On the Road with Bob Dylan (10 page)

An audience was forming in the hall, as Ramblin’ Jack strolled in to look over some Polaroids, Scarlett was wandering around in black fedora, T-shirt, and black vest, and Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, a New York poet, took seats near the side. Dylan and Baez were dueting on “Tears of Rage,” Baez with the lyric book open in her lap, but even that didn’t help as Dylan playfully changed the lyrics. Baez looked askance at him. “Don’t worry,” Dylan chuckled, “I’ll tell ya later,” and he went on, Baez holding back, then leering at Regan who was shooting her holding her nose. “Print that one, huh, Ken.” Neuwirth and Blakley walked in, Neuwirth looking collegiate in vest sweater and tennis shoes, while Blakley was L.A. bohemian in a multicolored smock, loose black pants, and beret.

Meanwhile, Dylan continued his improvisation, “I want you to know just before you go running off for something that was done to you, I myself thought it was the only thing for you to do,” and Baez chimed in on the chorus. But the song just petered out and Joan looked perturbed. “Do you wanna figure out an ending or is that it?” she asked Dylan. Dylan frowned. “Aw, let someone else figure it out, I’ll just forget it.” He was desperate for a smoke and within seconds a cigarette was rushed up, just as, earlier, some juice instantly appeared when he pointed toward the container.

While the songwriter took a breather, Baez was busy leafing through the Dylan songbook. She looked up brightly. “‘Times they are changing,’ we should do that one, give the people their
money’s worth.” So Dylan and she broke into the old protest classic, but Baez, frolicsome, played with the words and delivered a mock sermonette, “Beware the water that runs into the sea, accept it or soon you’ll be just like me.” Dylan looked at her a bit incredulously, and they tentatively started into “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” another old Dylan ballad. But they weren’t clicking. Baez was awkwardly trying to follow Dylan’s erratic phrasing, looking more and more frustrated.

“You don’t want to smoke that,” Baez frowned maternally, and plucked the cigarette out of Dylan’s lips and crushed it on the floor. She returned to leafing through the songbook, throwing out suggestion after suggestion. “How about ‘If Not For You’?” No response from Dylan. “I wanna try ‘Wheels on Fire,’” Dylan blurted out and started strumming, while Baez continued to peruse the book. Stoner started into a rockabilly tune, and Peter Orlovsky began bouncing behind Ginsberg, his long ponytail flailing in the air like a pennant. Dylan joined in on the rocker and Stoner screamed to him, “We don’t have too many rockers.”

Baez meanwhile found it. “Let’s do ‘Hattie Carroll.’” Dylan’s eyes lit up. “Sure, yeah, that one,” and he started a slow strum. All activity stopped in the room. Even the roadies stopped to listen as Baez punctuated Dylan’s emotional singing with some funereal scat singing and a few blasts of hand trumpet.

Dylan immediately broke into a new version of “If You See Her Say Hello,” and Ronson, who was sitting on the lip of the stage, looking like a lost sheepdog with his blond shag hairdo, grabbed a guitar. Mansfield, who had played mandolin on “Hattie Carroll,” switched over to steel guitar, as Dylan spat out the new words, “If she passes through this way most likely I’d be gone, But if I’m not don’t tell her so, just let her pass on,” turning the mournful lost-love ballad into a revenge song.

The song spurted to an end, and Dylan seemed pleased. Imhoff, who had been watching from the corner, scurried over to me at the break. “Don’t you know the worst thing you can do is write while
an artist is performing?” he chided. Ginsberg meanwhile was screaming up at Dylan from his seat. “Do the princess and the prince discuss,” a reference to “Gates of Eden.” Dylan looked gently down at him, “We can’t do everything, Allen!”

“Isis” came off impressively and then Wyeth got a phone call and a break was called. Dylan took advantage of it by jumping off the stage and striding to the back of the room. He couldn’t sit still, though. In a few minutes, Wyeth returned and they started into “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” Neuwirth and Dylan sharing the lead vocal, bouncing the song along with an infectious good-timey beat. Everyone in the audience was hopping around, Ginsberg and Orlovsky, like little kids, pulled their chairs closer to the stage, eyes glued to the performers.

“They just did it!” Ginsberg yelled back at me. “That sounds so good, I’ve never heard Dylan sing so powerful before. He sounds like an emperor of sound.” Ginsberg turned back to the stage, then swiftly leaned to me again. “He had the authority of an emperor of sound.”

The band churned on, plowing into a speeded-up version of “She Belongs to Me.” Onstage, Neuwirth was cutting up, giving Dylan a sly look on the line, “salute her when her birthday comes,” then suggesting that “For Christmas, buy her a whip.” Ginsberg was enthralled, amazed at how Dylan had managed to breathe new life into these old standards. “He can’t remember them, it’s like they were somebody else’s songs,” he told me incredulously, “he’s completely egoless.” We turned back to watch Dylan and Neuwirth cavorting together on the stage. “Look at them sharing humor and playfulness,” Ginsberg pointed out professionally. “It’s great, both Dylan and Neuwirth seem to understand the music in a marvelously sympathetic way, like a bunch of genius kids playing someone else’s songs. It’s amazing, the precision of his rhythm and the precision of the way he pronounces the syllables.”

Allen rushed up and took a front-row seat, his eyes scanning the assemblage onstage. “Look at Mansfield,” he pointed to the cherubic
multitalented player, “he has the face of a Botticelli angel, a Florentine princeling.” Onstage, they rolled into “Hard Rain,” rocking new life into the once-somber folksong. Ginsberg was almost beside himself, singing along, stamping his foot, slapping his thighs. “It’s more like he’s actually pronouncing the words,” Ginsberg shouted. “The electric-made rhythm is exact to actual American speech with no romantic distortion. It syncopates even more.” Dylan was boogying, bouncing around on one foot, as Allen moved his chair even closer, almost to the lip of the stage. “The song has become a dance of joy!” he screamed over the din.

They ground to an end and an emissary from Kemp came over to me. “Louie wants to see you,” he whispered and we moved out to the hall. Kemp was standing there, looking like a model of parental authority. “You’ve had enough; you’ll OD. Go home and write your story.” I protested, but to no avail.

Later that night, I wandered over to the Gramercy Hotel to see McGuinn and walked in on an impromptu party for Steve Soles in the bar. It was Soles’ twenty-fifth birthday, and Thunderers Blakley, Elliot, and Ronson were sitting around a table, swapping stories. A crew-cutted Lou Reed walked by, accompanied by a dark androgynous companion named Rachel. Reed, who had worked with Ronson on his
Transformer
LP, joined the table and began talking about gore photos. Jack Elliot started to pick out a lazy country tune. “I want to learn the electric geetar,” he drawled. “I’m tired of Jerry Garcia picking circles around me ’cause he’s got twelve million dollars.” Jack got interrupted by a call, then moseyed back to the crowd. “Telephone and eating food,” he mused, shaking his head, “two dirty New York habits.”

Reed, clearly out of his element among these folkies, tried to cajole Ronson into splitting for a loft around the corner. But Ronson was too settled and after a few more entreaties Reed gave up, a look of disgust crossing his world-weary face. “C’mon,” he signaled to Rachel, “let’s split, this is slumming.” By now, some more tour members had filtered into the now-closed bar, and were frantically
devising a way to break the lock off the liquor cabinet. Dylan walked in and we struck up a conversation, a conversation that lasted about a minute, until Kemp spotted us. Louie charged over, motioning me away. “C’mon, give him room, man.” I retreated to the company of those that don’t need protection.

By now, someone had located the owner’s son, and he authorized the impending destruction of the liquor cabinet’s lock. Bowden, McGuinn’s bear of a guitar player, vaulted the bar and hunched over the cabinet like an expert safe man. The lock was maddeningly resistant so Bowden simply ripped the entire cabinet door off its hinges and the thirsty crowd cheered. Chesley Milliken, Ramblin’ Jack’s road manager, and the scion of the Gramercy, served as impromptu bartenders, and Dylan ordered five Remys. “That’ll be ten dollars for the five brandies,” the owner’s son said straight-faced. “He’s charging for these fucking drinks,” Ronson muttered, but the scion stood firm: “Look, that’s not bar prices, it’s a substantial discount.” It’s clear the Gramercy will be in good hands.

Dylan retreated to a far corner of the bar, loosening up with the Remys, the omnipresent Kemp never more than one or two bodies away. Chesley, who had been serving up those brandies, leaned over toward Dylan. “Why’d you call this thing ‘Rolling Thunder,’ man?” he queried. Dylan focused in on him, thought for a minute, then leaned conspiratorially over the bar. “I was just sitting outside my house one day,” he finally replied, “thinking about a name for this tour, when all of a sudden, I looked into the sky and I heard a
boom!
” Dylan’s black-leather-jacketed arm sprung into the air, delivering synchronized punches to his narrative. “Then,
boom, boom, boom, boom
, rolling from west to east. So I figured that that should be the name.” He leaned back, with a sly grin on his face. “You know what Rolling Thunder means to the Indians?” questioned Chesley, something of an authority on Indian lore. “No. What?” Dylan snapped back. “Speaking truth,” Chesley smiled. Silence. Dylan shifted his hat and rocked back on his barstool. “Well, well. I’m glad to hear that man, I’m real glad to hear that.”

T
he buses took off promptly the next morning with their bleary-eyed passengers. But the camper was long gone, Dylan so excited about the tour that he had pulled out from the Gramercy before dawn. Up in Massachusetts, the troupe sequestered itself at the Sea Crest Motel, a lush, rambling resort in North Falmouth, about a half-hour’s drive from the first gigs in Plymouth. For the musicians, it was a chance to lounge a few days and get some additional rehearsal in, in a relaxed setting. The tennis courts were converted to an outdoor rehearsal hall and the only distractions were some nice Jewish mommas lodged at the Sea Crest for their annual Mah-Jongg convention.

It was such a relaxed setting that one night, Bob and Joan decided to hang out with those old ladies, dropping in on one of their meetings and doing a short set, a couple of nice acoustic ballads. Of course, they brought the film crew with them.

I hadn’t planned to leave the city until Wednesday night in order to have a chance to straighten out final domestic details, rent a car, get a letter of authorization from
Rolling Stone
, and pack. And to call Kinky Friedman down in Rio Duckworth, Texas, and get the lyrics to “Ride ’Em Jewboy” for Dylan.

Kinky is the original Texas Jewboy, the first member of his religious persuasion to opt for country music stardom, if you don’t count Stringbean, who was a closet Jew. Actually he’s sort of the Groucho Marx of music, sporting a Menorah-emblazoned silk cowboy shirt, a cross between a ten-gallon cowboy hat and a Jewish-old-man fedora riding snugly atop his mossy hair, and those long ceegars dangling unlit from his lower lip. He sports
chaps onstage and his guitar has a long fuzzy aqua fur strap. The sound is distinctly country, the patter decidedly crude, punctuated by burps and frequent ethnic slurs (“We’ve been about as busy as a set of jumper cables at a nigger funeral.”) But the songs are brilliant, sensitive, and finely crafted jewels. Perhaps the most stunning is “Ride ’Em Jewboy,” the only rock song written about the Holocaust, a touching treatment that belies the sensationalistic title.

It was about noon, Texas time, when I called Kinky and after a few rings a fuzzy sleep-edged voice blurted out, “Hello, what be thy name?” I identified myself and Kinky jarred himself awake. “Hey hoss,” he chuckled, “how you doing in your New York area, boy-chick.” We exchanged a few amenities and I mentioned the business at hand, the lyrics to “Ride ’Em Jewboy.”

“OK it starts with ‘Ride’ …” Kinky began.

“No, start with the recitation you’d do.”

“I never do that anymore.”

“I don’t care, that was the most moving part.”

“OK it went, ‘Father,’ it was huh?, ‘Father, let our blessing touch us and remain, guiding all our actions, till we meet again. Unto all thy children here and everywhere, Father give us comfort of thy loving care.’ Then I go into the yodel, eeehhheeeiiii, just yodeling, OK, then into Ridddddeee … ride ’Em jewboy ride ’Em all around the old corral