Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (8 page)

Robertson, for his part, sounded disingenuous when he got around to attempting to explain how
The Basement Tapes
came to be released. He failed even to offer a convincing explanation for his own motives. Interviewed by
Crawdaddy
magazine for its March 1976 edition, the guitarist was certain only that the legal version of the basement recordings had not been produced to ‘combat’ the tenacious bootleggers. Robertson said:

All of a sudden it seemed like a good idea. I can’t tell you why or anything. It just popped up one day. We thought we’d see what we had. I started going through the stuff and sorting it out, trying to make it stand up for a record that wasn’t recorded professionally. I also tried to include some things that people haven’t heard before, if possible … I just wanted to document a period rather than let them rot away on the shelves somewhere. It was an unusual time which caused all those songs to be written and it was better it be put on disc some way than be lost in an attic.

It was one thing to refuse to look back, but Dylan had a large blind spot where this part of his work was concerned. Several of the songs had provided hits for other artists. A good number had been praised to the skies by the usual critics. Who writes ‘I Shall Be Released’ and acts as though it’s a bagatelle to be rearranged and added, almost as an afterthought, to a makeshift greatest-hits package? In April of 1975, nevertheless, Dylan was still telling Travers that the basement songs were ‘written like in five, ten minutes, you know’ while he and his musicians were ‘drying out’ in their rural retreat. No big deal, then.

If he had been paying more attention, Dylan might have thought twice about some of the choices made by Robertson. After a wave of approbation for
The Basement Tapes
from critics primed for genuflection – the
New York Times
burst a corset and called the set ‘one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music’ – questions were asked. Why had tracks recorded primarily in basic stereo been collapsed into mono if not to give a fake ‘primitive’ patina to the sound? Who thought it clever to add overdubs of drums, keyboards and guitar to several performances on this ‘historic document’? How come one-third of the twenty-four tracks offered were by The Band – who would receive commensurate royalties – when most buyers were interested, first and foremost, in the songwriter of the age? By 14 August,
Rolling Stone
’s gossip column, ‘Random Notes’, was reporting ‘a Columbia insider’ to the effect that Dylan had demanded $1 million for consenting to the album ‘because he wanted to help out The Band, who he reportedly said was [
sic
] having financial problems (denied by a Band spokesman)’. It was soon discovered, in any case, that half of the recordings selected by Robertson to represent his group’s contribution had either not been made in 1967, or had not originated in the improvised studios of Woodstock.

The original basement tapes ran to between 120 and 130 recordings, depending on how false starts, stoned jokes and a handful of allegedly ‘missing’ titles are calculated. These days, after sterling remastering work by the bootleggers, a compendium with 124 takes is easy enough to obtain. Yet, for the sake of The Band, Dylan’s fans were obliged in 1975 to do without ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Sign on the Cross’, ‘Silent Weekend’, ‘All You Have to Do Is Dream’ and even the glorious fun, interruptions and all, of ‘I’m a Fool for You’. That was before anyone mentioned the numerous traditional songs and cover versions attempted in 1967. Dylan’s performances could have filled a couple of fine vinyl double albums easily.

Despite it all, and in defiance of the approbation granted to the work, he gave no sign that he cared. Subsequently he would fail to disguise his contempt when attempts were made to identify those covert, subterranean recordings as the founding artefacts for an ill-defined musical movement known as Americana. He would have no taste whatever for the grand cultural theories piled around the monuments raised to this phase of his career. Something about the circumstances surrounding the Woodstock recordings, or perhaps just the recordings themselves, had left him dissatisfied and defensive.

You can easily believe, of course, that the success of
Blood on the Tracks
could have been enough to persuade Dylan finally to countenance an album based on the tapes. The former gave plenty of cover, commercially and creatively, for the latter. Nevertheless, a simple fact is worth repeating: even in the worst of times, paralysed by writer’s block and self-doubt at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, he had refused to exploit the great songs of 1967 seriously.

His only concession had come in the autumn of 1971, in the depths of his creative drought, when Columbia had proposed the mistitled double-album stopgap
More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits
. Dylan had suggested that one side should contain previously unreleased material, but on this occasion the company had been oblivious to the appeal of ‘the legendary basement tapes’. He had therefore re-recorded three of the 1967 songs in an afternoon and put them on an album that did not contain too many certifiable hits. That had been the limit of his interest.

Few others would have hesitated in lean times to fortify flimsy albums with ‘Too Much of Nothing’ or ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’. Nevertheless, eight years after the fact, with
Blood
fast becoming established as one of his finest achievements, no one was liable to accuse Dylan of desperate measures, or of recycling his own legend. In any case, the bootleg industry and a host of cover versions had already settled the matter. The reviews for
The Basement Tapes
were preordained, if not already written. The only person who seemed to dissent was Bob Dylan.

According to Rob Fraboni, the studio engineer given the job of restoring the original basement recordings, the artist spent next to no time overseeing the work. It was all one to him, it seems, whether the original, spooky stereo sound captured by The Band’s Garth Hudson was rendered into that spurious ‘authentic’ mono at the behest of Robbie Robertson. Above all, Dylan appeared not to care about the songs involved. If ‘copyright issues’ between himself and his estranged manager, Albert Grossman, had ever been at stake, they were no longer relevant by the summer of 1975. Dylan simply refused to take seriously all the praise that had been showered on his compositions. Omit ‘I’m Not There’? Sanction an album that misrepresented the work done at Woodstock and the legends born of that work? As he seemed to say, ‘What of it?’ In a way, he had a point. The legal double album entitled
The Basement Tapes
, since greatly improved by a 2009 remastering exercise, would stand in its own right as a significant event in pop’s small universe.

There is, in any case, rubbish aplenty in the remainder of the mythologised bootleg corpus; enough of it, certainly, to rebut some of the extravagant acclaim and the socio-historical theorising. The Woodstock recordings embrace a fair number of duds and worse. There are numerous tracks to which no serious (or sober) artist would lend his name. Nevertheless, Dylan’s disdain even towards the official release and what it was supposed to represent stands as an early example of the wilful artistic self-harm that would become commonplace in the succeeding decades. But nothing in his world is forever.

After touring South America, Central America and Europe in 2012, Dylan returned to the US in the autumn of the year. At first his concert set seemed to follow the structure that had become familiar to audiences across the world throughout the year. Then, at a casino’s 10,000-seat arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, as though out of nowhere (appropriately enough), Dylan opened with one of his less-favoured songs. Why choose ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, a 45-year-old tune from a body of work he had often disparaged? Only he could say. Before long, however, the song had become one of Dylan’s regular opening numbers. As the tour drew to a close in Brooklyn, New York, at November’s end, there it was again, a piece of the past redeemed.

IN 1975, FOR ALL THAT THE WORLD KNEW, THE SUCCESS OF
Blood on
the Tracks
had replenished Dylan’s self-confidence. Certain of the reviewers had hedged their bets, or grumbled vacuously over ‘production’, but half a million copies of the album had been sold within three weeks of its release. Critics changed their tunes soon enough. By the summer of the year it appeared that Dylan’s old, weird amnesia had been banished for good. Not only had he created a record to surpass
Planet Waves
easily, he had done something inimitably new, once again, with the songwriter’s art.

The cascading popularity of FM radio in the mid-1970s, with its so-called ‘integrity programming’ and its allegiance to ‘album-oriented rock’, was perfectly timed for the newly ‘mature’ artist. The length of a track was no impediment to the free-format AOR stations and the hippy DJs who refused to treat music as the next best thing to ambient noise. Ambitious recordings were no longer being chopped in half routinely, as had been the fate of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, for the sake of airplay. Songs from
Blood on the Tracks
that would never have been granted a hearing as singles by traditional stations – even ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ only made it, just, to 31 in America – were given reverent attention. Each play demonstrated that Dylan was as powerful a writer as he had ever been. Surely he no longer had reason to fear the permanent loss of his creative faculties? He would choose a strange way to prove it.

While the likes of Patti Smith and Bette Midler congregated (and squabbled) at The Other End, while Bobby Neuwirth resumed his duties as courtier and master of ceremonies, Dylan began to wonder what might be made of all the talent that was gathering around him each night. The bass player Rob Stoner came to his attention, as did a teenaged multi-instrumentalist named David Mansfield. Mick Ronson, formerly the guitarist with David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, came to call. Neuwirth was by now using his own club performances as de facto auditions for Dylan. The guitar player Steven Soles was invited along; the Texan who called himself T-Bone Burnett, another guitar player, arrived in town at Neuwirth’s behest for ‘more fun than the law allows’.
¹

Watching Ramblin’ Jack Elliott perform on the first Thursday night in July would even prompt Dylan to give the dutifully awestruck club crowd a fine performance of an entirely new song called ‘Abandoned Love’. Known for long enough as ‘St John the Evangelist’ thanks to a verse that the writer, typically, would later discard, the remarkable piece – in this performance, at any rate – would do Ramblin’ Jack’s own set no favours. As ever, that amiable man would raise no objections. Soon enough, under the guise of guest appearances during performances by Neuwirth, the artist was performing regularly.

Patti Smith, with whom he developed an affinity and a friendship in this period, had only just begun to complete the long transition from fringe performance poet to bandleader. She had yet to release an album when Dylan saw her perform her own ‘Redondo Beach’, a soon to be famous version of Them’s ‘Gloria’, and the old Stones hit ‘Time Is On My Side’ at the end of June. He was taken with Smith in large part because of her honesty, her humour and her utter fearlessness as a performer. Though she would decline an invitation to sign up as cabin boy on Dylan’s next voyage, she was given a better insight into his thinking than most of his old New York friends and colleagues. A 1975 feature in the short-lived
New Times
captured a moment: ‘She and Bob Dylan sit at the top of tile stairs at a hush-hush Greenwich Village party, trading whispers like two schoolboys.’ Smith would recall the conversation. Dylan ‘had been in hiding for so long’, she would tell Barry Miles in 1977.

And he was working out this Rolling Thunder thing – he was thinking about improvisation, about extending himself language-wise. In the talks that we had there was something that he admired about me that was difficult to comprehend then, but that’s what we were talking about. That’s what we were talking about on the stairway …
²

‘This Rolling Thunder thing’, when it came to fruition at the end of October, would involve transporting the human contents of an idealised Greenwich Village club around the small towns, colleges, theatres and arenas of the Eastern Seaboard. It would attempt to rekindle the bohemian fantasy that had been the young Dylan’s first inspiration. Rolling Thunder would assert an idea of what music and performance were
for
in a straightforward rejection of everything the imperial progress of Tour ’74 had come to represent. It would be, in one sense, a last attempt to expose the figure of ‘Bob Dylan’ to scrutiny by the man who bore the name.

The 31 shows in Rolling Thunder’s first incarnation would amount to a kind of erratic developing essay on identity, on disguises, on human contact. The concerts would also be, by turns, pretentious, acute, self-indulgent and enthralling. Rolling Thunder would become a piece of theatre, a radical artistic gesture, a travelling circus, a movable movie set, a gypsy caravan and the realisation, intermittently, of a superstar’s old dream of creative emancipation. That was the general idea, at any rate.

Perhaps Dylan could just hit the road with a bunch of friends and allies, roll from town to town, play wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and be free at last of the entertainment industry’s assumptions and diktats. There was only one way to find out. Strangely enough, the artist who had scorned the counter-culture and all its otiose free-form rhetoric was about to launch an enterprise that seemed, at least in its first phase, to be the culmination of every misty-eyed ’60s hope. Romantic chatter, from participants and the media, would hang over the tour like a cloud of peculiarly fragrant smoke.

As Joan Baez later informed
Rolling Stone
’s dogged reporting team, the Rolling Thunder thing would be an ‘offbeat, underground, weird medicine show’. Roger McGuinn, formerly of the Byrds and also along for the ride, would contribute the inspired opinion that ‘this tour is like better than tripping out’. The poet and Dylan votary Allen Ginsberg, never knowingly undersold as a snake-oil salesman for blind optimism, would proclaim on behalf of the 100-strong expeditionary force that ‘We have, once again, embarked on a voyage to reclaim America’.
³
First, in a gesture that counts as typically perverse, the artist found himself a writing partner.