On the Road with Bob Dylan (40 page)

Dylan shrugs. “Why don’t you write a song?” he suggests.

“I think I will,” Ratso smiles impishly.

“Oh, yeah, what are you gonna call it?” Dylan asks. “’Jerked Off?”

“No, I’ll call it ‘The Combat Zone,’” Ratso shoots back.

“Oh, yeah?” Dylan suddenly gets serious. “I like that. Hey, I’ll help you write it.”

“OK,” Ratso smiles.

It’s nearly time for the concert and as Dylan finally sits down and shovels down some cold turkey, most of the others are starting off for the hall, across the street. And what a hall. It was the strangest arrangement Ratso had ever seen. Perfect for a basketball game, with two long sections running high toward the roof facing the court, which was covered with chairs facing the stage. So most of the audience got a great view of the privileged few lucky enough to see the performers who were way off at one end. “This is just like Chicago,” Beattie exclaims, craning her neck at the stands. Tonight, Ratso is going to help her babysit, and he dutifully follows her, the kids’ granny, and the children to a special row of chairs that have been placed on the balcony in the rear of the hall, which, due to the bizarre dimensions of the place, are actually the best seats in the house.

They settle down and watch Guam’s warm-up set. After a few numbers, Beattie leans over to Ratso. “What does Bob Neuwirth do?” she asks the reporter. “Can he do anything?”

Ratso blanches. “Well, he’s a songwriter and he’s responsible for this first part of the show ….”

“I didn’t know,” Beattie shakes her head, “I don’t see him doing anything.”

But the conversation is rudely interrupted by the appearance of her son on the stage. Beattie immediately turns back and glues her eyes to the small prancing figure. Dylan sounds a little weak, a little tired as he rushes through the first two numbers, but by “Hard Rain,” which he dedicates to D. H. Lawrence, the momentum seems to be building. In fact, by the end of the concert, most of the staff and film crew have filtered up to the balcony. The kids, who’d been running or fighting in their seats, have all fallen asleep, leaving Beattie and Ratso a chance to concentrate on the performance.

Onstage, Bob starts into “Hurricane.” “What did they send him to jail for?” Beattie leans back and asks Ratso. “For defending his people,” the reporter answers and Beattie gives a knowing nod and turns back to the music. At the end, the audience rises in a standing ovation and the singer’s mother pops up, cheering the protest song. “Isn’t it great?” Ratso claps along. Beattie just shakes her head and hits a fist against her heart. “It leaves you weak. It leaves you weak,” she says in wonder.

“When is ‘Sara’?” Beattie suddenly asks. “Do I have enough time to go to the ladies’ room? I had too much coffee.” The band breaks into “One More Cup of Coffee” and Ratso can’t resist the pun. “One more?” Beattie’s eyes open wide. “I’ve already had six or seven!”

She visits the john, and comes back just in time for “Sara,” Bob crouching down low, strumming furiously, pouring his heart out. He gets up to the line about writing “Sad Eyed Lady” and Ratso hits Beattie’s knee. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she shakes her head in awe, “this is the greatest love song ever.”

During “Just Like a Woman,” they make their move, shepherding the remaining kids backstage, and as the show ends Ratso slumps in the bleachers, taking a well-earned breather.

Everyone’s forming a caravan to go directly over the border to
Quebec tonight, the two buses, the campers, the Cadillac, the film vans, the support cars, and Ratso has been promised a spot in the procession. But there’s a delay, so Ratso chats with Michael Ahern, the stage manager, who acquaints the reporter with the seamier side of the rock ’n roll life, the crew’s perspective. It’s fascinating talk, Ratso’s enthralled, and a half-hour later, he jumps up and runs outside. Nada. “Motherfucker,” the reporter screams to the cold Maine night, “they’re gone. Like a fucking nightmare.”

Ratso storms back inside, gets his things, gets last-minute directions from Ahern, and hops into the Monte Carlo. It’s treacherous driving tonight, the soft dewy snow has now frozen into a slick ice layer and it takes him about ten minutes merely to inch down the steeped road leading to the arena. But when he reaches 95 and starts north toward Quebec, he realizes that there is something drastically wrong. The car won’t stop, every time it’s fed a little gas it lurches forward and continues to accelerate. Shit, the reporter curses to himself. Sabotage? The ultimate dirty trick. And such an old one, tamper a little with the car, make it impossible to drive, wait for the victim to start off, and an hour later he’s cleanly eliminated, wrapped around a concrete abutment.

“Jesus, these guys are smart,” Ratso says aloud, “pulling this in the most desolate area imaginable, right near the fucking Maine-Canada border. But they’re not smart enough,” and the reporter swerves into a wild U-turn and heads back to Waterville. After about two and a half hours of creeping down 95 riding the brake all the way, he limps back into the Howard Johnson’s and gets his old room back.

By now it’s 4
A.M.
, but with the mixture of the music, the prescribed drugs, the illicit drugs, and the paranoia, Ratso’s wide awake. But what to do at four in the morning in Maine? Nothing but call some friends, and since it’s only one on the coast, Ratso dials Mike Bloomfield, a great blues guitarist, who backed Dylan up at his first electric appearance in Newport and went on to play searing guitar on the legendary
Highway 61 Revisited
sessions.

“How you doing Larry,” Bloomfield booms. “Where are you man?”

“In Maine,” Ratso answers disconsolately. “I’m on tour with Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue. But it’s been real weird. What was it like working with Dylan for you?” the reporter tries to compare notes.

“Well, Larry, the last time was atrocious, atrocious. He came over and there was a whole lot of secrecy involved, there couldn’t be anybody in the house. I wanted to tape the songs so I could learn them so I wouldn’t fuck ’em up at the sessions …”

“What songs?” Ratso shoots in.

“The ones that came out later on
Blood on the Tracks
. Anyway, he saw the tape recorder and he had this horrible look on his face like I was trying to put out a bootleg album or something and my little kid, who is like fantastically interested in anyone who plays music, never came into the room where Dylan was the entire several hours he was in the house. He started playing the goddamn songs from
Blood on the Tracks
and I couldn’t play, I couldn’t follow them, a friend of mine had come to the house and I had to chase him from the house. I’m telling you, the guy intimidated me, I don’t know what it was, it was like he had character armor or something, he was like in a wall, he had a wall around him and I couldn’t reach through it. I used to know him a long time ago. He was sort of a normal guy or not a normal guy but knowable, but that last time I couldn’t get the knowable part of him out of him, and to try to get that part out of him would have been ass-kissing, it would have been being a sycophant, and it just isn’t worth kissing his ass, as a matter of fact, I don’t think he would have liked that anyway. It was one of the worst social and musical experiences of my life.”

“What was he like?”

“There was this frozen guy there,” Bloomfield says. “It was very disconcerting. It leads you to think, if I hadn’t spent some time in the last ten or eleven years with Bob that were extremely pleasant, where I got the hippie intuition that this was a very, very special
and, in some ways, an extremely warm and perceptive human being, I would now say that this dude is a stone prick. Time has left him to be a shit, but I don’t see him that much, two isolated incidents over a period of ten years.”

“What do you see as the cause of that?” Ratso wonders.

“Character armor. It’s to keep his sanity, to keep away the people who are always wanting something from him. But if a lot of people relate to you as their concept of you, not your concept of you, you’re gonna have to do something to keep those people from driving you crazy, but if that is so strong that you can’t realize who is trying to fuck with you and who just wants to get along with the business, if you can’t tell the difference, it’s very difficult.”

“How did you relate to him in the early days?”

“When I first saw him he was playing in a nightclub, I had heard his first album, and Grossman got Dylan to play in a club in Chicago called The Bear and I went down there to cut Bob, to take my guitar and cut him, burn him, and he was a great guy, I mean we spent all day talking and jamming and hanging out and he was an incredibly appealing human being and any instincts I may have had to try and cut him and slice him, which is very common in Chicago, it was a thing that almost all musicians did, and it wasn’t really a mean thing, and any possible interest I may have had in doing that was immediately stopped, and I was just charmed by the man.

“That night, I saw him perform and if I had been charmed by just meeting him, me and my old lady were just bowled over watching him perform. I don’t know what, it was like this Little Richard song, ‘I don’t know what you got but it moves me,’ man, this cat sang this song called ‘Redwing’ about a boys’ prison and some funny talking blues about a picnic and he was fucking fantastic, not that it was the greatest playing or singing in the world, I don’t know what he had, man, but I’m telling you I just loved it, I mean I could have watched it nonstop forever and ever.

“The next time I saw him was at a party in Chicago and he was traveling with a bodyguard, a big fucking Arab, named Victor
Maimudes, an Arab, and he was a bodyguard, that’s what he was, I didn’t know that then, what did I know? I hung out with the niggers, what did I know about him and his bodyguard, and he was trying to get pussy and, believe me, he got a lot of pussy, and we hung out at that party and we talked, blah blah blah, and I was watching the bodyguard, the next time, I get a phone call from him, would I want to play on a record with him and I said, ‘All right.’ And I really didn’t know he was a famous guy, I really didn’t know, I was so into the black music scene and AM radio that I didn’t know this guy was famous.

“And I went to Woodstock, and I didn’t even have a guitar case, I just had my Telecaster and Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived, which wasn’t so much, and Sara was there I think, and she made very strange food, tuna fish salad with peanuts in it, toasted, and he taught me these songs, ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and all those songs from that album and he said, ‘I don’t want you to play any of that B. B. King shit, none of that fucking blues, I want you to play something else,’ so we fooled around and finally played something he liked, it was very weird, he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano, then he took me over to this big mansion and there was this old guy walking around and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ and Bob said, ‘That’s Albert,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Albert?’ and he said that he was his manager, and I didn’t recognize Albert even though I had met him many times before. He had short hair before and now he looked like Ben Franklin, he looked like cumulus nimbus. I didn’t know who he was and I asked Bob if he was a cool guy and Bob said, ‘Oh, yeah.’

“We fucked around there for a few days and then we went to New York to cut the record and I started seeing that this guy Dylan was really a famous guy, I mean he was invited to all the Baby Jane Holzer parties, and all these people would be walking around with him, and the Ronettes would come up to him and Phil Spector would be talking to him and I noticed that he and Albert and
Neuwirth had this game that they would play and it was the beginning of the character armor, I think, it was intense put-downs of almost every human being that existed but the very few people in their aura that they didn’t do this to. It was Bob, Albert, and Neuwirth, they had a whole way of talking, I used to be able to imitate it. David Blue is a very good imitator of it, as a matter of fact I don’t even think he knows he’s imitating it. It’s just like this very intense put-down.

“And he was very heavy into drinking wine, to stay calm and loose I guess. We went to this Chinese restaurant and I started putting Bob down, playing the dozens with him and I did it all night long and he and Albert loved it, they were in hysterics because it wasn’t the kind of putting down that they did, it was the dozens, and I talked about his momma and his family and everything, and I had a great time.” Bloomfield cracks up at the memory.

“Do you really think …” Ratso starts.

“Oh, and then I remember one time Bob wouldn’t eat and Albert took him to Ratner’s and bought him plates of sturgeon and like mushroom barley soup and he was taking the sturgeon and just piece by little clump putting it in his mouth and saying, ‘Eat, sturgeon, good,’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was so fucking far out.

“And we cut the album and that was extremely weird because no one knew what they were doing there. They had this producer who was as useless as tits on a pig, he was referred to exclusively out of his presence as Dylan’s nigger, this big tall guy, a hillbilly, Johnston, he was a good old boy, no doubt about it. I mean there were chord charts for these songs but no one had any idea what the music was supposed to sound like, what direction it was, the nearest that anyone had an idea was Kooper and he was there as a guitar player, and as soon as I came in and started playing, he picked up the organ, he was a good organ player but it was weird for Bob. We were doing songs like ‘Desolation Row’ three or four times, takes and takes of that, and that’s crazy, it’s a long song. I mean the guy
had to sing these fifteen-minute songs over and over again, it was really nuts. And the
schwartze
from Paul Butterfield, Sam Lay, was playing the drums, and the bassist was Russ Savakus, I think it was the first time he had ever played electric bass in his life, he had been a studio upright player for years and years, and it all sort of went around Dylan. I mean like he didn’t direct the music, he just sang the songs and played piano and guitar and it just sort of went on around him, though I do believe he had a lot to do with mixing the record. But the sound was a matter of pure chance, whatever sound there was on that record was chance, the producer did not tell the people what to play or have a sound in mind, nor did Bob, or if he did he told no one about it, he just didn’t have the words to articulate it, so that folk-rock sound, as precedent-setting as it might have been, I was there man, I’m telling you it was a result of Chuckle-fucking, of people stepping on each other’s dicks until it came out right.”