According to a recent story in the Old Colony Memorial (my journalistic alma mater) the 'business plan' for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour was to promote the release of the now third or fourth incarnation superstar's new album
"Desire." In a piece of local history insufficiently celebrated, a rarity for Plymouth, Dylan chose to perform the tour's first concerts in the town's Memorial Hall, an aging and semi-dilapidated World War I era auditorium, on Oct. 30 and 31.
According to the newspaper story, also published in the Patriot Ledger, tour promoters rented an oceanfront home (for a visiting 'celebrity') and engaged the services of a housekeeper-cook.
But Dylan was a reclusive vegan. He stayed in the tour van and didn't eat the food cooked for him. According to the story's sources, Dylan was
"fond of the area," Plymouth and Cape Cod.
Dylan and his band -- a smaller number than the large and divers entourage that would join the tour in the succeeding months -- rehearsed in Sea
Crest Motel in Falmouth, surprising that establishment's regular Bingo session.
And, perhaps best of all for the local market, the paper found a photo of Dylan leaning on round support column at Plymouth
Rock.
The Rolling Thunder tour is the subject of feature-length documentary by Martin Scorsese -- that debuted earlier this summer on Netflix. Which, in my humble opinion, is currently the best thing on Netflix or any
screen anywhere. If you're not old enough to have experienced the letdown of the 70s after the wild, norms-smashing promises of the 60s when the times truly were changing, it's hard to appreciate the
tour's premise. So, for context, in the mid-70s New York City was bankrupt and cities were everywhere failing. Crime was up, and a criminal was
President -- oh, maybe today's audiences can understand that.
When the Rolling Thunder
Revue opened -- what today would be called a 'soft' opening in a hall in Plymouth -- the documentary (full title: "Rolling Thunder
Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese") shows a guy on
Court Street being handed a leaflet about the concert and asking in a puzzled voice, "Why does he want to
come to a little place like this?"
The film also has a brief clip of Dylan and companions visiting the then-tourist attraction Wax Museum and contemplating a wax JFK. A wax LBJ.
Plymouth was the sticks back then; it's
practically a metropolis today. America's big cities have rebounded considerably as well;
that's where the money lives now. America and the pre-digital world were
part of a different universe a half century ago. And into that empty space
between then and now, a unique strain of artistic genius could find a space to imagine a way
on. I'm sorry I missed being in the seats for one of the tour's many live,
small-theater performances. (I was living in Cambridge then.) But Martin Scorsese's magnificent documentary makes
the thunder of the mind roll on again.
Some enduring impressions: Dylan wearing hat with an opulent flower, a dandyish fashion from who knows when, and singing "Hey Mister Tambourine
Man." The film cuts away to a clip of Richard Nixon, his blast-from-the-past deep voice celebrating the promise of the 'American dream' as the theme for the bicentennial. Would that dream, perhaps, consist of ending the War in Vietnam?...
Dylan talking about why he invited the playwright and novelist Sam Shepard to travel with the ever-expanding revue tour. Shepard "brought a knowledge of
the underworld," he says. "He communed with the dead."
An older Dylan expressing the need for a 'new' birth of hope in America, offering, for example,"people lost a sense of connection. Two people tried to shoot the President
in one month."
Wow. I didn't know he cared.
Allen Ginsberg, an immortal voice of his generation, explaining the impulse for the tour's unorthodox collection of voices, performers, and hangers-on: "to show how beautiful we can be [as a country] by showing how beautiful we are."
(A statement that NY Times reviewer Manohla Dargis misquoted as "showing how beautiful he [Dylan] is...," in order to belittle both Dylan and Ginsberg. It a good think neither Dylan nor the filmmakers are litigious.)
A more contemporary Dylan (interviewed for the Scorsese's film) reveals his literary knowledge in quoting Ginsberg's famous line from Howl: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by drugs..."
In another cut from the contemporary interview, an aged Dylan reveals a grouchy old man persona when asked about the inspiration for the Rolling Thunder tour:
"I
don't remember a thing about the Rolling Thunder tour. .. It was 40 years ago.
I wasn't even born then."
Which is to say, quite truly, that he was a different person back then in his thirties. We all were.
Because on the screen we see Dylan prancing on stage in white face paint singing "to dance beneath the diamond sky..."
The thing is, as perceptive students of Dylan's Nobel-winning career have pointed out, his singing and stage performances captured by film of the tour were never better. Wholly committed, passionate, loose-bodied, comfortable in his skin (at least on stage), exhibiting a willingness to interact with the audience that his younger, pricklier self never showed.
Dylan -- an older Dylan in the Scorsese interviewers --
offering the interviewer the film's money quote: "Life
isn't about finding yourself... Life is about creating yourself."
We see this self-creation in action.
Dylan on stage performing, singing duets, exchanging leads with band members, among them the incredibly well-suited electric fiddle player Scarlet Rivera, a name that was unfamiliar to me. Her presence provides a link to the face paint that Dylan, and some others wore, on stage. Rivera sometimes played with the early 70s rock act Kiss, who impressed me as too atrociously one-dimensional to listen to. But Kiss members grease-painted and dressed like clowns on stage.
Dylan face-painted in the tradition of the commedia dell'arte, those traveling players with roots in the Middle Ages, who served as a precedent and philosophical anchor for his Rolling Thunder traveling 'revu' -- never simply a headliner plus openers -- and his determined preference for smaller halls. Not a stadium tour.
The audience was close; it was in his face.
And what they saw on Dylan's face was a mask. Leading to this wonderfully apt quote, again from the current-day interview: "When somebody’s
wearing a mask, he’s going to tell the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask,
it’s highly unlikely.”
Dylan of course never wears a mask in his often visibly reluctant interviews. Or, perhaps, those masks are invisible.
Rivera's contribution figures heavily in performances with Dylan of songs I never fully appreciated, including "One More Coffee for the Road" and "Isis."
Baez, interviewed for the 1975-76 tour film that provides images for Scorsese's new film, recalls her touring with Dylan in the 60s. She recalls the hotel room where he wrote "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."
The film also includes strong stage performances by other major voices of the time.
The energy is catching Joni Mitchell sings her song "Coyote." In the film
Roger McGuinn says that she wrote the song "about this tour and on this
tour and for this tour.”
Joan Baez duets with Dylan, who is seen in a tour-time interview responding to a question this way: "Joan Baez and me, we can sing any song."
And in fact, better than in any other filmed performance, the film shows what a great singer Dylan is. Not just a guy with a weird voice and an attitude. And what a great musician. The trick is not just writing the lyrics. It's finding the music that turns them into magic, lights their fire.
And then the stage performance that sells them.
His lyric says: "your loyalty is not for me, but to the stars above." Who else has written that?
And when you hear the line sung, chills go through you.
On stage in Rolling Thunder, Dylan sings at a fast pace, at times in the topical songs with a barely contained rage that goes off in you mind like an extended explosion. He knows you know a a song such as "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and where it's going, so instead of the coldly ironic build-up to the devastating conclusion, he screams the song out like a horrified witness statement.
Barely contained passion -- matching the blunt anger of the lyrics -- also characterizes of the later 'protest' ballad "Hurricane," another tale of unspeakable injustice committed against someone guilty of breathing while black.
Other interviewees comment on Dylan's "energy" both on and off stage. The energy was "rolling thunder."
He was remaking himself, just as he remakes the songs in these performances.
He knew how to do it. He had done it before. He would do it again.
If you've ever had any interest in one of the major artists of our time, you have to see this film.
