Had he mentioned that he had recently learned he had played high school football against Joe Biden?
Not that anyone knew Joe Biden from a down marker in 1959.
But it seemed as good a story as any.
He had read an article about Hunter – the “bad” son – which mentioned his following Beau and their father to Archmere. He had not thought of Archmere in years, but they had beat them Papists sophomore, junior and senior years, and even though Joe, as the media had it was old now – practically in his dotage – while he remained vital and vibrant, he wondered if their careers overlapped, and, sure enough, Wikipedia had Joe as a star wide receiver and half back and, even though he was eight-months younger, graduated a year later, making him a bit of a ringer, yeah. When he e-mailed a few team mates asking if any were willing to go public with memories of being groped by Joe in a pile-up, one of the team’s stars – cue up “Glory Days” – dug out his scrapbook. They had been up 30 – 0, and in the fourth quarter Joe caught touchdown passes of 67-, 37- and 35-yards.
Not that anyone remembered him.
They wondered more who their defensive backs had been.
I.
Between October 30 and December 8, 1975, Bob Dylan led a troupe of musicians, poets, and performers on a bus tour of New England, New York, and Canada.[1] Called Rolling Thunder, it played 30 (mostly) small venue, (mostly) skeletally promoted concerts, ending in a benefit at Madison Square Garden for the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whom Dylan believed to have been wrongfully convicted of a triple murder.[2] Participants in the tour and/or movie shot during it included Joan Baez, Ronee Blakley, David Blue, Sandy Bull, Sara Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Allen Ginsburg, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Hawkins, Helena Kallaniotes, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Neuwirth, Peter Orlovsky, Scarlet Rivera, Sam Shephard, Harry Dean Stanton, Anne Waldman, Popping up in audiences and/or at parties en route were Leonard Cohen, Rick Danko, Emmett Grogan, Kinky Friedman, Gordon Lightfoot, Bette Midler, Phil Ochs, Robbie Robertson, Jerry Rubin, O.J. Simpson, Bruce Springsteen,
Shepard published “Rolling Thunder Logbook” in 1977. Larry Sloman, who covered the tour for “Rolling Stone,” published “On the Road With Bob Dylan” in 1978.[3] The four-hour “Renaldo and Clara,” starring and written and directed by Dylan (and edited by him and Howard Alk), was released that year – but quickly withdrawn from circulation because of hostile reviews. [4] In mid-2019, Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” re-visited the tour on Netflix, with two-plus hours of restored original footage, interviews of participants conducted decades later, and of fabricated characters, acted by the semi-famous, whose contributions Goshkin considered…
II.
Horseshit.
He was 77, married 50 years, a retired attorney, author of eight books, survivor of five heart surgeries. His love for his wife defined his world view. His heart shaped the prism of his vision.
“Why don’t you write about it?” the editor had said. So he was re-watching Scorsese’s film, just as he had re-watched Dylan’s, and re-read Sloman’s and Shepard’s books and read “Shelter From the Storm” ( 2010), by Sid Griffin, a London-based musician/author. There had been other books, but Goshkin figured Griffin would have taken them into account. So what the hell…
“Rolling Thunder Revue” opened with a a silent movie magician vanishing a woman. (The trick should have been a clue.) Then came Rolling Thunder Dylan performing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” intercut with Present Day Dylan explaining why he’d hit the road. He referred to America’s “loss of confidence,” following the fall of Saigon and two attempts on the life of the president, while flotillas, parades, and President Nixon celebrating the Bicentennial screened.
But the Bicentennial had been the summer after Rolling Thunder, and Nixon had resigned two years before it, and Ford had been shot at, not Tricky Dick. Neither Saigon nor the assassinations had figured in any tour account Goshkin had read, and the only mention of the Bicentennial was Shepard telling Scorsese people “didn’t give a shit” about it.
xxx
Dylan had been “kicking around the idea of a traveling carnival for years,” Mick Ronson, who became de facto leader of the tour’s band, told Griffin. So throughout ‘75, Dylan’d asked Elliott, McGuinn, Baez, others to join him. He wanted “an old-timey feeling, instead of a star show,” Baez said. He got, Sloman wrote, “a rolling party.” Dylan himself said – Sloman had the tapes – he aimed for a “commedia del arte” “that would last forever…”
But here he was telling Scorsese, “I (didn’t)… have a clue about the reason for the tour.” “I don’t remember anything about (it)…. It happened so long ago, I wasn’t even born.”[5]
More crap.
II.
Why did he care about truth?
As a lawyer, a writer, he knew all about eye witnesses and “objective” journalism.
Sure, drop a brick on your toe, it was a good bet to sting.
Beyond that…
Anytime you rely on human memory, the novelist taught, you are talking fiction.
We see what we believe, not the other way around, the TV villain instructed.
He liked the idea there was only the past. The present was over before you thought of it and the future nothing but a guess.
III.
“I wanted him to be his own self, his own person…”
Bob’s mom to Sloman
If, like Goshkin, you were asking yourself who-am-I; who-will-I-become in the mid-1960s, you felt you were asking at a time when America and its were breaking apart, and possibilities for good and ill – the good more readily apparent – existed which had been unimaginable a few years – or days – before. If you approached these questions from a certain angle, influenced by a particular intellectual weight and socio-political inclination, the artist who seemed to most embody the resulting tensions and who most fascinated you was Dylan.
Ten-years down the road, on Rolling Thunder, the question persisted. “There is no such thing as identity,” Ginsberg declared. You make yourself up “from everything that ever touched you,” Shephard wrote. “Mr. Tambourine Man gives us the opportunity to be whomever we could be,” Blakley told Scorsese. “Life isn’t about finding yourself,” Dylan told Sloman. “It’s about creating yourself.”
If you were Bob Dylan in 1975, trying to find a core within that creation must have seemed like extricating yourself from a python. His development from pass-the-hat folk singer to auditorium-filling superstar had transformed him. He had attained “mythological” status, Mel Howard, a cameraman/producer of “Renaldo,” told Sloman, “requiring a certain amount of illusion.” He was “unknowable,” said guitarist Mike Bloomfield, garbed in “character armor… to keep his sanity.” “(H)is very identity,” Shepard wrote, “… (is) a mystery that remains unsolved.” In “Renaldo,” Baez, Blakley, Hawkins, and Sloman take turns playing him. “What was it like being Bob Dylan?” he asks Sloman. “I wish you’d tell me.” He sometimes appeared on stage wearing a clear plastic Bob Dylan mask.[6]
III.
“I have nothing more to offer,” his doctor said.
In a good way.
“You look good; you feel good; your blood work is fine.”
So go ye forth and prosper.
Implied.
Part of his heart was still dead. His repaired valve still leaked. But come back in six-months for an echo-
Unless crisis intervened.
Implied too.
Wasn’t that the same for everyone?
…until crisis intervened.
IV.
Speaking of identity…
“Sara Dylan” was born Shirley Noznisky.
And “Ramblin’ Jack Elliott” Elliott Charles Abnopoz.
And “David Blue” Stuart David Cohen.
And “Scarlett Rivera” Donna Shea.
And “Joni Mitchell” Roberta Joan Anderson.
And “Roger McGuinn” James Joseph McGuinn, III.
And “Sam Shepard” Samuel Shepard Rogers, III.
And everybody knows “Bob Dylan” was Robert Allen Zimmerman, goddamn.[7]
V.
“Rolling Thunder Revue” never mentioned “Renaldo & Clara,” which struck Goshkin as odd since he considered “Renaldo & Clara” either (a) the greatest film ever made or (b) the worst film ever made or © and most likely – a perfect example of what happens when you give a lot of talented people a lot of money and a lot of drugs and some movie-making equipment, sort of like the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters, except you only had one monkey – most likely, on speed – so you didn’t get Shakespeare, but you still you got something like nothing before or since; and wasn’t that a measure of art?
Maybe Scorsese was jealous. After all, the best parts of his movie came from Dylan’s. Goshkin’d watched Scorsese’s film on his flat screen TV, sharp and clear, glowing like unearthed pirates’ gold, and he’d seen Dylan’s on a fourth or eighth generation VHS tape sometime in the ‘80s, after having connected with Aurelius, a UC undergrad, who was part of a Dylan underground, whose deal was, if you gave him three blank cassette tapes, he would make you a copy of any bootleg he had, from full concerts to Dylan sitting in with a bar band in a Holiday Inn in L.A., a relationship that later led to an invitation to join a syndicate Aurelius was forming to raise, oh, $100 to purchase a tape someone had made of R&C when it was shown on the BBC, of which Aurelius would keep the cleanest copy, and the other investors would be in line for a copy of his, or a copy of that copy, or a copy of a copy of… Aurelius was so well connected that one day at his pad Goshkin caught him screening a tape he had made of an interview of Garth Hudson he’d done for a senior project and another time he’d met Dave Whittaker, who was then living in Berkeley but, back in Dinkeytown, had turned Dylan onto Woody Guthrie, which felt like being introduced to the guy who’d passed Timothy Leary his first joint.
VI.
The contenders for the presidency were talking health care.
Health care, the doctor at the next table said, is not the issue. Health is the issue.
But it was easier to run for president promising free health care than telling people, “Stop smoking; lose weight; exercise six days a week.”
Besides, if the experts were right about the planet, health care mattered only if you were talking radiation poisoning, starvation, maybe typhoid.
The contenders might as well be debating the Warriors’ chances.
It was as consequential.
“It’s not dark yet,” his wife sang. “But it’s…
VII.
Renaldo & Clara in Dialogue
- “No one expected what would happen.”
- “Are you sure you have the right room?”
- “How are you going to get where you are going?” “I’m just going to keep going.”
- “You just traded your hoss for this woman.”
- “I’ve got to go. That’s all I do. That’s all I’ve ever done… I play music…Don’t come between me and my music.”
- “Renaldo, have you been lying to me?”
- “Evasion is all in the mind. Truth is on many levels.”
- “A man wouldn’t solve anything.”
- ” Do I love her like I love you? No. Do I love you like I love her? No.
- “This is the only way out.”
VIII.
Frank Sinatra had done “On the Town” and Elvis “G.I. Blues,” and Dylan had played “Alias” for Sam Peckinpah (and centered two documentaries); but, by 1975, movies had called even the most serious American artists to express their own visions. Norman Mailer had done three. Susan-fucking-Sontag… So…
Even before the tour began, wrote Sloman, Dylan had a crew shooting “documentary” footage.
But Howard didn’t want any “corny” concert film.
So Shepard was brought in to write a script.
Only Dylan decided he didn’t want “connections.”
So Ginsberg, Sloman, the film crew, others suggested scenes to improvise.
Which left 110-hours of film to be identified on numbered index cards, coded according to what was depicted, or who was in it, or its general theme or subject, or predominant color, and then ordered in a pattern – here’s Griffin now – “based on musical notation within a given melodic scale.”
What could go wrong?
Especially since 44-years later, Dylan is telling Scorsese he’d wanted something like the newsreels he’d seen as a kid.
Like that was exactly how The March of Time did it,
IX.
“I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning.”
Bob Dylan. 1963
Even the tour’s name is obscure/hidden/unrevealed.
Was it because Dylan heard thunder while at home in Malibu?
Or was the “thunder” he heard the sonic boom of jets from Vandenburg Air Force Base?
Or was it because Rolling Thunder is a Native American expression for Speaking Truth.
Or the name of a Sioux medicine man?
Or the code name for the United States’s secret bombing of Cambodia?
xxx
And why had he appeared on stage in white face?
Was he honoring Jean-Louis Barrault in “Les Enfants du Paradise”?
Or Kiss?
Or Japanese kabuki theater?
xxx
And of what consequence were any of these questions?
Are they mysteries life cares if we solve?
X.
Ten Scenes in “Renaldo & Clara”
- David Blue plays pinball.
- Harry Dean Stanton pours sugar into his coffee.
- Bob Neuwirth throws a rope over a wall.
- Joan Baez frugs.
- Bob Dylan mounts a horse.
- Ronee Blakely applies make-up.
- A bus rides down a dark road.
- Larry Sloman discusses God’s work with townies.
- Sara Dylan picks up a rose
- Allen Ginsberg reads about his mother’s bearded vagina to a group of women assembled to play mah jong on Cape Cod.
XI.
The magazine featured a 20-something Japanese-American pop singer of whom he’d never heard.
Nor her contemporaries or influences.
Nor if locked in a cell with their music piped in, could he identify one song while being water-boarded. His eyes slid across the pages of the article like skates on ice. His brain was out the window.
It was not exactly a Get-off-my-lawn moment; but, the truth was, he did not care what 20- or 30- or 40-somethings sang or said or wrote. What was the chance they could instruct him?
He was who he was, until he would no longer be.
He did not regret this. He did not feel out of touch in any way of consequence. He felt the same way about, say, artificial intelligence, what pronouns should be used when, the political developments on several continents. His brain and soul were rich and full. No one or thing was important unless you declared it so.
xxx
This even applied to Dylan. In a BBC documentary, intelligent, earnest men discussed his career from 1990 to 2006. It seemed those years were of consequence. But that was not his Bob Dylan. His pieces were in place without them.
Oh, he continued to buy albums – even the Christmas and Frank Sinatra once – but played them once each. He continued to attend concerts. He enjoyed seeing Dylan, with or without cowboy hat, with or without pencil mustache, with or without his Oscar and Victoria’s Secret ad..
Dylan always made him smile.
If he heard two Dylan songs the same day on the radio, he worried he had died.
XII.
Before it was released, Blakley told Sloman “Renaldo & Clara” would be “brilliant.” (But most of the scenes she described – and on which her evaluation was based – were eliminated.)
Howard envisioned “a heavy mythological movie,” with Dylan torn between the opposing forces of his wife (Sara) and former lover (Baez), bolstered by the concert footage, would be “the greatest movie in the world.” (But he feared how it would “turn out” after his involvement ceased.)
Shepard thought it would be “the best head-to-head confessional ever put on film” – or “the worst melodrama on earth.” (But he cautioned against giving in to “hysteria and madness” over the seeming “lack of form.” “It’s not formless anyway,” he wrote. “It’s just that most of us are out of touch with the form it’s taking.”)
Louie Kemp, in charge of the tour’s business end, wanted Orson Welles or Francis Ford Coppola taking control.
XIII.
It was only because of Dylan.
That the performers hopped onto the bus.
That Shepard charged across the country.
That Slocum dosed himself on speed and no sleep and unwashed clothes and abuse (“weasely,” ” “sleazy prick,” “master of tack and bad taste,”) to bag his story.
That Griffin, who’d already written one book about the guy, felt the need to do another.
That Scorsese, who’d practically draped Dylan in a halo in “The Last Waltz” and devoted three-and-a-half hours to him in “No Direction Home,” plunged back into the editing room.
And Goshkin? Goshkin thought. Who’d first heard Dylan’s name and music on his first date with his wife.[8] With whom, when they’d reconnected four years later, he’d immediately listened to “Blonde on Blonde.” Whose “Bob Dylan: The Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich,” he still considered – not without a twinkle in his eye – the definitive word on its subject.[9] Who, nearing his ninth decade, might be better off spending his time on spirituality or meditation or estate planning.
What about him?
XIV.
Every morning, he sat in a café, writing on a yellow pad, He wore a straw hat. He had bracelets on both wrists. You never knew when Scott and Zelda might drop by.
He had known Peter since they had worked for legal aid. The world was going to change then. Now he was retiring too.
“Did you feel a loss of identity?” Peter said.
He thought about it.
He felt his response coming out, as if it was being formulated for the first time but had lain within him, inchoate, awaiting expression.
“It’s like…,” he said. “ Like this trans-sexual thing. Like all those years I’d been walking around as a lawyer, but inside I was really this writer.”
XV.
Ten Things Scorsese Brought to the Party.
- The view that Rolling Thunder was “a pure expression of music and joy.”[10]
- The view he could demonstrate this “truth” by going “one step further.”[11]
- Present day Dylan – NIFTY! (But don’t believe a word he says).
- Present day Baez – Looking GOOD, girl.
- Present day Hawkins – Still alive. WOW! (But where is Scarlet Rivera?) [12]
- The exchange – deliberately cut from “Renaldo & Clara” – one “director” over-riding another – where Dylan tells Baez, “”But I married the woman I loved,” and Baez tells Dylan “And I married the man I thought I loved,” and Dylan says, “See… thought will fuck you up.”
- No outside “experts,” no biographers, no scholars, no critics.
- But Patti Smith and…
- Lots more Ginsberg, singing, dancing, reciting, declaiming…
- And a dozen COMPLETE songs, featuring extreme close-ups of Dylan, mad-eyed, danger-mouthed, committed to each word.[13]
XVI.
Yo, his high school buddy wrote, since you’ve been dumped by the Raiders, why not reclaim your roots and become a re-born Iggles fan?
His friend, who lived in Boca, still had season tickets.
He bet he could name twice as many Eagles from the 1960 championship team as he could Eagles from all teams since. Maybe he could name more from the 1948 champions. Van Buren, Muha, Pihos, one-eyed Tommy Thompson. He had seen that game with his father on a neighbor’s black-and-white TV. Chuck Bednarik, Bucko Kilroy, Black Jack Ferrante.[14] The picture – and field – were all snow.
The past was not even the past. It was snatches of time you clutched like crumpling leaves for reasons you could only feign to understand.
XVII.
Sex, Drugs & Rock’n’Roll
There is no sex and no drugs in “Renaldo and Clara.”
There are no drugs in “Rolling Thunder Review,” and the only sex is an allusion by Hawkins impugning both the chastity of Rivera and his drummer.
Shepard reports the presence of speed, “funny chemicals,” Valium, opium derivatives, “long lines of snow,” and “Tiparillo-sized joints,” without dropping a clue as to what ended up within whom. But, though Mitchell wrote “Coyote” about him, he says nary a word about the old in-and-out.
Sloman – while concealing his Phi Beta Kappa key – admits – no boasts about – his consumption of meth, Dex, bennies, ludes, Valium, and pot, as well as capitalizing upon his tour connections to bed several girls, at least one 17-year-old (He was 25) but fingers no one else’s indiscretions. (He also admits to rounding up groupies and hookers for a movie party scene, without going into what happened after the shooting stopped. And he quotes one mentally unstable young woman as saying she “fucked four guys to get to Dylan.”)[15]
And Griffin –25-years removed from the need to keep confidences – lets out that “Drugs” – cocaine, in particular – “played their part in Rolling Thunder” but maintains the fiction that the bus and hotels were as celibate as a monastery.[16]
Goshkin had encountered more sex – Tiger Woods going anal with a hooker – in a “New Yorker” article – William Shawn rolling in his grave – on the Masters.
XVIII.
Howard Alk (52) died of a – perhaps intentional – heroin overdose in Dylan’s studio 1982.
David Blue (41) died of a heart attack in 1982.
Sandy Bull (60) died of lung cancer in 2001.
Rick Danko (55) died from drug and alcohol-induced heart failure in 1999.
Phil Ochs (35) hung himself in 1976.
Emmett Grogan (35) died of a heroin induced heart attack in 1978.
Mick Ronson (46) died of liver cancer in 1998.
Mike Bloomfield (37) was found dead – perhaps heroin-related – in his car in 1981.
Jerry Rubin (45) died from a heart attack following injuries sustained jaywalking in 1994.
(Aside from Dylan and Ginsberg’s visit to Jack Kerouac’s grave, mortality casts less of a shadow in these books and films than sex sets off rockets.)
And Bob Dylan, 78-years-old, Nobel Prize winner, grandfather of, at least, 11, survivor of one near fatal disease, has played over 3000 concerts in 30 years, one-nighters circling and re-circling the globe.
XIX.
Questions for Class Discussion
1.) If an actual event is being addressed, does layering on or giving voice to lie or myth or creative license enhance or debase it? (Is there, in fact, an “actual event”)
2.) If this piece replaced “Goshkin” with “Levin,” would your reading experience change?
3.) What if “Goshkin” had cancer, instead of heart surgery, been an accountant, not an attorney, been a widower, not still married?
4.) Did the absence of the sex in these books and films bother you as much as it did the author of this piece? Does it bother you now that he has made an issue of it? Or do you consider this just his own weird bit of business?
XX.
One morning he stopped at a new café. He ordered his short double espresso. He sat on a side patio, shielded by an umbrella from the sun. He opened his yellow pad.
Perhaps, he thought, Bob Dylan had not been putting it on when he told a reporter in 1965 that he was “a song and dance man, you know.” Perhaps, when he told Sloman he aimed for a show “that would last forever,” that was truly his goal.
Maybe he had a handle on a “self” all along.
At the next table was a wild-haired man, a shepherd mix beside him.
“Has life ever given anything you wanted?” the man said.
“You know…” He straightened up. The sun was behind him now. “…when I was in my 20s, there were two things I wanted This girl and to write.” He sipped his espresso. The wonder filled him.
“I’m married to one, and…” He pointed at the yellow pad.
NOTES
[1].Well, the troupe was in busses. Dylan traveled in a red El Dorado convertible or in a private motor home.
[2]. A second, less acclaimed and less documented tour, with some changes in personnel, gave 27 concerts throughout the American south in the spring of 1976.
[3]. Sloman writes as an indefatigable admirer of Dylan’s. Shephard admirer Dylan to pop across country following a phone call inviting him aboard; but his knowledge of his subject may be called into question by his twice calling “The Ballad of Hattie Carroll” “Williams and Zinger.”
[4]. The NYT’s doubts that anyone would find it “comprehensible” were not atypical.
[5]. Dylan fans will note this twist on “My Back Pages” “I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”
[6]. Which had long been on his mind. “Don’t be scared. I have my Bob Dylan mask on… Ha, ha.” Bob Dylan. Philharmonic Hall concert, Oct. 31, 1964.
[7]. And the author of this very piece, Robert Allen Levin.
[8]. See Levin. “Cheesesteak.” 2018.
[9]. Karamu. Spring. 1996. If it wasn’t that, it certainly had the best title.
[10]. NY Times. June 16, 2019.
[11].Ibid.
[12]. Not less than 24-hours after typing this, who did Facebook suggest as someone I “…may also know” but…?
[13]. Less impressed was Pauline Kael: “Dylan has given himself more closeups than any actor can have had in the whole history of movies.”
[14]. According to Wikipedia, it was “Blackjack.” He was surprised he’d missed Bosh Pritchard and Vic Sears. He would have had Al Wistert, but it said he was known as “Ox” and his brother had been “Whitey.”
[15]. I should say, his book is a masterpiece of a reporter’s life on the road. He must have had his tape recorder on 24/7, capturing conversations with Carter, Dylan, Bloomfield, Blakey, Robertson, and Mitchell – who then interviews him – as well as his battles with Kemp and his own editor. He visits diners and bars. He tours Boston’s Combat Zone with Shepard, shops with Sara, is prescribed chicken soup for a cold by Dylan’s mother, and rescues his son Jesse from a nosy reporter.
[16]. Perhaps not the best analogy – or, come to think of it, perhaps a perfect one.