On the Road With Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Rolling Thunder Revue

Backstage at the Rolling Thunder Revue, Allen Ginsberg (who has just dedicated his book of First Blues to “Minstrel Guruji Bob Dylan“) asks the convener of these revels, these winds of the old days, “Are you getting any pleasure out of this, Bob?”

The convener, who can use words as if they were fun-house mirrors when he’s pressed, fingers his gray cowboy hat and looks at the poet. The first he had ever heard of Allen Ginsberg and the kind of people he hung out with was in Time around 1958 while he was still a kid in Minnesota. (“I’m Allen Ginsberg and I’m crazy.” “My name is Peter Orlovsky and I’m crazy as a daisy.” “My name is Gregory Corso and I’m not crazy at all.” That had broken up the kid in Minnesota.)

Now, here on the road with this hooting, rocking carnival of time present and time past, both perhaps present in time future, is Allen, who has survived serene and curious, in a business suit.

“Pleasure?” Dylan finds the word without taste, without succulence. “Pleasure? I never seek pleasure. There was a time years ago when I sought a lot of pleasure because I’d had a lot of pain. But I found there was a subtle relationship between pleasure and pain. I mean, they were on the same plane. So now I do what I have to do without looking for pleasure from it.”

“He is putting you on,” said a friend to whom Ginsberg, later in the tour, had described Dylan’s exorcism of the pursuit of pleasure.

Photos: Bob Dylan Hanging With Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, More

“No,” Ginsberg said firmly. “Bob’s attitude is very similar to the Buddhist view of nonattachment. The belief that seeking pleasure, clinging to pleasure, evokes pain. It stunned me when Bob said that. It meant that he’s reached a philosophical level very few come close to. And it’s a long-range, practical, workable, philosophical level. Bob has grown an awful lot. He’s alchemized a lot of the hangups of his past. Like his insecurity, which has now become,” Ginsberg laughs, “an acceptance of and an ability to work with continuous change.”

On the other hand, a musician in Minstrel Guruji’s band tells of an epiphany early in the tour:

“Joan and Bob are doing a duet. I forget the name of it, it’s one of his old tunes. She’s really moving. I mean dancing. She starts doing the Charleston and the audience is digging it and we’re digging it. Dylan though, he’s plunking his guitar, moving his eyes around quick, like he does, looking at Joanie, looking at us, looking at the audience. Like, ‘What the hell is she doing that’s going over so damn big?’ It’s over, and Joan walks offstage, grinning, sees a friend in the wings, and says to him, ‘You won’t be hearing that number again from this little old duo on this tour.’ And laughs because neither the friends nor the others standing there can figure out what she’s talking about. But she’s right. Bob’s never called for that tune since. He couldn’t stand the competition. Big as he is, in some ways he’s still a kid scrabbling for his turf.”

“Not true,” says Joan Baez of the kid characterization. “Or, not as true as it used to be.” She had once described Dylan as “a huge ego bubble, frantic and lost, so wrapped up in ego, he couldn’t have seen more than four feet in front of him.” But now, “Bob has learned how to share,” Joan told me one night after a three-and-a-half-hour show in Waterbury, Connecticut, at an old rococo movie theater that reminded me of Depression nights as a boy when we would go to just such a place to feel good anyhow and come home with some dishes besides. No dishes this time, but the most mellow feelings I’ve had from a concert since the Duke Ellington band on an exceptionally good night. The kicks were from the genuine mutual grooving of the music makers; but it was Dylan, as shaper of the thunder, who was responsible for lifting the audience and keeping it gliding.

A bounteous dispenser of thunder was Dylan this time around. At least three and a half hours every night, sometimes longer. (The first concert in Toronto, one of the tour’s more exalted evenings, ran close to five hours.) And yet always, or nearly always, the pacing, though relaxed, didn’t go slack.

The right mix of a backup band, driving strong but sinuously so it never sounded like an assault. If you could keep T-Bone Burnett, Steve Soles, Howie Wyeth, Mick Ronson, Luther Rix and David Mansfield together — I was thinking as a once and former A&R man — you could have one hell of a house insurance band. Especially with Mansfield, 19 and the kind of natural whom conservatory students prone to neurasthenia should never be allowed to hear or see. Mandolin, pedal steel, dobro, violin — Mansfield makes them all sing, for God’s sake, as if he were the sorcerer, not the apprentice he looks like.