And with good reason, they hired the best documentary
filmmakers and those are guys who are independent, wonderfully spirited cameramen, who have over the years covered every major event and made films about it. And they don’t really understand the fictional notion of having a game plan, sitting down and actually having a daily plan and inventing a film. To them, that’s somehow dishonest, the thing to do is to discover it as you go along. Now the problem with that, there’s long books about
vérité
and what is real and what is truth and it ain’t gonna be answered by us, the thing is that if you’ve been at it long enough, like somebody like Meyers, who’s been at it for many years and reputed by everybody to be the best, he makes a story, his energy, his determination, and his good humor and all of that, actually takes whatever the situation is and makes an event out of it. So is that more truthful than fiction? In fact, it’s not, to me. Because what often comes out of that is people just being grotesque for the camera, trying to be funny, they’re on. So to me, a lot of the stuff that we were shooting in New York and at the beginning was stuff that was conventional and worse than that, it was stuff that … fuck Dylan as a person, whom I grew to love, but at that point I didn’t give a shit, but Dylan as a symbol for something that we all needed, an inspiring man with brains who was able to look at the world and say ‘Fuck, man, this is what’s happening,’ to take the opportunity that rarely comes to any communicator, artist, writer, I mean all of us had this incredible opportunity, in a sense, on his coattails, to say something. To take that opportunity and just parade him around as though he were some lame dick and everybody’s gonna freak out over him and we can take funny movies of girls giggling, that to me was lame and a drag.”

Howard winces at the memory and stares out the bus window. Ratso is enthralled by this narrative and just waits till Mel resumes his monologue. “So what happened very early on, I became a sour-puss so there was a real rift in the production. The rushes started coming in and everybody was self-congratulatory, ‘Oh, they’re
great, the greatest,’ and Bob, who really doesn’t know film, I’m saying this with respect, I think he would make a great director but he doesn’t yet know film, he wasn’t sure what to make of it, so he would respond a lot to people’s energy around him. It always happens in films, you want to believe in what’s happening, but I thought the stuff was home movies, and I really disliked it and finally it came to a head at some point and I said that and of course by saying that, it was intemperate and it incurred the wrath of the filmmaker cameramen who were saying in effect I was criticizing them, which wasn’t the case. It was just an opposition of styles.

“That kind of was a breaking point ’cause when Dylan said if I didn’t like it what is it I’m after? There was never any violent disharmony, there was just this rhythm underneath. Every day we’d go out and shoot. But we had a couple of long raps about it and he agreed. I just said, ‘Do you want your name, I mean your music and what you represent, do you want to use it to its best intention?’ And in that, we had tremendous support and allies in people like Ginsberg. The thing about Allen is he’s a wonderful historian, he tends to see things, everything has a historical significance. So Allen saw Dylan rightly connected to the whole tradition of the Beat generation and through that to the earlier poets, Poe, the whole sense of the American vagabond. So Allen was keen to add that element to it, and of course, Dylan is mindful of that, that’s why he invited Allen, so that there’d be input from people in the whole area of poetry and Kerouac and what the country was about, because the RTR was coming a lot of people would appear out of the woodwork, old faces from the scene who dropped out, so that there was really the raw material for an inspiring event beyond just a corny film.

“And at some point, Sara comes and Sara is an actress and an old friend of mine and I literally begged her to get involved in the movie because I knew that she would be into certain things. And what the movie has is a conglomeration of some of the most interesting
strong women in the world, really. Joan Baez, who is absolutely irrepressible, she’s super, a wonderful, enthusiastic, dynamite lady.”

“Did she do an incredible scene with Dylan, that almost became psychodrama about their old relationship?” Ratso vaguely remembers muffled rumors about this early on in the tour.

Mel lowers his voice a bit. “Yeah, at Momma’s, what happened was, I don’t know how much of this we’re not supposed to talk about, but basically they had, everybody knows, a really intense relationship years ago and they split up largely I think at Dylan’s behest and all those years Baez never resolved that, she carried the torch, ’cause Dylan is very powerful, and she wrote those songs about him. And she and I started to talk and I literally fell in love with her, I had never been a fan of hers particularly, but she’s got real spirit, real character, real conviction, and we talked and it was very touching, she talked about how for years she and Dylan had not talked, how there was so much she wanted to say and ask him but that she was afraid to and he was so elusive.