Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Ian Bell

Bette Midler congregated (and squabbled) at The Other End, while Bobby Neuwirth resumed his duties as courtier and master of ceremonies, Dylan began to wonder what might be made of all the talent that was gathering around him each night. The bass player Rob Stoner came to his attention, as did a teenaged multi-instrumentalist named David Mansfield. Mick Ronson, formerly the guitarist with David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, came to call. Neuwirth was by now using his own club performances as de facto auditions for Dylan. The guitar player Steven Soles was invited along; the Texan who called himself T-Bone Burnett, another guitar player, arrived in town at Neuwirth’s behest for ‘more fun than the law allows’. 1
    Watching Ramblin’ Jack Elliott perform on the first Thursday night in July would even prompt Dylan to give the dutifully awestruck club crowd a fine performance of an entirely new song called ‘Abandoned Love’. Known for long enough as ‘St John the Evangelist’ thanks to a verse that the writer, typically, would later discard, the remarkable piece – in this performance, at any rate – would do Ramblin’ Jack’s own set no favours. As ever, that amiable man would raise no objections. Soon enough, under the guise of guest appearances during performances by Neuwirth, the artist was performing regularly.
    Patti Smith, with whom he developed an affinity and a friendship in this period, had only just begun to complete the long transition from fringe performance poet to bandleader. She had yet to release an album when Dylan saw her perform her own ‘Redondo Beach’, a soon to be famous version of Them’s ‘Gloria’, and the old Stones hit ‘Time Is On My Side’ at the end of June. He was taken with Smith in large part because of her honesty, her humour and her utter fearlessness as a performer. Though she would decline an invitation to sign up as cabin boy on Dylan’s next voyage, she was given a better insight into his thinking than most of his old New York friends and colleagues. A 1975 feature in the short-lived
New Times
captured a moment: ‘She and Bob Dylan sit at the top of tile stairs at a hush-hush Greenwich Village party, trading whispers like two schoolboys.’ Smith would recall the conversation. Dylan ‘had been in hiding for so long’, she would tell Barry Miles in 1977.
    And he was working out this Rolling Thunder thing – he was thinking about improvisation, about extending himself language-wise. In the talks that we had there was something that he admired about me that was difficult to comprehend then, but that’s what we were talking about. That’s what we were talking about on the stairway … 2
    ‘This Rolling Thunder thing’, when it came to fruition at the end of October, would involve transporting the human contents of an idealised Greenwich Village club around the small towns, colleges, theatres and arenas of the Eastern Seaboard. It would attempt to rekindle the bohemian fantasy that had been the young Dylan’s first inspiration. Rolling Thunder would assert an idea of what music and performance were
for
in a straightforward rejection of everything the imperial progress of Tour ’74 had come to represent. It would be, in one sense, a last attempt to expose the figure of ‘Bob Dylan’ to scrutiny by the man who bore the name.
    The 31 shows in Rolling Thunder’s first incarnation would amount to a kind of erratic developing essay on identity, on disguises, on human contact. The concerts would also be, by turns, pretentious, acute, self-indulgent and enthralling. Rolling Thunder would become a piece of theatre, a radical artistic gesture, a travelling circus, a movable movie set, a gypsy caravan and the realisation, intermittently, of a superstar’s old dream of creative emancipation. That was the general idea, at any rate.
    Perhaps Dylan could just hit the road with a bunch of friends and allies, roll from town to town, play wherever he wanted, whenever he