On the Road with Bob Dylan (19 page)

“I don’t know if it’s street language but it’s more direct language,” the poet responds. “The shit in ‘George Jackson’ and here ‘what kind of shit is coming down,’ he’s using it in a way that’s rhythmically very interesting.”

“Such economy in that line about the judge making all of Rubin’s witnesses drunkards from the slums, that sums up the whole trial,” I add.

Ginsberg leans over Peter, “He’s written the kind of song that the last rebels of the late ’60s were demanding that he write.”

“But he’s doing it on his own terms,” I add. “I think the demands have slackened off, now he’s doing it ’cause he feels it. It isn’t a simple knee-jerk Skinnerian response.”

“I didn’t mean that he was doing it ’cause they asked him to, or he was doing what he thought they wanted him to do. He’d been doing it all along actually,” Allen adds.

We begin our way back because Allen has to go onstage for the encore, but directly stage left Peter finds three empty seats. We’re high up, but we have a good vantage point as Dylan moves to the mike. “This song is straight out of the underground,” he breathes, and the familiar murky strains of “One More Cup of Coffee” fill the civic center. Ginsberg is rocking in his seat, shout-singing along, “One more cup of coffee before I go down to the valley below!”

“Which valley?” I joke.

“Death!” Ginsberg notes with finality. “Or life; anything,” then
he adds: “The valley below. The Biblical valley. The shadow of the valley …”

“This song is so mysterious and murky,” I whisper, “it reminds me of a mature ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ That gypsy violin is incredible.”

“Well it’s Moorish, gypsy, Arabic, semitic,” Ginsberg points out. “It’s a rabbinical, cantotorial thing he hasn’t done before. It’s just like a real Jewish melody. ‘Sara’ is also. Yiddish. This one’s Hebraic, though. I’m just hearing the words as they come through.”

“It’s almost a put-down of hedonism with that line ‘your pleasure knows no limits,’ a put-down of excess,” I say.

Dylan finishes the song. “Hum, Hum, Hum,” Ginsberg screams, causing a sea of faces in our section to investigate the source of the strange warble. “For the moment that’s my favorite song,” he bubbles, “definitely a great song. ‘Isis’ and ‘Hurricane,’ I’m in sympathy with them in historical terms but this is sort of an archetypal song and the voicing of it is the most open we have in the Hebrew, that sort of ahhh … Wait, here comes ‘Sara,’ see ‘Sara oh Sara’ that’s the Yiddish part, the refrain, ‘Sara oh Sara.’ He reminds me of some rabbi, some negun. He looks like a negun. Write that down you can use that.”

We both watch Dylan in silence for a minute. “What’d he just say,” I ask Ginsberg, “‘Arabian jewel’?”

“I think ‘radiant jewel,’ ‘mystical wife,’” he corrects.

“What an amazing song, listen to the chronology,” I yell. “After the beach scene, he talks about Woodstock, then living in the Chelsea Hotel. I wonder what she feels when she hears this?” We both start singing the chorus.

Dylan starts up the last stanza, “Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp …” Ginsberg leans over, “A sort of wave of consciousness goes through the audience when he goes through that stanza, a sudden realization of what he’s doing. Back to the beach now.”

“This is like ‘Shelter from the Storm,’” I note, “but it’s better, closer to the bone.”

Ginsberg smiles. “He revealed his heart,” he gestures with one finger in the air; “for Dylan to reveal his heart completely is for me a great historical event. For any man to reveal his heart completely is a great historical event. It gives other people permission to reveal their hearts. Look at the way he’s bouncing now. He’s very relaxed.” Allen leans forward, devouring the scene. “Hum, Hum, Hum,” he shouts with his hands cupped to his mouth.

“What does that ‘Hum’ mean,” I inquire.

“It’s a mantra for intellectual penetration,” Ginsberg explains, with his eyes fixed to the stage. “It’s from the heart.” Dylan swings into “Just Like a Woman,” eliciting a roar from the audience.

“It’s brilliant to go from that complete announcement of his totally open heart to some ancient open heart song,” Allen admires, “completely transformed for them now. Everybody has thought about Dylan endlessly for ten years and now he’s taken all those thoughts and summarized them and he’s putting out the definitive statements about what we thought. All the fantasies people had about his children and his wife, he’s out there doing them.” He returns to the song. Dylan is hunched over the mike, his face temporarily hidden by the hat with the fresh flowers. “Queen Mary she’s my friend,” Dylan confides, “yes I believe I’ll go see her again.”

“He’s right out there now,” Ginsberg points, “giving. He’s completely in his body, completely in the song, completely at one with his universe.”

“I just don’t fit,” Dylan howls, as Allen hurries down to make his cue. And a few minutes later, the poet is behind a mike in the rear, beating on his finger cymbals to the Woody Guthrie classic, staring at the back of the little guy with the open heart.

There’s another concert tonight, so I file outside with the ecstatic audience and look for a place to eat. Outside, I spot Bob Gruen, a freelance rock photographer, and Chris Charlesworth, a New York correspondent for
Melody Maker
magazine. They’re hungry too and we settle on the Red Rose Cafe, a funky pizza parlor.

The jukebox is blaring “George Jackson” as we enter and grab a booth.

“What a scene,” Gruen moans. “I had to smuggle my cameras in. After the shit Pulin went through in Plymouth, man, they confiscated his cameras and he didn’t get them for hours. You should have seen ’Em tonight, I had lenses in the hood of my coat, cameras in my boots.” Our lasagnas come, and the waitress politely asks for $2.35 each upfront. She mumbles something about lots of walkouts.

Suddenly, I hear a familiar sound wafting through the room. It’s the concert; “Oh Sister” is playing on someone’s cassette. Bootleggers in Springfield! I investigate. Across the room, they’re sitting around a booth, three of them, one lean, Italian-looking; one larger, ruddy-faced; one a petite brunette, real wired. I join the table and tell them I’m covering the tour for
Rolling Stone
. Instant assault.

“What’s the tour like? Is Sara with him?” the skinny one asks.

“Is he at ease on this tour?” the burly one demands simultaneously. They laugh and we all introduce ourselves. There’s Sal, the thin ascetic-looking one, Sheila, who seems about to pop her gourd, and Ken. They’re all around thirty and all teach in New Jersey high schools. All stone Dylan fanatics.

“We all went to see him several times on the last tour with the Band,” Ken says, “and the audience was so nice like everyone was dying to stand up and just scream but instead everybody like took it easy because they didn’t want to scare him away. Do you think that has anything to do with him coming back here now? Like, he’s so free and easy onstage now.”

“I think seeing Rubin in jail affected him strongly, Rubin trying to reach out and touch people after years of being reclusive and antisocial,” I suggest.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” Ken marvels, playing with the remains of his spaghetti, “he looks like he did in 1966, like in
Eat the Document.”

Sal lights up. “Yeah, we saw that at the Whitney Museum when
it played. Went ten times, every day. By the way, do you know what ever happened to
Don’t Look Back?
”

“He sued,” I offer, “took it out of circulation.”

“In
Eat the Document
, though, he seems as tight as a wire,” Ken shakes his head, “but right now, we were right behind the stage and he turned around and he looked just like Buddha. He just smiled, he was so relaxed.”

Sal is leaning over the table now, just waiting for a chance to jump in. “I saw both shows in Providence,” he blurts, “and what really blew my mind was the way he was emoting. He was acting, it was like a play. He was just there. Besides the makeup, the expressions on his face were like
Eat the Document.”

“Why do you think he’s wearing makeup?” I throw out.

The three of them pause in their tracks, then Sal addresses the class. “I don’t know,” he muses, “I think it’s because he wanted to create a Pierrot figure on the stage. You hand in your money and you go watch the geek and there he is onstage and he’s doing that, in other words, he’s saying, Don’t take me too seriously, I’m one of the clowns in my songs.”

“He always said he was a trapeze artist,” I counter with a smile.

“What I really liked too was the reconciliation with Joanie,” Sal adds. “Like for so many years she’s been in such pain, every time I’ve seen her in concert she’s talked about him and sung to him. The last time I saw her was at the Felt Forum and she said, ‘Everybody tells me to leave Bobby alone, that there’s nothing he cherishes more than his privacy, but I’ll do anything I can to get him back onstage.’”

Ken suddenly snaps out of a reverie and looks at us with urgency. “You know, Sal said earlier that when you see Dylan at so much peace it’s almost like he’s going back and I asked him how we can explain Dylan going back to his roots. It’s like if he’s going back, if you read the Scaduto book, he’s a real fuck, he burns everybody. Yet here he is sending bridges.” His voice trails off quizzically, and he scans us for a response.

Sal scowls. “We met Scaduto,” he smirks, “he’s an asshole. We were interpreting songs, asking him what things meant and he didn’t even know. At Brentano’s, it was an autograph thing. We had to answer all the questions for him. How can anyone write a book about Dylan and give one paragraph to
Blonde on Blonde
and mention the
Basement Tapes
in one sentence.” Sal shakes his head in disgust.

“It could have been Guy Lombardo he was writing about,” Ken moans. “All it was, was police reporting.”

“He couldn’t penetrate Dylan’s circle,” I suggest. “After all, the people that he interviewed all had lost contact with Bob.”

Sal stabs at the leftovers of his veal. “He interviewed people like the dish-cleaning woman at the Cafe Wha?, Beattie Zimmerman’s next-door neighbor, shit like that. Where were the interviews with Robbie Robertson and Mike Bloomfield?”

The table falls quiet, Sal and Ken lost in some private Dylan reverie; Sheila, who’s stayed silent, seems to be biding her time till the second show starts. Ken breaks the silence: “What do you think about that
People
interview, like when he said he can’t elude the Dylan myth any longer, it’s what God wants?”

“He’s doing God’s work,” Sal flatly states.

“I think he believes that,” I say softly.

“Do you think it’s a sign that on this tour he isn’t doing any stuff from
Planet Waves
or
Blood on the Tracks?”
Sal inquires.

“I tried to teach McGuinn to do ‘Never Say Good-bye,’” I laugh, “but he never had time to learn it. What do you think of
Planet Waves
anyway?”

Ken laughs, “After waiting so long for something …”

“After waiting all those years, of course we were ecstatic,” Sal lectures, “but looking at it in perspective, last night we were playing the tape over and over again and listening to his new material we taped at the concert, it seems to me that since he’s made the decision to come back, he’s been trying to gain his ground. He did the
Planet Waves
LP, he did the tour with the Band, but he looked nervous,
uptight. He didn’t seem to be partying through most of that. Then came
Blood on the Tracks
, which was a gigantic step in the right direction, but I still don’t think he was capturing the sound that he wanted to. But with this new material it seems that he’s getting back to what he really wants to do.”

“But what about the songs in that period?” I ask.

“A lot I didn’t think were effective,” Sal shrugs.

“Blood on the Tracks was,”
Ken asserts.

Sal grabs his fork and starts puncturing the air with it. “It seemed to me that Dylan reached a peak that no one else had managed to get near in
Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61
, that whole madness period, just pre-bike accident, and then he had the accident and went through all these heavy changes. He withdrew, tried withdrawal, it didn’t work, he wanted to get back, he was itching. Made a number of abortive attempts to get back. Withdrew from those. Finally decided to take a lunge, did
Planet Waves. Planet Waves
, to me, relates more to
New Morning
than it does to
Blonde on Blonde
but this new material relates more to
Blonde on Blonde.”

“He said to me the problem was that everyone expects another
Blonde on Blonde,”
I note.

Sal sighs, “But the intensity, the perfection of that record.”

“Planet Waves
is a precise LP,” I interrupt, “a tremendous statement about the balancing of domesticity with the concerns of a mystical artist. It seems from that LP that he had to make a choice and now he made the decision.”

“The choice we wanted him to make,” Sal acknowledges with a smile.

“I asked him why he tours and he told me ‘It’s in my blood,’” I add.

“Look,” Sal bangs the table, “it’s like in ‘Going, Going, Gone,’ you could just see the changes he seemed to be going through there. He wasn’t sure, living on the edge, playing it straight, but I gotta get back before it gets too late. See, he decided to go back to the edge again.” Sal smiles smugly.

“If you perceived all this from the LP,” Ken counters, “then the album was successful. That’s what Larry’s trying to say.”

Sal grimaces. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I love everything he’s done.”

“That’s why you asked me before why do I care about knowing about Sara.” Sal is staring at me. “It’s ’cause Dylan reveals pieces of his life, like a mosaic, on his records. You’re intensely interested in what’s going on in his life, of course, you see yourself in it, but everything about him, everything he does, you want to know.”

It’s time to leave for the Civic Center, but first the New Jerseyites are having an instant lottery. They have three tickets, one in the second row, one in the fourth, and one in the tenth. Sal carefully shuffles and places them face down on the table. They take turns picking. “I got it, I got it. The second row!” Sheila screams at the top of her lungs, jumping up and down. She hugs Sal.