Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (22 page)

Dylan had met Rubin Carter again on 7 December and performed at the Correctional Institution for Women – confusingly, men were held there too – in Clinton, New Jersey, where the boxer was then an inmate. It had been a strange affair, afflicted with what Larry Sloman would describe, inimitably if unhelpfully, as ‘a strange vibe’. The band had played, Ginsberg had recited, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez had been followed – to the delight of the otherwise unimpressed inmates, who gave her a standing ovation – by the soul and R&B singer Roberta Flack. ‘Hurricane’ had then been given one of its final performances for the benefit of the TV news cameras. A press conference had followed in which, as so often, Carter had made his case with eloquence and passion. For all that, there had been a sense of artifice, even of something a little phoney, about the affair. It was a sense best captured, ironically enough, by an infamous photo opportunity staged for
People
magazine.

The Clinton prison was no maximum-security installation: Rubin was no longer being treated in that manner. The joint had no bars to speak of, no gloomy, echoing cell blocks. A scene was therefore contrived between Dylan and Carter involving a floor-to-ceiling gate normally used simply to close a hallway. The prisoner was placed on one side, his would-be liberator on the other. The photograph acquired was a fake, in other words, and the ‘bars’ an implausible prop. The magazine would nevertheless run the image across two pages late in December. Why did Dylan go along with the stunt? Presumably because he thought it might do Carter’s cause some good. Did that, too, count as hypocrisy?

The ‘Night of the Hurricane’ was advertised just over a week before the event. Tickets, said the ad in the
Times
Sunday ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, were to be sold only through the Garden box office. As a consequence, thousands of fans had queued through the small hours for a pair of the 14,000 available seats. On Monday night these faithful souls would see Dylan appear, as he had appeared throughout the tour, in a hat resembling a pale fedora that was decked, as usual, with flowers. The crowd would wonder, as other crowds had wondered, what the white face paint signified. They would hear a telephone call from Rubin Carter relayed through the hall’s public-address system. They would be treated to several unnecessary speeches and in turn treat Muhammad Ali, once again heavyweight champion of the world, to the unprecedented experience of being booed to the rafters for his attempt to turn Hurricane’s night into a lame pitch for a no-hope Tennessee politician. Above all, mercifully, the audience at the Garden would hear the artist at something close to his best.

Dylan had been reluctant to bring his show to New York. The revue’s premise might have been long lost, but it seems he could sense the reaction he was liable to receive from disdainful
Times
critics and others besides if he turned up at the city’s biggest venue with his gypsy ensemble. George Lois, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who had taken up Rubin Carter’s cause, was obliged to beg the artist – ‘I went up to New Haven and got down on my knees,’ Lois would tell
Rolling Stone
– to act against his better judgement.
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Backstage, there would be a brief moment of hysteria thanks to a rumour, a rumour Dylan would come close to announcing as the truth, that Carter was about to be released. Out front, Robbie Robertson would join the band for ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, the song dedicated mockingly to Albert Grossman, that exorcised ghost of a former manager, ‘who won’t be our next president’. Effortlessly, Dylan would prevent his show from turning into anyone’s political rally. He at least had learned something since the 1960s. If the press or anyone else wanted a truly political point, it would be there in the Rolling Thunder Revue’s customary closing song, Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’.

*

So what had Dylan intended and what, in fact, had he done? A home-grown version of
Les Enfants du Paradis
would be one slightly odd answer. It happens to be true, but the fact does not sit well with the usual descriptions of Rolling Thunder, or the usual dismissals of
Renaldo and Clara
. If nothing else, the director deserved credit for his taste. At a stretch, you could even transpose the film’s central plot situations to the tour – and the movie, and the album – Dylan devised. He had said
something of the sort
to Sam Shepherd, after all. That does nothing to explain the artist’s motives, however, in making these works.

Despite all its contradictions, Rolling Thunder did become a kind of anti-tour by a performer who still seemed to flinch at the self-exposure involved in public appearances. You could say, too, that he was experimenting with form – if a rock and roll tour counts as having form – and trying to see if there was a new way (or a very old way) to reach audiences. He was conducting an audit of his own life and career, very possibly, through all those roles and masks, with some of those who had played their parts in his existence as his cast, with the cameras rolling. Perhaps, equally, he didn’t know quite what the hell he was doing, or what he wanted, but was content to follow his instincts in the hope of finding an answer. That sounds like him. Not for the first time, you remind yourself: no one made him do it. In this phase of his life, nevertheless, a new question became pertinent.

Dylan had won the sort of creative freedom granted to very few: what did he mean to do with it? He had followed his first ambitions ruthlessly and won his prize. Now what? The people demanding his return to active service on the ideological front lines had grown fewer, but the campaign for Hurricane Carter had shown that those shrill types were still around. They had attached the label ‘protest’ to the song written for the fighter almost instantly, while Dylan-Levy had intended, instead, a kind of campaigning journalism. The difference was overlooked. It was tangential, in any case, to art.

Campaigning, even on his own terms, was not an occupation liable to hold the artist’s attention for too long. He might also have begun to wonder whether Rubin Carter, ruthless in his desperation, was not using ‘Bob Dylan’ much as everyone else, given half a chance, had tried to use Bob Dylan. Spiritual kin the two men might have been, but the Hurricane never did show much interest in the music being made on his behalf. During the prison concert, Rubin had paid attention only when the song written in his name was being performed. His favourite Dylan song, the boxer had declared when pressed, was ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. That seemed to be simply because the verses spoke to Hurricane Carter – so he said – about the plight of Hurricane Carter.

For all his comical travails, Larry Sloman was no slouch as a reporter. As he had come away from the press conference at the Clinton prison, he had wondered about the Hurricane’s polished performance for the assembled press. Troubled, Sloman reached what still seems a valid conclusion. Carter was no murderer, the journalist thought, but ‘he sure as hell might be a damn good con artist’.
³⁵
Given the distance he would put between himself and Rubin’s case in the year ahead, when the campaign to have the boxer freed was a long way from over, Dylan might well have been inching towards a conclusion similar to that reached by Ratso. At the very least, a few second thoughts were very probably in order. Carter was fighting for his life but doing so with the guile of one who understood how to gain and keep the sympathy of nature’s liberals. He was not culpable on that account, necessarily, but the sight of Rubin working a room full of journalists could make a person uneasy. Patently, for whatever reason, the artist’s devotion to the cause was ebbing. Within less than two months ‘Hurricane’ would receive its final performance.

So what was Dylan’s role to be, if any, in his field of art and within his industry? What was his choice? Things had changed; America had changed. Spokespersons on behalf of generations were falling out of fashion as the last of the counter-culture disappeared into squalor while cocaine and smack became the seductive and unforgiving drugs of choice. It was a poor exchange, whatever Dylan thought about the politics and political movements of the ’60s. To that extent, at least, there was probably something in the claim that Rolling Thunder was a last hurrah for the spirit of Greenwich Village. The artist’s great knack had been to make startlingly new music from the sense of old times and other places.

Blood on the Tracks
had demonstrated his continuing artistic potency.
Desire
would prove to the world that he was still capable of surprising changes of direction. By the mid-’70s, nevertheless, a simple fact of life had to be addressed: he and his audience, his first audience at any rate, were so much older than before. As a generation, they were no longer being swept along by the old sense of infinite, unstoppable change, by the unexamined ’60s belief that just about anything was possible. There was disillusionment, damage, cynicism amid the retreat into all those New Age fairy tales. America’s 1976 Bicentennial, advertised as a moment of national reaffirmation and renewal, would meanwhile be the briefest respite from a nagging sense of foreboding. Perhaps Vietnam had done more damage to the country’s once invincible optimism, its formerly incurable faith in American exceptionalism, than anyone truly realised. Before long, the question would become commonplace: had the republic’s best and most potent years come and gone?

For Dylan, weary for so long with grand statements about his life and his songs, there were the usual strange parallels. They could have said much the same things about him. That had a lot to do with his origins and his age, of course, born in the middle of the country and growing up in the middle of the American century. But the arc of his career, rising amid the great national prosperity and seeming to fall away as national optimism fell away, as the promise of the ’60s fell away, as the great upsurge of rock and roll fell away, seemed to trace the graph exactly. Nothing so pessimistic was said when
Desire
was perched at the top of the album charts, of course, but it would be said before too long. Soon they would begin to say that Bob Dylan’s best years, the years of effortless creativity, were behind him, long lost and gone forever.

*

So what was the Rolling Thunder Revue in its best and brightest moments? In January 1976, back in London, Yorkshire-born Mick Ronson gave as good an account as any of the ties that had bound the first of the tours together. The guitarist also said something important, by his lights, about the nature of Dylan’s art. Even in Ronson’s inextinguishable Hull accent, it counted as a testament of faith.

With Bob, you just know. If there was something he was looking for in a song, you’d try to find it without being told. And that’s the thing about Dylan. I’d follow him anywhere, no questions asked. That whole tour was this huge, huge adventure. A real treasure hunt. There was Joan Baez. McGuinn. Ginsberg – he’s a grand lad, is Allen. There was Dylan. And there I was, too. For a lad from Yorkshire like meself, it were truly out of this world … There’ll be nowt like it again. Fookin’ nowt.
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*

There was one thing more, a casual statement that soon enough would sound like a presentiment. Back in October, interrogated by
People
magazine, the artist had been taxed as usual on the subject of ‘the Bob Dylan myth’. He had been as evasive as ever. He had never learned to enjoy this line of questioning. Finally, however, he came up with an answer. The myth of ‘Bob Dylan’? ‘It was given to me – by God.’
³⁷

DESIRE
WAS RELEASED ON 16 JANUARY 1976 AND HELD BY MOST CRITICS
and fans to be a triumph. A second concert was staged for the benefit of Rubin Carter on the 25th at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and derided as a shambles. ‘Hurricane’ was performed publicly for the last time at that badly organised and thinly attended show. Dylan had surely done all that he could with the song, with bohemian vaudeville and with the Rolling Thunder Revue. Outbreaks of press cynicism towards certain of his alleged superstar pretensions aside, responses to the tour had otherwise been gratifying. The artist should have quit while he was ahead.

There were some decent arguments urging him onwards. Only one part of America, far less the world, had been granted the chance to witness the latest ‘new Dylan’ at work. Given the media attention afforded to Rolling Thunder, there was, presumably, a demand waiting to be met. Equally, the ad hoc nature of the tour in the autumn and winter, not to mention the impossible financial strain involved in adding two film crews to the payroll, had left a big hole somewhere between gross and net. A lot of money had been made, but a lot had been spent. In January of 1978, the
Los Angeles Times
would put the cost of
Renaldo and Clara
at $1.25 million.
¹
There were sound economic reasons, therefore, for mounting a spring campaign. In Dylan’s specialised line of work, those have rarely proved to be the best reasons.

Desire
was a big hit, however. Soon enough it was the artist’s third number-one record of the decade. That should have been the main thing. However much the 105 to 110 hours of film stock expended on the
Renaldo and Clara
project had cost him, Dylan was not about to go broke with an album sitting at the top of the charts.
Desire
had also been accepted, almost instantly, as an appropriate follow-up to
Blood on the Tracks
. This might seem to show that the wisdom of crowds is overrated, but critics and record buyers probably had a point. Dylan could easily have painted himself into a tight corner with his masterpiece. Hiring Jacques Levy might therefore have been something more than a caprice.

If Dylan had intended consciously to put
Blood
behind him, what was supposed to follow? If Levy’s claims can be taken at face value – and Dylan has seemed to confirm certain of them – the collaborator certainly nudged the artist in the direction of structured narrative, fictional and documentary. Left to his own devices, Dylan would not repeat the experiment, but in 1975–6 it served his purpose. Besides, as Gertrude Stein, recipient of a couple of enigmatic dedications during the autumn tour, would probably not have said, a hit is a hit is a hit.