Down the highway, p.26
Down the Highway, page 26
Bob spoke between songs, slurring his words as if wasted. ’this is, um … this is cawlled, “Yessss …” ’ he drawled the introduction to ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’ The crowd laughed. He tried again: ’this is … er … this is called, “Yes I See You Got Yer Brand-New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Haaat.”’ But he enunciated perfectly when the band kicked in. Much of his stage act was showmanship, worthy of vaudeville. Before the next number he mumbled a stream of nonsense words. The moment the audience shut up to hear what he was actually saying, he deadpanned: ‘… if you only just wouldn’t clap so hard.’ He had used the same trick the night before in Sheffield. The gag got a cheer and Mickey Jones had his cue to strike the first note of ‘One Too Many Mornings.’
Bob took Richard Manuel’s seat at the piano to play the toysoldier march of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ Garth Hudson spun arpeggios of sound on the organ.
There was a lull before the next song.
‘JUDAS!’
The taunt was loud, from the back of the hall. People applauded the heckler, Keele University student Keith Butler. He was upset that Bob had taken songs like ‘One Too Many Mornings’ from acoustic albums and performed them now in a radically different style.
‘I don’t believe you,’ retorted Bob, strumming the opening chords of ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ Then he became angry, retorting with vehemence: ‘You’re a LIAR!’ Bob turned to The Hawks. As they began the song, he exhorted them to ‘play fuckin’ loud.’ The music swelled toward the bridge. Bob squirmed one skinny leg up against the other, shuddering with ecstasy, as he keened: ‘How does it feel?’ Again: ‘How does it feeeeeeel?’ Jones used his heavy right foot to punish the bass drum and Hudson’s organ shimmered. Keith Butler stomped out of the theater, pausing to tell Pennebaker’s film unit that ‘pop groups could produce better rubbish than that. It was a bloody disgrace, it was. He wants shooting.’*
After concerts in Scotland, Bob and The Hawks flew to Paris, where they performed at L’Olympia on May 24 in front of an enormous Stars and Stripes. This upset members of the French audience partly because of America’s controversial involvement in the former French colony of Vietnam. Bob seemed oblivious to the politics, as usual, even though his world tour coincided with a huge escalation in the conflict in Vietnam. After large-scale U.S.A.F. bombing of North Vietnam, thousands of U.S. combat troops were sent to bolster the campaign, many of them drafted. A large protest movement was gathering momentum. On September 25, 1965, just after the start of Bob’s U.S. tour, an antiwar concert was staged at Carnegie Hall in New York featuring many of Bob’s friends, including Joan Baez, who urged young men to resist the draft. Bob was invited to participate at this and similar events, but was notable only by his absence. ‘Everybody came except Bob Dylan,’ says Izzy Young, who emceed at Carnegie Hall. ‘[Bob] wasn’t particularly active at all.’
There was also an uproar at the Paris concert when Bob seemed incapable of tuning his guitar during the acoustic part of the show. ‘He was tuning it and tuning it for a long, long time and I remember saying to Albert Grossman, “Tell him to give me the guitar and I’ll tune it for him real quickly. People are getting hostile out there,”’ says Robbie Robertson, who was in the wings. ‘It seemed like it was turning into a game. That’s why the people got upset. They thought he was just messing with their head.’ The crowd seemed relieved when The Hawks came on stage and played actual music. It was one of the few times the band was cheered and Bob’s acoustic set was booed.
The day of the Paris performance was also Bob’s birthday. Having transformed popular music and written some of the greatest songs of the century he was, amazingly, only twenty-five years old.
Despite the fact that the Manchester show became known as the Royal Albert Hall concert, the actual Albert Hall dates were two days after the Paris show, on May 26 and 27. There was a spacey feeling to the London shows, with slurred introductions and remarkable acoustic performances that sounded as if Bob was singing to himself. The vastness and grandeur of the ninety-five-year-old theater – opened by Queen Victoria and named after her Prince Consort – was hugely impressive to The Hawks, who had been playing a club in New Jersey just a few months earlier. Soon they would be transformed into The Band, one of the most celebrated groups of the era, filling great theaters on their own. This was just one of the remarkable repercussions of the extraordinary world tour that was now concluded. ‘We went from a bar band to the Albert Hall because of Bob,’ says Garth Hudson. ‘Any exaggeration would be an understatement when it comes to the help we got from Bob Dylan.’
Bob returned home from Britain exhausted. His once cherubic face was pinched; his eyes were dark; his skin was paper white; and his long pale fingers were stained with nicotine. His speaking voice was slurred with weariness, words stretched out, sentences not completed. Substances he had been taking to endure the tour had reduced him to a shadow. As Pennebaker says: ‘He was very wasted.’ Yet if Albert Grossman had his way, Bob would get back on the road in August for a sixty-four date American tour. He would be on the road interminably, until every last ticket dollar had been sucked up, or until his heart gave out and, like Hank Williams, he slumped back for the rest that never ends. All this time Bob had been doing as he was told by Grossman, but now he was starting to feel the pressure of the workload that had been put on his shoulders, and he became noticeably irritable.
Even Bob’s brief summer break was crowded with tasks. Eat the Document, which ABC-TV wanted to screen, was miles of non-sensical footage with a sound track that did not synchronize. Bob wanted Pennebaker to edit the film. Pennebaker had little enthusiasm for what was essentially Bob’s home movie, but he and Bobby Neuwirth made a rough cut. Bob thought it too much like Dont Look Back, and decided to recut it himself, using equipment Pennebaker sent up to Hi Lo Ha, and employing Howard Alk as his assistant. Dylan and Alk worked night and day on the film, but though he clearly wanted to be a film director when he assumed control of Eat the Document, and he would try his hand at directing in years to come with other projects, Bob was no filmmaker. ‘It’s not something you learn parking cars in a garage. You gotta know some of the rules,’ says Pennebaker. ‘And he didn’t know any of the rules.’ Bob hacked up the original footage to make a rough cut, which ABC-TV would ultimately reject because it was believed it would be incomprehensible to a mainstream audience, indeed to almost any audience. In the process, Bob destroyed valuable original film, including concert recordings. Pennebaker asked Bob’s office if he could make a duplicate, so that raw footage would at least be preserved for posterity, but he was met with indifference. He was in dispute with Grossman at the time, over money owed for Dont Look Back. As Pennebaker says: ‘It got to be a little nasty.’
There were other pressures. Macmillan was about to publish the long-promised book, Tarantula, which it turned out was not the Dylan novel many had been expecting. The book was comprised of short segments of unpunctuated free-form verse. Familiar phrases from song lyrics appeared, together with a cast of famous names. Sometimes the imagery was startling, and parts were funny, but it was the least commercial book imaginable – a hundred and thirty-seven pages of liner notes for a Dylan album that did not exist. Macmillan had printed Tarantula button badges and Tarantula shopping bags as part of a major promotional campaign. When Bob saw the galley proofs he had second thoughts about the whole project and told Macmillan he wanted to make changes. They gave him two weeks.
As if the film, the book, and the upcoming tour were not enough to think about, Grossman was attempting to renegotiate Bob’s contract with Columbia, and Columbia in turn wanted a new record from Bob. It was all too much.
ON THE MORNING of Friday July 29, 1966, Bob and Sara were leaving the Grossmans’ Bearsville house. Bob had retrieved an old motorcycle from the garage and wanted to ride it to a repair shop. Sara followed him in a car. As they pulled out of the drive, Sally Grossman was in the hall talking by telephone to Albert, who was at his office in Manhattan. She was still speaking with Albert a short time later when Sara’s car reappeared in the drive. ‘Hold on,’ she told Albert, as she saw Bob emerge from the car. Apparently, he was hurt. ‘He was kind of moaning and groaning.’
Bob came up to the house and ’sort of lay down on the porch.’ When Sally came closer, Sara told her excitedly, ‘Keep away from him!’ Sally gathered that Bob had ’slipped off the bike’ – which was nowhere to be seen – and hurt himself. Yet he was not cut or obviously roughed up. The only evidence he was hurt was his moans of pain. Sally went back to the telephone to tell Albert what was happening.
What exactly happened to Dylan after he rode out of the Grossmans’ property that morning has remained extraordinarily mysterious. Despite the fact that it seems to have been a fairly minor fall off a motorbike – and Bob, with his poor eyesight, was known for his haphazard road skills – the incident seethes with intrigue. There are contradictory accounts of where exactly the accident happened, and even whether there was an ‘accident’ at all. This is because the timing was very convenient for Bob; the accident gave Dylan an excuse to get out of the numerous business commitments then threatening to overwhelm him.
There certainly was an accident, or rather an incident. But it was not as serious as was reported at the time. Sally Grossman, who has never previously discussed the matter publicly and is a key witness to part of the events of that day, believes it occurred on Glasco Turnpike, the country road that led from Bearsville to Bob’s house in Byrdcliffe. A close friend of Bob, who wishes to remain anonymous, says the accident happened on Striebel Road, which runs directly outside the Grossman property. The source says Bob later admitted to him that when he came out of the Grossmans’ drive, onto the steep and slippery Striebel Road, he simply lost his balance and, rather feebly, fell off his bike. The bike then fell on top of him. In a quite different version of what happened, former Woodstock constable Charlie Wolven recollects Bob being involved in an accident several miles away, on Zena Road, near the hamlet of Saugerties, at a sharply twisting S-shaped bend. Although Wolven says he was called to do traffic duty after an accident here, and he thinks the accident involved Bob, he did not see Bob and there is no police report of Bob being involved in an accident on Zena Road. It seems very unlikely that this was the fabled accident. Apart from anything else, it would be almost impossible for Bob to ride to Zena Road and have Sara bring him back to Bearsville in the short time Sally was on the telephone with Albert. ‘I know it wasn’t that long a time, because I was standing in my hallway talking to Albert when they pulled out, and still talking to him [when] they came back.’ Considering all the evidence, it seems almost certain that the accident happened very close to the Grossman property, probably on Striebel Road or a little farther on, perhaps at Glasco Turnpike.
Subsequent press reports stated that Bob was rendered unconscious, broke his neck, and was almost killed. Yet by Sally’s account, there were no obvious injuries and Bob was conscious. Furthermore, if Bob was that badly injured common sense has it he would have been rushed to the nearest general hospital, only fifteen minutes away in Kingston. But Sally confirms that no ambulance was called. Neither were there any police. Most important, Bob’s doctor, Ed Thaler, now reveals that Sara did not take Bob to the hospital. She drove Bob directly from the Grossman property to Dr. Thaler’s house-cum-surgery in Middletown, fully fifty miles away. This was a grueling one-hour drive by country roads, not a journey for a man in dire need of medical help.
As Bob lay in Dr. Thaler’s surgery, radio stations across the country flashed dramatic news that Bob Dylan – an artist at the height of his fame and creative powers – had been in a motorcycle wreck. The New York Times reported that Bob’s injuries were so serious he was forced to cancel a concert in New Haven scheduled for the following Saturday. In this way the first part of a remarkable career drew to a close.
CHAPTER 6
COUNTRY WAYS
LIFE HAD MOVED FAST since Bob arrived in New York from Minnesota in 1961. Following the motorcycle accident of 1966 there was a period of slowing down and reassessment. In many ways the accident was a blessing. ‘I was pretty wound up before that accident happened,’ he later said. ‘I probably would have died if I had kept on going the way I had been.’
The true extent of Bob’s injuries is still unclear. By Bob’s own account, he suffered several broken vertebrae in the accident. Friends saw him wearing a neck brace for a while and say he received ultrasound treatment. He complained of back pain, and took up swimming again partly as therapy. So there is evidence that he had suffered some injury and lasting effects. At the same time, however, he did not require intensive medical treatment.
Bob chose to stay with Dr. Ed Thaler in Middletown for six weeks following the accident. This was despite the fact that he had a comfortable home of his own in Woodstock, and a wife and child waiting for him. Dr. Thaler denies the suggestion that Bob used this time to wean himself off drugs. ‘He did not come here regarding any situation involving detoxification.’ Dr. Thaler’s wife Selma says Bob used their house rather as a refuge, a place where he could have sanctuary from the press. ‘He had some kind of anonymity here. As it turns out the people next door had a teenaged daughter who recognized him, [but] nobody bothered him and they certainly would have in [Woodstock] … maybe we being ten years older than Bob [was] reminiscent of his childhood,’ says Selma Thaler. ‘The house was peaceful [and] he felt comfortable here. His friends were able to visit him. Nobody stalked anybody… He could be alone. I don’t know whether he was writing or thinking or what he was doing, but it was away from [his] ordinary daily life – and I think that provided some peace of mind.’
In the summer of 1966, after an exhausting tour of her own, Odetta visited Dr. Thaler for personal reasons, stating, ‘I needed a dose of my Thalers.’ She discovered Bob was living in a spare room on the third floor. ‘Eddie and Selma had the [room] made so it was like his apartment,’ she says. When Odetta sat down with Bob to talk, he was well enough to complain about artists recording cover versions of his songs with mistakes in the lyrics. ‘He was well on his way to being whole again.’
The convalescence coincided with the expiration of Bob’s contract with Columbia Records. Bob considered switching to M.G.M., for a reputed $1 million advance, and actually signed a contract at one point. But M.G.M. executives had second thoughts and were slow to countersign. Tarantula was another problem. Bob now realized he had embarked on the book for the wrong reasons. As he said, he had agreed to write a book simply because a publisher had offered to publish him. He did not, however, really have a book to write. ‘I just put down all these words and sent them off to my publishers and they‘d send back the galleys, and I’d be so embarrassed at the nonsense I’d written I’d change the whole thing.’ Publication was postponed for the foreseeable future.
After fully recuperating, Bob settled down to a relatively quiet domestic life at Hi Lo Ha. A few friends visited, including Allen Ginsberg, who brought a parcel of books. D. A. Pennebaker found Bob engaged in editing Eat the Document. ‘He didn’t seem in peril particularly,’ says Pennebaker. ‘The accident was, to some extent, a period when he was resting up from whatever traumas he was enduring.’ Partly for security, Bob and Sara acquired two huge dogs that lived in a large kennel at the entrance to their property. Their first pet was a giant poodle named Hamlet. The second was an aggressive Saint Bernard they called Buster. Next to the dogs’ kennel on the drive was a sign that warned PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING.
In addition to editing Eat the Document, Bob decided to shoot additional scenes that he thought might be used in that film or for another project he had vaguely in mind, and he invited friends to come to Woodstock to act with him. Rick Danko and Richard Manuel arrived in February 1967. Since Bob’s accident, The Hawks had been a road band without a road to go on, kicking their heels at the Hotel Chelsea. They were still on the payroll and Bob did not know quite what to do with them. Snow was thick on the ground when Danko and Manuel got to Woodstock, giving the town the look of the penultimate scenes of Bob’s favorite film, Shoot the Piano Player. Streams were frozen like glass, and roofs were covered in sparkling white blankets of snow. Danko and Manuel got up at five each morning to work with Bob in the first hours of daylight. ‘That was really my first exposure to Woodstock,’ says Danko, ‘in the wintertime, shooting the snow.’ The other Hawks drifted upstate, lodging initially at the Woodstock Motel. Eccentric performer Tiny Tim became part of the gang. Bob had an idea about working with ‘Mr. Tim,’ as he laconically called him, on what Pennebaker describes as ‘a circus film.’ Tim was also involved in a Peter Yarrow film called You Are What You Eat. ‘Everybody thought you could make money in films after Dont Look Back,’ says Pennebaker. ‘But it seemed very unorganized and casual and off the wall.’
When the light faded each day, Danko and Manuel met friends in a local restaurant. The restaurateur had a house to rent near the hamlet of West Saugerties. ‘She wanted $275 a month. It was in the middle of a hundred acres, a lot of privacy. The way she explained it, it was beautiful,’ says Danko. The house was a large split-level building, painted the color of a strawberry milk shake. Danko decided it would be better than living in a motel. ‘So Garth, Richard, and myself moved into Big Pink,’ he says, using the name they would give to the property. Robbie Robertson rented a separate place with his girlfriend Dominique. Levon Helm was still estranged from the group, presently drifting around the south.
