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

wanted, and be free at last of the entertainment industry’s assumptions and diktats. There was only one way to find out. Strangely enough, the artist who had scorned the counter-culture and all its otiose free-form rhetoric was about to launch an enterprise that seemed, at least in its first phase, to be the culmination of every misty-eyed ’60s hope. Romantic chatter, from participants and the media, would hang over the tour like a cloud of peculiarly fragrant smoke.
    As Joan Baez later informed
Rolling Stone
’s dogged reporting team, the Rolling Thunder thing would be an ‘offbeat, underground, weird medicine show’. Roger McGuinn, formerly of the Byrds and also along for the ride, would contribute the inspired opinion that ‘this tour is like better than tripping out’. The poet and Dylan votary Allen Ginsberg, never knowingly undersold as a snake-oil salesman for blind optimism, would proclaim on behalf of the 100-strong expeditionary force that ‘We have, once again, embarked on a voyage to reclaim America’. 3 First, in a gesture that counts as typically perverse, the artist found himself a writing partner.
    Dylan had never before felt the need for a collaborator. He had worked with the prowling ghosts of the long-dead often enough in adapting or appropriating old songs. Richard Manuel of The Band had provided the melody for ‘Tears of Rage’ during the recording of the basement tapes, just as the group’s Rick Danko had contributed to ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’. Refusing credit for his contribution, Dylan had helped McGuinn out on ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ – with an opening couplet and a half scribbled on a napkin – for the soundtrack to the 1969 film. He had also part-written the banal ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ with George Harrison at Woodstock late in 1968. Before the release of
The Basement Tapes
, however, none of these works had been allowed anywhere near a Bob Dylan album. Amid the composition of hundreds of songs, he had never sought a full-time writing partner. Dylan flew solo: the persona was well established and intrinsic, or so it seemed, to his art. How could there be equal billing when he had no equals?
    Jacques Levy, six years Dylan’s senior, was nothing if not a resourceful character. A trained clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst – useful skills, perhaps, in the entertainment business – he had already acquired a certain reputation as the director chosen by critic-impresario Kenneth Tynan to launch the witless ‘erotic revue’
Oh! Calcutta!
on Broadway in 1969. With a musical based on
Peer Gynt
in mind, Levy had then done some writing with McGuinn, the best-known example being ‘Chestnut Mare’, an enduring piece whose precise relationship with Ibsen’s poem-play remains to be explained. Later in life, the dramaturge would become a professor of English and drama at a college in upper New York State. On his death in 2004 an obituary notice in the
New York Times
would describe him as a ‘lovable, brilliant, irascible, inspiring, principled rebel hipster, charismatic sweetheart of a man’. When he bumped into a famous acquaintance one summer day in lower Manhattan in 1975, Levy was presented with a proposition: would he care to help Bob Dylan out with some songs?
    In another version of the story, the two met at The Other End, having been introduced previously by McGuinn. During their conversation, so it seems, Dylan suggested a collaboration. At Levy’s loft apartment, just around the corner on LaGuardia Place, they then set to work on a half-finished song named ‘Isis’. Who then wrote what as the pair worked through the night is very far from clear.
    Dylan’s motives are equally obscure. Interviewed by Bill Flanagan early in 1985 for the book
Written in My Soul
(1986), the artist was asked why he had not persisted instead with ‘what you’d tapped into with
Blood on the Tracks
’. The answer:
    I guess I never intended to keep that going. It was an experiment