Critical Mass

CRITICAL MASS: What Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue meant

When Bob said "Yes"

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, in white-face makeup, perform during Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. A new documentary, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” directed by Martin Scorsese, is now streaming on Netflix. (Courtesy Netflix/AP)
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, in white-face makeup, perform during Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. A new documentary, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” directed by Martin Scorsese, is now streaming on Netflix. (Courtesy Netflix/AP)

"Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of 'Time Is on My Side' (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richard T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like 'You gotta a lotta nerve sayin' you won't be my parking meter.'

"Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively playing to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from Nashville. But Dylan is an expert in gamesman­ship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back."

This is James Wolcott, writing in the Village Voice in July 1975 about Dylan showing up to watch Smith and her band play at a Greenwich Village club called The Other End -- the once and former The Bitter End, the oldest rock 'n' roll club in New York City.

At the time, Smith had just been signed to Arista Records but had yet to record an album, and Dylan was six months clear of releasing Blood on the Tracks, a confessional album about his disintegrating marriage.

That's not what Dylan says the album is about; he maintains that there's nothing autobiographical about Blood on the Tracks, that he based the songs on Chekhov stories. But Jakob Dylan has described the album as "his parents talking," and even if they weren't specifically written about Dylan's marriage, the truth is that the marriage was falling apart.

Blood on the Tracks was recorded in immediate aftermath of Bob and Sara's initial separation; after the album was released he embarked on a trip to the south of France where he expected her to join him. She did not. Though the divorce didn't become final until 1977, by June 1975 Dylan's marriage was over.

So he took a loft on Houston Street and went down to The Other End at night to drink wine and socialize with old friends like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bobby Neuwirth. From this distance you could see it as Dylan blessing Patti Smith's group, but the truth might be that he would have been at The Other End no matter who was playing that night.

Anyway, some people say her show inspired him to go back on the road, to play music again with people he liked.

"Somebody told us he was there," Smith told Thurston Moore about the show in 1996. "My heart was pounding. I got instantly rebellious. I made a couple of references, a couple of oblique things to show I knew he was there. And then he came backstage, which was really quite gentlemanly of him. He came over to me and I kept moving around. We were like two pit bulls circling. I was a snot-nose. I had a very high concentration of adrenaline."

Someone took pictures of Smith and Dylan together; one ran on the cover of the Village Voice that contained the Wolcott story.

"And then a few days later I was walking down 4th Street by the Bottom Line and I saw him coming," Smith told Moore. "He put his hand in his jacket -- he was still wearing the same clothes he had on in the picture, which I liked -- and he takes out the Village Voice picture and says, 'Who are these two people? You know who these people are?' Then he smiled at me and I knew it was all right."

A NEW BAND

The theory is that Dylan saw Patti and wanted his own band.

That was something he hadn't really had before, though he'd had The Band and had gone out with them on a 40-date "comeback" tour in 1974. (Given his schedule over the past 30 years or so, it's difficult to believe that inveterate tourer Dylan once went eight years without touring.) He wanted to get away from the big halls and "play for the people," in more intimate settings, smaller halls, in a more relaxed setting. That's if there was any plan at all.

Dylan began working with Jacques Levy, director of the off-Broadway nudie revue Oh! Calcutta! on songs for a new album that would be 1976's Desire. Levy was friends with Sam Shepard, having directed the playwright's early play Red Cross.

Levy was friends with Roger McGuinn, with whom he tried to write and produce a musical version of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. That project never got off the ground but one of the songs McGuinn and Levy wrote together, "Chestnut Mare," was a minor hit in England, and McGuinn and Levy continued their songwriting collaboration.

It's a little weird, considering Dylan's reputation as a poet, that Levy was primarily if not exclusively a lyricist. On the seven Desire songs Levy co-wrote, you can hear his influence -- those songs tend to be less imagistic, more rooted in convention and direct than typical Dylan songs. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; "Hurricane" is all the more powerful for its blunt fury.

Director Martin Scorsese (Courtesy Netflix/AP)
Director Martin Scorsese (Courtesy Netflix/AP)

Dylan allegedly found Scarlet Rivera playing violin in the street and invited her to play on the Desire sessions, which were notoriously chaotic, with Dylan attempting to record the songs with all sorts of musicians before settling on an intimate core group consisting of Rivera, singer Emmylou Harris, drummer/pianist Howie Wyeth, bassist Rob Stoner. These musicians would eventually become the heart of the traveling circus that's the subject of Netflix documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.

The movie is a great watch but, like most things that have to do with Dylan, isn't entirely reliable. Jack Tanner is a fictional congressman first played by Michael Murphy in Robert Altman's HBO series Tanner '88. Sharon Stone did not join the tour as a 19-year-old groupie. Stefan van Dorp isn't a real person. A future Paramount Pictures CEO was not the tour promoter; Dylan's childhood friend Lou Kemp was.

There's probably other made-up stuff. I understand why Scorsese included these "Easter eggs," they are a playful acknowledgment of Dylan's insistence on taking poetic license. He is, after all, just a song-and-dance orphan from Oklahoma.

The Revue began to come together in October 1975, soon after Desire was completed, when Dylan rented rehearsal space in midtown Manhattan for the Desire musicians in anticipation of a record-supporting tour. He also invited three musicians who had impressed him during the sessions even though their contributions weren't used on Desire -- guitarists T Bone Burnett and Steven Soles (who contributed backing vocals on "Hurricane") and multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield. Also invited was Dylan's old buddy Neuwirth.

Over the next few weeks, Dylan continued to bring players to the rehearsal space such as percussionist Luther Rix, Ronee Blakley (the actress/singer who'd recently starred in Altman's Nashville), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Eric Andersen, Patti Smith, Arlen Roth, Bette Midler, Buzzy Linhart, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.

Soon they moved rehearsals to The Other End late at night after the crowds thinned out and the club closed.

A plan was forming; Dylan brought his old friend, filmmaker Howard Alk, on board to shoot a film of the tour; he enlisted Sam Shepard to write a screenplay. Levy was on board. Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen declined because they had commitments, but David Bowie's guitarist Mick Ronson joined. Allen Ginsburg wanted to read his poetry on stage (these readings were later cut, but Ginsberg came along anyway).

There was a show at Gerde's Folk City -- the scene of Dylan's big break, where The New York Times critic Robert Sheldon had seen him in 1961 -- after the evening's headliner played, when Dylan and Baez came out and sang "One Two Many Mornings." Other performers followed.

Roger McGuinn (from left), Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform during the finale of "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story" on Netflix. (Courtesy Netflix/AP)
Roger McGuinn (from left), Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform during the finale of "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story" on Netflix. (Courtesy Netflix/AP)

Consider it a dress rehearsal -- Rolling Thunder Revue kicked off a week later on Oct. 30, the first of two shows at Memorial Auditorium in Plymouth, Mass., a hall that held about 1,000 people. Tickets were $7.50, with a limit of two per customer. (The photo of Dylan used on the cover of Desire was taken in Plymouth while the Revue was there in a state park about midway between a replica of the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America in 1620, and Plymouth Rock.)

The first leg of the tour would end, some 30 dates later, in New York's Madison Square Garden on Dec. 8 in a benefit concert for imprisoned Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King appeared on stage. Roberta Flack, Robbie Robertson and Joni Mitchell joined the regular performers. They went back out for another 20 dates in 1976, after Desire was released.

"I had been knocking around the high studios and low dives of Bohemia America making ketchup tomato soup and sleeping in guest rooms for the decade since I'd gotten out of Paschal High School in Fort Worth, Texas, and was well on my way to being a chronic and world-class ne'er do well when Bob Neuwirth called me to play The Other End in the Village with him," T Bone Burnett would later write by way of introduction to Sam Shepard's The Rolling Thunder Logbook.

"We ended up on stage with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Ringo Starr, Muhammad Ali, Caroline Kennedy ... this list could go on for some time but let me just say that this was quite a learning experience ... There were genius writers everywhere. It was a bus full of musicians and singers and painters hurtling through the night fueled by White Russians and other things, making a movie, writing songs, playing ... some of the most incendiary, intense, and inspired rock 'n' roll, before or since. For evidence, please see the version of 'Isis' on the Bootleg Series DVD ... Check out Dylan's reading of 'If you want me to, yes.'"

That moment, that "Isis" moment, is included in the Scorsese documentary. (And in the just released 14-CD 148-track The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings.) It was recorded in Montreal on Dec. 4, 1975. In it Dylan, his eyes blazing through his white-face make-up (not inspired by KISS), dispenses with his usual conciliatory approach to the song, instead spitting the lyrics out hot and venomous as the band rhythmically jerks and Rivera's violin swirls and spins like Scheherazade:

She said, where ya been,

I said, no place special

She said, you look different

I said, well I guess

She said, you been gone

I said, that's only natural

She said, you gonna stay

I said, if you want

you me -- YES!

Bob Dylan in a scene from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story," directed by Martin Scorsese, on Netflix.
(Courtesy Netflix/AP)
Bob Dylan in a scene from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story," directed by Martin Scorsese, on Netflix. (Courtesy Netflix/AP)

That devastating assent echoes the Molly Bloom soliloquy that concludes James Joyce's Ulysses. ("... and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")

It's one of those moments, like the secret chord ringing at the beginning of "A Hard Day's Night," or Pete Townshend violently deconstructing a Telecaster, that transcends pop music.

"That was about it for me," Burnett writes. "That 'yes' encapsulated all of it. The joy, the shock, the anger, the lust, the mirth, the bewilderment, the almost derangement of the whole ride."

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 06/23/2019

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