Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (21 page)

If he was making any money at the box office, the artist’s honest excuse was that the ‘evolving’ movie was indeed costing what his fish-merchant friend called an arm and a leg. Dylan was bearing the entire monumental cost. It is a pity, therefore, that he failed to pay enough attention to what was going into his picture. Keeping Sam Shepard happy and writing scenes worth filming would have been cheaper by far than all those clumsy improvisations shot on a wing, a prayer and the artist’s dime. Soon enough – in the middle of May 1976 – Dylan would be handing an importunate Allen Ginsberg $15,000 in recognition of his work on
Renaldo and Clara
. The older poet would reckon he was entitled to the cash for ‘acting in [the movie] and setting up the scenes and dialogue’.
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Even those who admire the film might struggle to justify that invoice. Those who admire Ginsberg can meanwhile ask themselves what happened to all that anti-materialist Buddhist ‘non-attachment’, all that radical ’60s rhetoric.

The incident gives a rough clue, nevertheless, to the kind of money Dylan must have been paying to Baez, McGuinn and all the others working for love and whatever else was specified in their contracts. The Guam band was a big, expensive proposition in its own right. Ravaged Elvis Presley, his last studio recordings behind him, was also out on the road that year. He too could summon better than 30 individuals to the stage, what with a six-piece band, eleven singers and a small touring orchestra, all flogged onwards yet again by the insatiable Colonel Tom Parker. But a ticket to see Presley was costing $10 in 1975 and the King was due to mark New Year’s Eve in front of 60,000 people at the Pontiac Silverdome, a football stadium in Michigan, picking up $300,000 personally for just an hour’s work.
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Dylan was trying to face in two directions. On the one hand, he wanted his modest, understated, friends-making-music show with its ‘anti-money, anti-establishment position’. On the other hand, he was trying to run a big, even grandiose touring ensemble on a scale Elvis would have recognised while footing the bill for a horribly expensive movie. ‘Theatrical’, like the picture business, didn’t come cheap. How much was he making? Plenty and not enough.

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What with cocaine on demand, the adrenalin rush of performance, the looming, ever-watchful cameras and the usual oppressive intimacy of life on the road, almost everyone involved with Rolling Thunder went a little crazy. Often they had a real camaraderie, it’s true, but there were some big personalities among them, with egos to match. Baez, with her own guaranteed spot on the bill and a pleasantly superior dressing-room – fruits of that detailed contract, no doubt – could be imperious. Neuwirth’s needling humour was not to all tastes on all occasions, especially after drink (or whatever) had been taken. As Joni Mitchell would observe on first boarding the bus, they could seem like ‘cruel people being cruel to each other’.
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This troupe were under an unspoken obligation to behave as a tightly knit group – as if life on the bus allowed any other choice – but they were also expected to defer instantly, automatically, night after night and day after day, to a wholly unpredictable individual. Musicians by trade, they became hostages by habit, like all touring bands. The difference for the Rolling Thunder ensemble was that its members would also find themselves turned into actors, after a fashion, for scenes in a movie Dylan did not readily discuss, far less explain. Some of those involved failed even to realise that one day they would be listed as ‘characters’ – though this might have been the artist’s droll choice after the fact – in
Renaldo and Clara
.

Neuwirth as ‘The Masked Tortilla’? T-Bone Burnett as ‘The Inner Voice’? Ginsberg as ‘The Father’, David Mansfield as ‘The Son’, and the visiting old Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins – this was surely labouring a point – as the unholy ghost, ‘Bob Dylan’? But then, everyone involved in Rolling Thunder was a character, in the several senses of that word. The fact that they had to come up with their own lines while their lives became anecdotal, if not ‘legendary’, was presumably part of the point the artist was trying to make about existence as performance. The interesting question is whether the nominal director – the name ‘Bob Dylan’ would occupy that role in
Renaldo and Clara
’s credits – exempted himself from his own strictures.

Plymouth, Dartmouth, Lowell, Providence, Springfield, Burlington: the old New England towns, the places where America began, came and went as the Bicentennial approached. From the start, Ginsberg had been promoting the idea that the semi-evolved film should attempt some sort of comment on the state of the nation, but an idea so coherent and obvious suited neither the tastes nor the talents of Dylan’s movie-making collective.
Renaldo and Clara
would wind up, as cineastes rarely say, as a bit of this, a bit of that and a portion of something else entirely. The film would combine those inept improvisations with remarkable concert footage and an assortment of interviews. For many, the old cliché about the whole and the sum of its parts would spring to mind. It became a tour movie, in short, with pretensions. Anything worth saying about the American experience would be said, as ever, in Dylan’s songs.

At Lowell in Massachusetts, during the tour’s third stop, he had paid homage at Jack Kerouac’s grave. It turned out to be one of
Renaldo and Clara
’s best sequences. Ginsberg had recited one of his lost friend’s favourite poems, Shakespeare’s 97th sonnet: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! / What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!’ The poet had then quoted a few lines from Kerouac’s
Mexico City Blues
, in its turn a Dylan favourite. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, the two men had then improvised a slow blues with guitar and harmonium. Momentarily, Dylan had paused to pick up a fallen autumn leaf and store it in his pocket. The lurking, ever-present movie camera had caught it all, of course, but Dylan, clearly moved, had seemed able to ignore the apparatus for once. The nature of the debt had altered with the years, but he owed much to the Kerouac whose work had once set him afire, and helped to set him on the road.

Still the Rolling Thunder Revue pressed on. Whatever the financial concerns behind the scenes, Dylan seemed to the paying public to be enjoying himself. Suddenly he was almost garrulous on stage. His song introductions began to resemble a comedy turn. In Providence, Rhode Island, the audience was told that ‘Isis’ was ‘a true story’. Just before the opening bars of ‘Romance in Durango’, innocent customers were invited to remember that ‘raw lust does not hold a candle to true love’. In Burlington, Vermont, the venerable, much-analysed ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was dedicated ‘to all psychology students’.

On 15 November, at the Niagara Falls Convention Center, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ was delivered, supposedly – and why not? – ‘for Gertrude Stein and Modigliani’. In New Haven, Connecticut, before ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, the audience was informed: ‘This song is dedicated to da Vinci.’ At one show, ‘Oh, Sister’ was performed ‘for Henry VIII’; at another, Dylan decided that ‘Durango’ was for ‘D.H. Lawrence, if he’s here tonight’.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the artist said of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’: ‘I wanna dedicate this to Wallace Stevens from Hartford, a great renowned poet. Wherever you are now, we wish you the best of luck.’ In Quebec, the song was performed for the benefit of ‘the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud’. In New York’s Madison Square Garden, on the final night of this wandering vaudeville tour, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ would be sung ‘for Herman Melville, who’s sitting …’

It wasn’t all comedy. Almost without fail, something was said by Dylan, night after night, about the plight of Rubin Carter. The show staged in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 19 November was typical: ‘This song is called “Hurricane”. If you got any political pull you can help us get this man out of jail and back on the streets.’ Dylan would also tell a New England crowd of learning ‘that Massachusetts was the only state that didn’t vote for Nixon. We didn’t vote for him either.’

Perhaps the funniest moment came in New Haven on 13 November. A shout – ‘Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’ – had gone up from someone in the crowd. The artist, preparing to perform a revised ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, had replied deadpan: ‘No, I don’t think so. I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone else.’

In New Haven, meanwhile, Joni Mitchell joined the show and the motley crew on the bus. She would stick with both all the way to the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ at Madison Square Garden, reputedly becoming the sole participant in the revue to pay her own way. Bruce Springsteen was also to be seen at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven on 13 November, but the chances of a performance ended, it seems, when Dylan ruled out an appearance (what with one thing and another) by the full E Street Band. On 2 December the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, an ice-hockey arena capable of accommodating more than 16,000 customers, would see performances by Ronnie Hawkins, plus Mitchell, plus Gordon Lightfoot, all in addition to the existing vast cast and their leader. Some 54 songs were performed by various artists during that second Toronto show. Things, it could be argued, were getting out of hand. Only Leonard Cohen brought a breath of elegant good sense to proceedings when he declined politely to participate in the Montreal concert on 4 December on the grounds that it would be ‘too obvious’.

At some point, just to complicate matters further, the film-makers Alk and Howard decided – or so Howard later asserted – that it would be a nicely ‘creative’ idea to bring Sara Dylan and her husband together for the sake of the movie. It led to uncomfortable scenes and a degree of slapstick backstage when, more than once, the artist’s girl of the hour was hustled out through one door while his wife entered through another. Sara Dylan had neither the taste nor the aptitude for life on the road. By then she and Dylan were married in name only, joined as parents – when he had the time – and by what once had been held in common. How he persuaded her to drag herself from California to New England in such a circumstance remains a mystery.

Nevertheless,
Renaldo and Clara
thus began to develop into the tale, roughly speaking, of a triangular relationship with, supposedly, mythological overtones. Dylan played Renaldo (obviously), alongside Sara/Clara and Baez as ‘The Woman in White’. Sympathisers would argue that the piece thereby achieved emotional tension and coherence, particularly in its original near-four-hour version. They could never explain away the fact that amateur actors – Sara Dylan had some slight experience, it’s true – tend invariably to produce amateur dramatics. Dylan might have had complicated ideas for his picture, but he, of all people, seems not to have realised that complexity is best expressed by professionals.

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Rubin Carter wasn’t getting out of jail any time soon, despite anything Bob Dylan might have to say about the matter. The struggle to win the boxer a second trial would end horribly in December 1976 when he and John Artis were once again convicted, but on the ‘Night of the Hurricane’ – Monday, 8 December 1975 – hope still remained. Thanks in part to Dylan, Rubin’s case was a cause célèbre liable to attract celebrity liberal attention even, or especially, from those who did not necessarily understand every last detail. As the
New York Times
would report, all of a sudden any number of ‘prominent political figures’ had found time to show support for Carter and claim places on the guest list at Madison Square Garden. Famous athletes commanded excellent seats while ‘among the show-business personalities’ the likes of Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon and Melba Moore were spotted. There would be more speeches at the Garden than the artist would tolerate in normal circumstances, but he was given little choice. On this night, despite his best efforts, ‘Mr Dylan’ – the
Times
house style altered for no man – was a long way from the ‘reaffirmation of the old Dylan rootlessness’, as the paper described it, that had been part of Rolling Thunder’s avowed point and purpose.
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John Rockwell, the writer of the piece, found it necessary, in fact, to dish a little dirt amid some judicious praise for the Carter benefit. Rolling Thunder had grown into an arena show, like it or not. Its size, wrote the journalist, had ‘provoked some cynicism and charges of hypocrisy, especially since Mr Dylan’s friends and tour members have been more enthusiastic than usual with their populist rhetoric and assertions of Mr Dylan’s selflessness’. Rockwell continued:

There are reportedly three films being made, at least some which may well make money, and Mr Dylan is apparently thinking of renewing the tour in Europe two months from now. The stories of warm good feelings among tour members have been partially purchased by a skulking, in-crowd exclusivism, and there have been persistent tales of dissension and ego clashes, too.

Dylan was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he stepped away from public life his absence was mourned or condemned. If he got involved only ‘populist rhetoric’ was worth mentioning. No one had said a word about hypocrisy when he and The Band were cleaning up amid a huge demand for tickets during Tour ’74. They had played the Garden twice during that campaign, to great acclaim. In any case, from whom ‘reportedly’ had the tale of three films come, with the supercilious assurance that one or more could ‘well make money’? What was being implied by the use of the phrase ‘partially purchased’, far less the description of ‘skulking, in-crowd exclusivism’? Mr Rockwell was naming no names and making no claims on his own behalf, but he was happy to clothe gossip in the affectless style of the
New York Times.

A lot of it happened to be true, of course. There was an undeniable contradiction between much of the Rolling Thunder chatter and the economic realities of staging the biggest little tour anyone had seen. The artist had been fooling himself, and therefore his audience, by pretending that ‘the old Dylan rootlessness’ could be dusted down, that the mythical minstrel boy could sing as and when he pleased, answering to no one. But what – for Mr Rockwell didn’t say – was he supposed to do? Retreat again into the old seclusion and wind up being labelled as a weird recluse, victim of a thousand mad ‘theories’? Tour as the Stones had been touring in 1975 – six nights at the Garden in June – with the arrogance of decadent princelings, with their mocking giant inflatable phallus, their circus elephants, their truckloads of Merck coke and their habit of keeping audiences waiting for hours? Had
Variety
ever wondered if the Stones were ‘interested’ in money? If Rolling Thunder had succeeded in anything, it had succeeded as one musically vibrant rebuttal – others were being prepared at that very moment – to the decayed nonsense ‘rock’ had become by the mid-’70s.