On the Road with Bob Dylan (60 page)

A huge smile sweeps across Ratso’s face as Joni starts to improvise on the spot.

Joni’s screaming now, Ratso’s encouraging her with whoops and yelps of his own:

“And you’re number five with a bullet,” Ratso shouts.

Joni collapses the song with laughter. “You knew what I was saying that day,” Ratso smiles, “you just blew it all out of proportion. I was just saying that I got different eyes.”

“And I was saying don’t come around me until you widen your scope a little,” Joni bites her lip, “‘cause I can tell now as you hear the lines there’s more than one good song here and you really didn’t know that …. I’m getting so low energy all of a sudden.” Joni holds her hand to her head, and collapses on the bed. “I feel like I’ve absorbed so much, being in the middle of a human experiment, and I’ve absorbed so much information, I haven’t had time to sort it out yet.”

“We oughta get Roger in here to sing,” Ratso says cheerily.

“C’mon,” Joni frowns, “let’s not have a party. What did you notice about the prison show?” Joni turns reporter.

“That Dylan sang like he never sang before,” Ratso shoots back. “He never sang ‘Hattie Carroll’ like that to honkies. That song’s
like a prototype for the Rubin song. You know, I told him to recut the album, and he said it was a question of time. I told him to add Robbie, Ronson, even Ginsberg for karma. Did you hear the new words he added to ‘Simple Twist of Fate’?”

“What are the new words?” Joni sits up on the bed.

“I don’t know, he made it more Levyesque, more narrative. He changed ‘that emptiness inside’ line to ‘picked up a note.’ I hate that change.”

“I heard that change, it’s superficial,” Joni agrees.

“Did you ever hear the change he made in ‘If You See Her Say Hello’? He changed ‘if you’re making love to her’ to ‘if you get close to her,’” Ratso shakes his head.

“He’s gutless a lot of times,” Joni chides.

“C’mon,” Ratso yells, “in ‘Sara’ he comes out with that Chelsea Hotel stanza, that’s not gutless, that’s the guts pouring out of him. ‘Hurricane’ isn’t gutless. You know that whole story, he came back from France, where he was hiding out from all the assholes that hit on him here. He can’t speak a fucking word of French, you saw that in Quebec. He couldn’t talk to the audience. They hated him there.”

“They didn’t hate him,” Joni calls out Ratso’s exaggeration.

“Yeah, but it was lukewarm in Quebec,” he backtracks.

“But that’s a provincial town,” Joni flashes, “what did you expect? You have to take that into consideration, that’s the subtlety of performing and of life and if you get hurt because you don’t get enough applause like in a certain situation—”

“How’d you feel at the prison?” Ratso jumps in, “the audience booing, and screaming and catcalling at you and shit.”

“I loved it,” Joni leaps up and starts to pace the room, “I loved the prison, I loved the confrontation in the third verse of ‘Coyote.’ I said to that chick who told me to get off, I said, You want me to get off? Well, I’m not getting off because my best verse is coming. We came here to give you pleasure, if you can’t take it from us that’s your problem not ours.’ I enjoyed getting feisty and I enjoyed the people at the end. At the end, that guy said, ‘C’mon down and
dance with me,’ and he was in for like seven years on a homicide charge. He had like an eighteen-year sentence. He was a good cat. He didn’t have nearly as much jive as Hurricane.”

Joni retreats to a chair and curls up, her face turning sour. “Hurricane was so jive. He was like shaking hands with one person and looking toward the next one that was coming to greet him like David Geffen or someone and the only song he listened to the whole show was the song for him. He talked through that whole show. I got no respect for that cat. He’s a phony, he comes on like a spiritually enlightened cat and he’s not. That’s bullshit. And I told that cat Wayne, his friend, I saw him at the party that last night and he asked if I wanted to send word back to Hurricane. So I told him, ‘Yeah, tell him I think he’s really an egomaniac, man, if he can’t give respect to other performers. Let him use some of his karmic pseudospirituality to cool the audience out if he’s so powerful. He’s not; he’s a fake. He’s an innocent man but he’s a fake. I got no respect for him.’”

Ratso falls silent, half agreeing with the singer.

“And that whole political thing at the Garden show,” Joni flares, “I hated that show, that whole show was bullshit. Even that line, that man in that hell, that’s no hell, he may have had trouble but you carry your own hell around with you. You can be in hell in a mansion, in the streets or anywhere. I talked to kids that were in there that were in better shape for their experience, so it was like romantic politics. The whole thing makes me puke.”

“Ali was bullshit,” Ratso admits. “He left the minute he was through, with his contingent.”

“What’s the difference between a singer standing up and talking about the prison that people are all in as they walk through the streets and so-called freedom,” Joni gropes for the phrase, “the prisoners of spirit …”

“Yeah I know, I know,” Ratso pooh-poohs. “Are the birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

“Let’s not get poetic about it,” Joni shoots back, “but what about that? To me that’s just as heavy, but politics always … Nietzsche said
something in
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, something like ‘around the great actors, circulate the people. What do they know of subtlety with their forty-two thoughts and none of them original?’ Today I feel contemptuous. That’s one of the feelings that I intend to experience, my contempt.”

“No one is saying you shouldn’t do that,” Ratso returns the service from left field.

“No, I’m not saying I shouldn’t either, that’s why I stayed in New York for three days to re-examine my attitudes in different spaces of consciousness, away from people consciousness, hyper consciousness, lampshade consciousness …”

“Coyote consciousness,” Ratso can’t resist.

“Out-of-control consciousness,” Joni hits back.

“Let me finish that first story about Dylan and Rubin hooking up,” Ratso backtracks a half hour.

“I see there’s a certain amount of genuine human motivation and a whole lot of like political bullshit …”

“Of course there’s gonna be political bullshit involved in getting him out of jail,” Ratso screams. “It’s gotta be done.”

“I mean even in performing, like the inflammation-of-the-crowd psychology …”

“Sure, they turn the lights up, boom up the sound …”

“The ways the press reviews it. They’re impressed with the roars.” Joni sinks into thought. “There’s so many subtleties to it, but three times I’ve had to curb my bitterness.”

“Sure,” Ratso picks up the ball, “what if you came on first? Here’s a special guest star, Joni Mitchell.”

“It has a lot to do with the position on the bill to the press,” Joni admits.

“And that whole thing was supposed to be negated on this tour.”

“What,” Joni almost shrieks, “billing? Do you know how much politicking there was? Do you know how many times when I started to get too hot in my spot, how like I let people cut my power off? Let me talk to you a moment about the fallacy of power. It depends
on what your ideas about power are and how stable you are emotionally, from a point of view of clarity and emotional stability, this is like a philosophical cliché but to the wise man the victor and the loser are both fools. You know, the victor puffed up in his celebration of victory and the fool depressed from losing. Now that’s a concept I understand from time to time, unless I get emotionally insecure. It’s related to applause and feedback too, and as a result you can be invulnerable to that as a measure of your worth as an artist. But people have different priorities depending on the subtleties of the life experience that they’re interested in, so some people find it’s hard to follow a roar, maybe it’s really harder for them to follow a silence. It’s bad if somebody bombs out there; it’s hard to go on like if people have been put in a pensive mood. Like it’s hard to change moods and everything, like my main reason for coming out on this tour initially was to see the show. Then I was going up to Toronto to visit some folks; then I was going to Vancouver to see my parents. It was like a cycle, I had my ticket and everything, then I got sucked into it and the magic happened for me at Niagara Falls.”

Joni’s cigarette is all ash by now and she absentmindedly flicks it onto the carpet. “I couldn’t get off it and I got sick then too, and I had no pipes or anything and I didn’t sing any familiar material and I was going on as a front runner. Now OK, dig the odds for making a splash, going on in that position in the show, and also having it manipulated so that even your exit offstage is controlled in a way. I allowed it to be controlled for a while …”

“Who controlled it?” Ratso cuts in.

“The people involved. The musicians in the show. Like three times I had this ego battle and it was emotional immaturity, knowing that it really didn’t make a difference in that my longevity as an artist is not affected in any way by what position I’m in in this thing or whether they say Joni Mitchell was ineffective or whether they don’t even mention my name in the article, but from time to time when you get emotionally low I begin to say, ‘Like wait a minute,
I’m a sophisticated musician in a naive kind of way. I’m a sophisticated observer …”

“You know what,” Ratso leans in toward Joni and whispers conspiratorially, “you’re as good a songwriter as anybody on the tour.”

“You’re right,” Joni blurts, “see! Remember when we talked and you put me in a bag with women and I said that you should come around me when you widen your horizons and stop limiting me to gender, you know. Because really, I have a lot of anima-animus, a lot of male perspective. I’m talking about roles; it has nothing to do with gender.”

A minute later, Soles comes in and he and Joni start frantically packing, as the singer has a plane to catch in about an hour. Ratso just sits back and watches the frenetic activity.

“I have this terrible itch in my throat,” Joni complains. “Maybe it’s hotel ear rot. This room is too classy. I really wanted to skid it before I left town.” She shrugs.

“You should have stayed at my place,” Ratso laughs. “You could have crashed on my couch.”

“My voice is gone,” Joni rasps. “I sound like an old spade. I lost like ten notes on this tour. They are just gone forever. I’m just a prisoner of notes. I guess I’ll have to do more with the four I have left.”

Joni’s almost finished packing when Soles lugs out the huge framed plaque that Imhoff has presented to all the performers, a plaque made up of all the backstage buttons, ticket stubs, and ID cards from the tour. Joni frowns at the sight of this.

“Want this, Ratso?” she suddenly brightens.

“Jesus, I’d love it.” The reporter laughs at the irony of getting thirty-five backstage buttons at once at the end of the tour when he couldn’t cop one during the whole trip.

“It’s yours,” Joni smiles, “there’s no way I can get it back.”

Slocum is truly touched and as they start down the hall, lugging the suitcases, he realizes how fond he’s grown of the singer, and how much more appreciative he is of her work. And as he hails the Checker and copes with getting all her luggage together and getting
her frazzled self together, and when she pecks him a good-bye kiss and climbs into the cab, and heads off toward LaGuardia, with just her blond mane visible as the cab disappears slowly into the late-afternoon Madison Avenue traffic, and as he turns and walks back into the hotel, the reporter feels a strange emptiness inside.

An emptiness that’s assuaged a bit when he immediately inherits her room and starts making a battery of calls. He calls Lois, he tries Dylan, he calls Kinky, and then he calls Rubin in jail, greeting him with “Carter, you motherfucker.”

“Hey Larry, you son of a rascal you, what’s doing?” the boxer laughs.

“I need to get a quote from you, a reaction to the concert, a quote.”

“Dylan is a fantastic human being …” Rubin trails off.

“Keep going, keep going,” Ratso chants.

“That’s it,” Rubin stops, “that’s it.”

“You gotta give me some copy, schmuck,” Slocum screams.

“You write it,” Carter yells. “You write it, you smuck, say I said it. Just don’t say nothing bad about Bob.”

“But Rubin …” Ratso starts to protest.

“You do it. You’re a writer, you know what to do. Listen, smuck, I gotta go, speak to you soon.”

Ratso shakes his head and decides to call Phil Ochs. Phil had deteriorated since the last time Ratso had seen him, at Porco’s birthday party. He was more ragged, deeper into the depressive cycle of the manic-depressive syndrome that ravaged his soul. He had taken to drinking again, and mutual friends had reported to Ratso during the tour that Phil had been found sleeping in alleyways, and flop hotels, and one night, even in the bathroom of the Chelsea Hotel. But Ochs had attended the Garden concert and he had seemed a bit better to Ratso, at least as well as he was when the reporter lived with him the previous year. And, at the urging of some friends, Phil had left the city and was living in the Rockaways in Queens, crashing at his sister’s place. It was there that Ratso reached him.

“Phil, how are you doing?”

“I’m hanging in,” the meek, gentle voice fights its way out of his body.

“What did you think of the show?”

“I loved Dylan.” Phil perks up a bit, as he did whenever he discussed Bob with Ratso. “I thought it was the best I’d ever seen him.”

“Really.” Ratso, unaccountably enough, seems pleased.