Bob Dylan’s Eyes
The films by or about Bob Dylan are every bit as strange,
unique, intimate & evasive, as he is and Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan
Story, streaming now on Netflix, is no exception, blending documentary footage Dylan had
taken during the famous 1974-6 tour with more than a few fictional add-ons from
the likes of Sharon Stone, Kipper Kid Martin von Haselberg, and studio exec
(just not that studio nor that exec) Jim Gianapolus. But as
somebody who has been listening to, close-reading and watching the troubadour of
Hibbing for at least 57 years, the real stars of this paradocumentary are Bob Dylan’s
eyes. They are luminous, blue and often (in the faux Noh white paint that turns
up pretty much everywhere on Dylan, violinist Scarlet Rivera, and even for a
bit Joan Baez, during the tour) green.[i]
Most importantly, they are searching, making contact, commenting on the action
we see and the inner workings behind the mask that are not given to us during
the two-hour, twenty minutes of the film.
In 1974, Bob Dylan had largely been off the road for the previous
eight years following a motorcycle accident before returning to do a series of
stadium and arena-sized shows with The Band, the legendary backup quintet once
known as Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks. During the interim, Dylan and the Band had
been down in the basement making some glorious music, the group had
become nearly as famous as their front man, and the stadium shows reflected
this with alternating sets. It was a format that had become standard in the
post-Woodstock era, one that lives on today all over the globe, from Coachella
to K-Pop[ii].
But it is also the form that drove the Beatles into retirement from live
performance in 1967 and its fundamental inhumanness is its basic truth. Rolling Thunder Review repeatedly
returns to the fact that the smaller venues Dylan chose for the three-year
traveling carnival he had created to succeed the gigs with the band ensured
that it would never succeed financially.
But touring is an essential economic truth in the music
business, where record companies were sucking up vast portions of any performer’s
earnings long before the rise of the net and the cloud put control of the
product into serious doubt. After a five-year touring career in the early 1960s
and a six-month return before screaming masses of adoring ants, Dylan was
searching for something different. Rolling Thunder was the result.
With the stadium shows, Dylan had begun rolling out his new strategy
of reworking some of his standards, often quite dramatically, and the Rolling
Thunder performances show Dylan’s passion for these new versions of what had already
become familiar classics as well as more recent fare from the records released
during the eight years away from touring. But what is really most notable are
Dylan’s facial expressions, his directness with the audience, eyes rolling when
Baez transposes a phrase, eyebrows arching, registering emotion. It’s not just
that Dylan is having fun, although how often
have you seen him acknowledge that,
but that he’s communicating and collaborating with his expressions in ways
I had not seen during his folk and earlier rock periods and never in the course of his Never-Ending
Tour that has gone on now for over 31 years.[iii]
Like, say, Miles Davis (a performer whom at times reminds me of Dylan in his
obsessional focus on the piece at hand), who seldom if ever interacted with
audiences, Dylan often feels onstage is if he were alone with his band. Not so
in these performances.
Which is what gives these shows & this film an intensity
Dylan seldom approaches elsewhere.
Rolling Thunder was also Dylan’s attempt to create an
alternative to the isolating realities of fame and travel that can bedevil musicians.
Anyone who has seen Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley arriving for a concert with some
backup band he has never met, let alone with whom he has practiced, or heard
the exhaustion in the voice of a solo artist like Eric Andersen (who has a bit
role in this film), or who can count the number of musicians who have died on
the road, will sympathize. Dylan’s idea was to put together a small community
of first-rate artists and take them all along for the ride. While the film
returns repeatedly to the figure of the carnival, it’s really the pilgrimages
of, say, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that
echo most loudly here. The film’s second billing goes to Allen Ginsberg,
labeled in the credits as (Dylan’s phrase) the Oracle of Delphi, who begins the
tour as a central obsession for Dylan (“absolutely not a father figure” Bob
insists as Ginsberg leads him to the grave of Jack Kerouac, footage everyone
has seen before but given new poignancy by the context offered here ) but
concludes it sharing roadie duties with Peter Orlovsky. Others in the mix
include Patti Smith, Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Roger McGuinn and Joni
Mitchell. Oddly missing from the interviews are most of the musicians who back
Dylan up, particularly Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s close friend who served as the
functional producer of much that ensued musically on the tour and who proves a reasonable
successor to the great lead guitarists Dylan has had going back to the late
Mike Bloomfield.
If the tour was, as everyone insists – from Gianapolus as
producer to the jowly Dylan of just last year – a failure, it wasn’t
financially[iv]
so much as socially. The dynamics of the road are relentless – Baez, Dylan’s
ex-lover from the sixties quits the tour & her absence as a grounding is
noticeable[v].
What does it mean to have a roving commune in a world so hungry for roots? You
can run away to join the circus, but the circus itself turns out to be a very
circumscribed home. The commune movement, from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters
forward, was as much a seventies’ phenomenon as a holdover from the sixties,
and as the sometimes incoherent pacing of appearances from Richard Nixon, Gerald
Ford & Jimmy Carter[vi],
reflects, the failure of the revolution of ’68 left everyone not already bunkered down in the
counterculture without many alternatives. The power imbalance between Dylan and
everyone else is something nobody can get past – even Baez, here as elsewhere a
snarky skeptic unafraid of being incorrect, concedes to it. Bob is Bob, but
unlike Charlie, he doesn’t want a harem to kill for him, or – a la Baker-roshi –
to ensconce him in wealth and pussy. Dylan profoundly distrusts power, but his
followers are like iron filings to his magnetic presence. It’s the Gordian knot
he will never cut.
Much, too much in fact, is made of the question of masks as
Dylan’s only plausible defense to this conundrum, and when you hear Hurricane
Carter’s snappy, upbeat chatter about how Dylan is still searching regardless
of his claim to have already found some inner peace, you remember that Rolling
Thunder was Dylan’s last stop before the Bible[vii].
In one sense, this is where Scorsese – Dylan’s friend since at least The Last Waltz – fails as a filmmaker. A
director with some critical distance might have looked with a more jaundiced
eye at the wall Dylan hits at the end of this tour, aesthetically, spiritually,
intellectually. Good intentions will only get you so far. There’s a reason even
Ringling Bros. gave it up in 2017, and why so many other performers have
retreated to Nashville, Branson or Vegas, why the Blue Man Group or Cirque de
Soleil don’t do the road. At 78, Dylan still performs at 100-plus venues per
year, compared with the Stones who do 30 once every five years, and McCartney
something comparable to that. Dylan is driven, albeit not by fame, fortune nor
glory – his fumbling of the Nobel Prize should tell us that. In a sense, he’s
like the secret cylons in Battlestar
Gallactica, who know who they are by the song they can’t get out of their
head, written as it was by Bob Dylan.
[i]
It probably says hazel on his driver’s ID.
[ii]
Incommensurable, I know.
[iii]
The credit roll lists every show from 1974 through 2018 and we are talking thousands.
[iv]
Billionaire Sir Paul McCartney and maybe the Gershwins must be the only other people
to come close to Dylan in revenue from covers of their music.
[v]
Their discussion of their marriages, Dylan to the “woman I love” in Sara (not
always present on the tour and not visible here), Baez to Stanford anti-war
activist David Harris (“the man I thought I loved”), is a level of intimacy
nowhere available elsewhere in any film of Dylan I’ve ever seen.
[vi]
How many of today’s audiences will recognize a dazed Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme
being arrested after her attempt to shoot Ford at the Sacramento state capitol,
or even know that Ford was the target of two assassination attempts in one
month? If Scorsese had been making a film about the period, rather than the
tour, he’d have noted the arrest of Patty Hearst and her SLA compatriots that
same month, prompting one of the network news broadcasts to project its
coverage over the background of the Beach Boys’ California Girls.
[vii]
Where is T-Bone Burnett whose
presence on the tour is sometimes credited with Dylan’s religious conversion?
Or David Bromberg? Didn’t he get together with his wife, artist and Santeria practitioner
Nancy Josephson, on the tour? So many great musicians Scorsese could have
talked to and did not. Indeed, there would seem to be a documentary waiting to
be made of Scarlet Rivera’s presence throughout. Having been “discovered” by
Dylan walking down the street in New York – an event as improbable as Trungpa’s
famous cab ride with Ginsberg – everyone seems terrified of her. Next to Dylan, Ginsberg & maybe Baez, she’s
the most visible person here, still making use of the musical career that
apparently fell from the sky.
