On the Road with Bob Dylan (59 page)

“The Band’s stuff seems much more crafted.”

“Our stuff,” Robbie pauses, searching for the phrase, “there’s a thing going on there, there’s a fine line we’re playing off of. You know, Bob’s music is ad-lib music except for the chords and the words, so that’s terrific, it’s all terrific as long as it comes out in the end.”

Ratso senses Robertson is getting restless so he starts to wrap up the interview. “How do you relate to Bob’s new sound, with the violin … compared to the Sixties thing?”

“I’m not even sure what that was.” Robbie sounds incredulous even today. “I don’t know. Anyway, with the violin thing, it’s fine, it’s all part of the picture, the gypsy caravan. It all has its place in the thing, it sounds great to me. A lot of the stuff at the Garden the other night sounded extraordinary to me.”

“Yeah, the tour really built up a momentum …”

“Yeah, there was no question, that’s what I mean that it gets better. I don’t think it gets worse, I don’t think you lose it, I think it gets better. People get to digest it and understand what they’re doing and they’re not just running on some nervous anticipation. That’s what the
Basement Tapes
are, just very spontaneous but without that nervous anxiety of ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen next?’ If you’re playing with that feeling it prevents you from just relaxing, you know, you’re not relaxed when you do it, you’re on your toes so much that it’s tight.
The Basement Tapes
are the loosest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, including any blues records or anything. That, to me, is the epitome of what looseness is.”

Before he’d let Robbie go, Ratso had to interrogate him about
Planet Waves
, one of his favorite Dylan LPs and one that was woefully underrated by critics and public alike. Again, it’s the essence
of Dylan’s art, some songs hastily written, some just fragments of songs, done up in a three-day period before the ’74 tour. And, to Ratso’s ears, one of the finest rock albums ever made.

“It went by so quick,” Robbie smiles, recalling those sessions, “I mean,
Planet Waves
was as good as we could make it in the situation. Under the circumstances, Bob was not, I mean he really didn’t have a bag of songs there so it was just kind of a last-minute thing and it came off to me, under those circumstances, I thought that it was extraordinary. But if we had been doing the same thing, since then he’s written such songs of a lot more depth and zing to them. There were a lot of simple songs on that album, and people don’t necessarily want to hear very simple songs from him. I mean, every once in a while they take a ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ just to kind of get on with it, but basically what they want is a very complex song ….”

“Something in the ‘Idiot Wind’ arena,” Ratso interrupts.

“Right, and it wasn’t that kind of album at all, just songs like ‘Hazel’; they couldn’t be more simple.”

“I thought ‘Hazel’ could have been a top-forty hit covered by somebody like Neil Diamond or Sinatra,” Ratso offers.

“I like that song,” Robbie agrees. “I like a lot of them very much and I thought we played them very good and we got off some unusual stuff.”

“Yeah, like that interplay on ‘Dirge,’ that was fantastic.”

“But that’s just, we …” Robbie stammers. “I never heard that song before, and we sat down and we played it once and that’s it. But I know Bob’s thing by now, I don’t have to deal with that nervous anxiety of what’s gonna happen next. I know how to fake and slip to the left and slip to the right and it all sounds how it was supposed to be. I just learned it over the years, I guess, but I really enjoyed that album, we had a lot of fun doing it. Anything you do that fast is really rewarding, I guess. But it wasn’t an appropriate Bob Dylan album, that’s what the problem was, and it wasn’t super-unusual so it got a different kind of credit. People put so much
weight on the words that it really limited that album, all those songs, ‘Going Going Gone,’ ‘Hazel,’ ‘Forever Young,’ very very simple, as simple as he’s ever done and people just thought that it wasn’t a real effort and the whole thing went onto him. I listened to that album in somebody’s house last week and there’s some extraordinary playing on it.”

“Incredible ensemble playing,” Ratso gushes, “like on ‘Never Say Goodbye’ …”

“But if it doesn’t have the complex lyrics then it doesn’t even get to the point where it’s worth acknowledging, it’s like that on Bob’s records and I can see why he doesn’t want to go to a lot of trouble. It wouldn’t matter if he had Booker T and the MG’s and the New York Symphony Orchestra playing, people still wouldn’t hardly notice it, they’d be concerned whether they can hear that line and they’re not interested in accepting him on a musical level, his phrasing, his singing, his effect, his drama.”

“Do you think that the Rolling Thunder Revue was a reaction to Tour ’74?” Ratso has saved this question for last. “It seemed that Bob was so uptight …”

“Oh, I don’t know if they had anything to do with one another,” Robbie shoots back, a bit defensively. “And if they did …”

“C’mon,” Ratso again, “he seemed stilted on that tour. I almost felt that this tour was like a response to the impersonality of that thing.”

“On Tour ’74?” Robbie’s incredulous. “I don’t think he was particularly uptight, other than the fact that he hadn’t done a tour in eight years! There was a kind of pressure to the thing ….”

“Right,” Ratso jumps in, “and the Rolling Thunder thing in some respects seems to have taken that pressure off him, the whole revue format. It’s not like DYLAN/BAND with all the burdens on his shoulders.”

“Yeah, but that’s what a tour is,” Robbie laughs. “I mean, when the Rolling Stones go on tour that’s what it is. You can either accept it as being a very nerve-racking operation or you can say that I’ve
done this a lot of times before and we’re just gonna make the best of it. Tour ’74 was hard work, just the intensity of the music was so high that it was really straining. Whenever Bob sings with the Band he wants to get an energy level out of it, or I don’t know, not necessarily wants to but he does, end up singing things and it’s like Thunder and Mountains,” Robbie makes some expansive gestures, “you know, screaming at the gods in the sky and everything is so high-pitched, such intensity and energy. I mean, we can certainly do that but we can do a bunch of other things too, and we didn’t get to that. I think that his anticipation and nervousness on that tour didn’t allow for any laid-back stuff and we do lots of that. We didn’t do any of that on Tour ’74, it was really like a train going by and I missed that, all those different moods. On the Rolling Thunder I heard more of that and I like that. So that’s what the relaxation allows you to do. Rolling Thunder was extraordinary, everyone told me they had a really good time and it was loose and it was fun and it was nice to do something without having a gun at the back of your head.”

Ratso thanks Robbie and scoots back downstairs, goes home, and puts on
Planet Waves
for three hours. The next day he cabs it back uptown to the hotel. The crew, the film crew, the security men, most of the tour has gone but the performers are finding it difficult to leave. Only Baez has escaped without much trouble, but Mitchell, Neuwirth, Elliot, Blakley, Soles, T-Bone, even Dylan himself, they all seem to want to linger around and keep the thing going, if only in spirit.

So in the spirit of Plymouth or New Haven or Montreal, Ratso meets Soles up in Joni’s room. Today finally is getaway day but they seem to be having trouble packing. Steven is sitting on the floor noodling on an acoustic guitar, while Joni sprawls across the unmade bed, engrossed in a review of her new album in the
Village Voice
. “Ooh,” she says, “this is a great line,
‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns
sounds to me like a towering igloo of artistic conceit,’ that’s a good line.” Joni cracks up, as the phone interrupts.

After the call, the reporter plays social director, running down a list of favorite cheap restaurants of every conceivable ethnic stripe, proposing music clubs, after-hours clubs, in short a full night of entertainment if the performers should decide to linger one more day.

“This is really your town, huh?” Soles admires.

“I think everywhere is Slocum’s town,” Joni laughs. “He’s got every phone number down of every hotel. It’s like that joke, picture this, there’s a huge crowd, two million people in front of the Vatican, and I’m in the audience with Steve and Steve says, ‘Look!’ and points up to the balcony. And I say, ‘Yeah, but who’s that guy up there with Slocum.’”

“I just got Lisa’s poem,” Joni yawns, searching through the paper debris on her bed for the poem in question. “I skimmed through it and I don’t know what her trip is, whether she’s a terrible masochist or if she gets something out of it, but it’s like very disturbed.”

Just then the phone rings and it’s a call for Ratso, this one from George Lois. They do a postmortem on the concert and reviews, Lois particularly thrilled that the
Daily News
, “the enemy,” gave the center spread to the concert. In the background, Joni borrows Soles’ guitar just before he leaves and starts into “Coyote.”

“Joni, sing,” Ratso holds the receiver aloft, “sing so Lois knows it’s you.”

She shakes her head.

“She won’t sing,” Ratso reports, then holds the receiver near the guitar again. “You’re his wife’s favorite singer. While you were playing at the Garden, George was talking and she told him to shut up.”

“There’s something in there for him too,” Joni snaps. “Look Ratso, I’m starting to get angry now.”

“He’s a sincere guy,” the reporter pleads, “he spent his own fucking money on Rubin. There’s no guile in him.”

Joni starts singing in a low, hauntingly beautiful voice and Ratso gives Lois a hurried good-bye and listens to the words.

Joni pauses, then breaks into a long introduction, finally starting into “In France They Kiss on Main Street,” the opening song on the
Hissing of Summer Lawns
album. Ratso sits enthralled, really hearing the songs for the first time, unfettered by the large halls, the noisy crowds, and the temptations of the arenas.

“Great,” he whistles at the end. “Next time in Boston, I’ll take you to the Combat Zone, they’re great people down there.”

“Here’s one they’d like.” Joni smiles and does “Edith and the Kingpin,” Ratso marveling at the lyric, which he was never able to discern during the tour.

“That’s a nice one,” he admits. “Do ‘Coyote.’ I want to hear the whole song.”

“I only had two verses then in that cafe in Quebec,” Joni smiles sheepishly, “that’s why I kept repeating it. I was writing it still, so every time I played it I changed it.”

“Is it done?”

“No, not yet.”

“You’re still gonna add shit to it, huh, there are more coyotes on the road, in different cities …”

“… and I collect their pelts,” Joni picks up the line and runs with it, “the coyotes in different cities I sing in, and nail ’em up in my shack in Canada on the wall.”

“And I bring ’em when I come to the hall,” Ratso sings.

“I show them and exhibit them when I come to the hall,” Joni embellishes, “shameless hussy that I am.” They both laugh, and Joni starts strumming the hypnotic, driving beat of the song, then she starts to sing.

“That’s the end of the song,” Ratso screams just as Joni starts: