On the Road with Bob Dylan (6 page)

I
f the Village and the old hangouts like Gerdes and the Kettle provided a vehicle for some sort of musical re-enactment of Dylan’s past, it was Hurricane Carter who provided the fuel that propelled this band of minstrels on their whirlwind tour. For in Hurricane Carter, the troupe found a cause that conjured up the old days of Dylan and Baez and civil rights rallies down in Mississippi. Once again, a black man was getting fucked.

Carter was a dynamic boxer, probably one of the most exciting fighters of the ’60s, with his Fu Manchu moustache-goatee and his stone-shaved head. Dylan sings “Rubin could take a man out with just one punch,” and that’s really no exaggeration. He’s a stocky man, 5’8” and 155 pounds of solid rock. He won 27 of his 39 professional bouts, 21 of them KO’s, but unlike most of his black counterparts in the ring, Rubin was no Mr. Nice Guy outside the canvas. He had a “problem childhood,” namely early tastes of poor environment, gang cohorts, police run-ins, reform school crime educational courses, the whole rags-to-rags story. But then, what the social workers call his “antisocial behavior” was channeled into prizefighting and Rubin did well enough to drive around in a monogrammed black Eldorado.

But Carter also developed a nascent racial consciousness, and he began speaking out on social and racial issues, something that boxers just didn’t do in the pre-Ali/Floyd Patterson era. And when Carter had the balls to offhandedly tell a reporter during the Harlem Fruit Riots of 1964 that blacks should protect their communities from invasion by occupying police, even if it meant fighting
to the death for self-protection, Rubin became a marked man in the eyes of the New Jersey justice machine.

So it was no coincidence that Rubin and companion John Artis were hauled in by the Paterson, New Jersey, police the night of June 17, 1966, on suspicion of murdering three whites in a tavern shootout. From the start, anyone familiar with the facts could smell a frame. As described by two wounded victims, the suspected killer was a light-skinned black, about six feet tall, with a pencil-thin moustache. Hardly Hurricane. In fact, police were forced to release Rubin and Artis that night, and it wasn’t until four months later that the pair were arrested for the murders, due to the testimony of two habitual criminals who “positively identified” Carter in return for lighter sentences for their own misdeeds, which in one case included robbing the cash register of the freshly shot-up tavern. At any rate, the case got more and more Byzantine and it is fully documented in Carter’s book,
The Sixteenth Round
.

So on June 29, 1967, Carter and Artis went to jail. And waited. And waited. The luster of Hurricane’s fame began to wear off, and soon he was a forgotten man, rotting in Rahway State Prison. And it wasn’t until eight long years later that some support for Rubin was generated. Some reporters in New Jersey and New York began digging for the facts. A defense committee was put together by a young independent screenwriter, Richard Solomon. Hopefully sympathetic celebrities were contacted. Two of those men were George Lois and Bob Dylan.

Lois is one crazy motherfucker. A Greek florist’s son who cajoled, screamed, ranted, and generally loudly displayed his amazing creative talents and pushed his way into the Madison Avenue Advertising Pantheon. He had just finished reading Rubin’s book when Solomon chanced up to his office one day. It seems that Rubin was convinced that the only people who could promote his innocence were admen, a shrewd decision in a consumer society. Repackage this nigger, sell him to the suburbs, and get his ass out of stir. So Solomon began making the rounds of advertising agencies.
Fat chance. The liberals of Madison Avenue didn’t want to know from a nigger with a shaved head who beat the shit out of white boys in the ring and allegedly shot the shit out of white adults in the bars. Hardly the stuff that would go over big in Scarsdale. They all turned Solomon down, but they all agreed on one thing. George Lois was the only lunatic that would take on a cause like that.

So Solomon approached George that day. “Mr. Lois, I’m here to ask you to support Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, a boxer—” Lois, having just finished the book, almost jumped for joy. “Sure, kid, listen, well …” And he began plotting out a campaign. “But Mr. Lois, you may scare off some of your advertisers by supporting Rubin,” Solomon was so amazed that he was actually hedging, warning Lois, based on his experience with the other admen. Lois laughed, “Hey schmuck, you working for or against this nigger? I’ll do it.” And a few days later, Lois went out to visit Rubin, armed with a full campaign that included a large celebrity drive (which ultimately netted people like Muhammed Ali, who chaired the committee, Walt Frazier, Billy Friedkin, Dyan Cannon, Johnny Cash, etc.), fund-raising activity, and a “The Only Innocent Hurricane” T-shirt. The ball was rolling.

And then it rolled out to California. Solomon sent Dylan a copy of Rubin’s book, Dylan began it and couldn’t put it down. He decided that as soon as he came east, he’d go out and meet the man. And he did.

One of the first things that Dylan did when he arrived in New York that summer was to take a ride with Richard out to Trenton State Prison, Rubin’s latest home. I went out there too, a few months later, and talked with Hurricane. We spent about three hours together that day, holed up in the back of the prison library, Rubin nattily dressed in brown boots, pressed slacks, and turtle-neck, sipping coffee from a plastic container. Carter had been rotting in this shithole, refusing to eat convict food, refusing to dress in convict garb, refusing to be fucked in his convict asshole. Just obsessed with one thing, devoting all his energies for his freedom,
not maniacally, but with a calm, fervent devotion. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane.

And Rubin spoke about Dylan. “I sent Bob a book some time ago. I was thinking about getting people with a high visibility, that means celebrities, and Bob Dylan was one of the people that Richard suggested to send a book to. So we sent a book to him and we never heard anything from him, and then one day Richard got a call from him and he said he wanted to come down here after he read the book.

“So when he came down here, of course I didn’t know much about Bob Dylan. I’ve listened to some of his records when I was free on the street and he had a lot of truth in what he was saying and this was his particular medium upon which to do his thing, but I really didn’t know him as a man. So when he comes here, I’m sitting here, now two of us meeting for the first time ever, and he knows more about me than I do him at this time ’cause he had the book, so I’m sitting here talking to this man, and it wasn’t but a second that I’m sitting here talking to him and I see that here’s a man, here’s a man that not only is this a man that knows what he’s looking at, but he sees what he’s looking at and by seeing what he’s looking at he’s understanding what he’s seeing, and understanding what he’s looking at, and I’m saying, ‘Wow, he’s from the Midwest and I know that they don’t have the problems that the urban places have with the black-white thing.’ I’m sitting there listening to this man, he don’t talk too much, he do a lot of listening, I’m sitting here talking to this man and I say, ‘My God, two men always can meet no matter what their backgrounds are, no matter what their colors are, no matter what their philosophy might be or persuasions of any kind,’ and then I realized that that’s why Muhammed had to go to the mountain because two mountains never meet but two men can always do this and I just felt good after talking to him for four, five hours.”

I asked Rubin what they talked about.

“We sat right here where we’re sitting right now. We talked
about some of everything, religion, God, society, people, that’s what it all boiled down to—life, living, instead of death and dying. It seems like this society … this is one of the main things that we covered, in this society that has become contrary to all nature, we have become people who are wasting the water, the air, the soil, the fields. The only thing that we seem to be promoting in this country is concrete. We talked about growing, a part of life, at any rate, when Bob left he said, ‘I want to come back,’ I mean knowing that this man is almost a recluse, almost a hermit, and just the fact that he come down here and he was straight home from France and he was telling me that he had to go to France to get away from people because people suck his soul, just suck his soul, just suck him dry. I mean, here’s a man that’s trying to get the public to, er, give the people some truth here and the people don’t even understand what he’s saying. He’s so far ahead of his time.”

“Did he talk about that?”

“Yeah, his reaction was … well, I don’t know what his reaction to it was, I can only give you my opinion of what I feel his reaction was, ’cause I don’t want to put no words in his mouth, so anything I say here is not straight out of his mouth, it’s paraphrasing. I might be saying more than he said or I might not have gotten his message at all, but he was saying that he was seeing things that it seemed to him that other people just couldn’t see and he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see it and the only thing that he could do was to put it to music because, as I said, he don’t like to talk much and I understand that because at one time I couldn’t talk so therefore I could relate so closely to this man because of his desire to be alone, because of his not wanting to talk, because of his thoughts, I could relate so closely with him and I said, ‘Damn, here come a man from a totally different background and yet so similar so I think that there are two things about all human beings that are true, that we all are the same and yet we’re all different and upon those two facts all human wisdom is founded. So the man was just simply fantastic, there’s no doubt about that, I mean when he
walked in here I liked him, when he walked away from here, I loved him because he was real. There’s no phoniness about him and when he says that he was gonna write a song about me …”

“Right after the first visit?”

“Well, he never really told me, he didn’t say he was gonna write anything, but as I am sitting here talking to him, he was jotting little things down….”

“Almost like interviewing you?”

“No, no, but he was looking at me as if to say, ‘Who are you, man?’ I mean that’s what he was saying. ‘What are you? Tell me who you are? Are you what I see?’ But he wouldn’t put those questions in words, but that was what he was saying ….”

“Did you tell him who you were?”

“I tried to. I tried to tell him who I was, but he knew who I was, he knew who I was. Like I said, two men can always meet, he knew who I was, you see, and he just wanted to know if I knew who I was.” Rubin explodes with a hearty laugh. “Later on, I called him up because he gave me his telephone number and he told me he was gonna write a song. This was June, July, something like that, time here means nothing to me. I don’t know about the time, I just go day by day by day because yesterday is only a dream while tomorrow is only a vision and I believe that the day well lived, the day well planned, the day well thought out makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope so I don’t go by time, time don’t mean anything to me. The only thing means anything to me is that I don’t have my freedom. At any rate, when he told me that he was thinking about putting something together, it didn’t mean anything to me one way or the other but it made me feel good that indeed this man really understood what I was talking about, that if you’re gonna do something for me or I’m gonna do something for you let me do it
now!
Let me not hesitate or neglect. I’m trying to get this down right. Tomorrow’s not promised to us. There’s been many many songs and monuments written and erected for people after they were dead but the fact
that this man, a man of his magnitude, not only of his celebrity, if that’s a word, but a man of his understanding, for him to do this to me when I’m alive, where I can enjoy it, where I know that somebody feels about me the way that he feels about me, I mean that just makes me feel proud, man. That makes me proud, that makes me feel good. Dylan’s willing to help anybody that’s willing to help himself and that’s beautiful as far as I’m concerned.”

We started talking about “The Hurricane” and I asked Rubin what he thought about the song in comparison with other socially relevant tunes Dylan had written, like “George Jackson” and “Hattie Carroll.” Rubin frowned.

“I don’t know, man, because I’m not too much into his songs and things like that, not here, not here, ’cause all that soothing music, this ain’t no place to be soothed. This is a place, man, to be very very angry. Angry intelligently. You’re being brutalized and killed here, this is not a place to sit and listen to music. No time for music, man, this is a place to be serious. No no no man. I read, I must continue to grow because everything around me is dying.”

“But Rubin, some of Dylan’s stuff is revolutionary in the sense that it’s tremendously aware of the absurdity of the system. Take an album like
Highway 61
, that’s not escapist music ….”

“He got one song that I really like that I do listen to constantly. ‘It’s All Right Mama, I’m Only Bleeding.’ I like that, man. I don’t talk to many people in here but when he sent me that album, I called some young guys to my cell and I told them, ‘Listen!’ See we have a lot of people in here that are misinformed in their mind, their thinking is incorrect, they love their enemies and hate their friends. They hate each other, and I said, ‘Listen to this. Now this is a white man talking here, listen to what he’s saying about you. He know more about you than you know about yourself.’