BEFORE: It's finally here, the big Summer Music Concert (and Documentary) series. It's delayed, sure, and right now in the real world there are no rock concerts taking place, except for virtual ones, so maybe what I'm doing in some small way can help fill that gap. For me, of course, you're on your own - but it's a great time if you want to play along at home, or watch some great rock concerts that you've seen in the past, or hey, just put on your favorite live album and think about all the money you're saving by NOT buying overpriced tickets, $40 t-shirts and $12 beers. And you won't have a cleaning bill after somebody in the stands throws up on you after drinking too many $12 beers.
You may recall I did a MASSIVE dive into rock music documentaries two years ago - over 50 films, and yes, they were all linked together, of course, because it turns out that once you get into documentaries about the Beatles or the Stones the filmmakers all end up interviewing many of the same people, plus you can't do a rock doc without archive footage of McCartney or Jagger popping up somewhere in it. So that little magic trick of mine was really much easier than I made it look - but that's all magic tricks, right?
But in that deep documentary dive, I kind of neglected Bob Dylan - partially because I'd already seen "Don't Look Back" and "I'm Not There", and also because the Dylan films I'm about to watch now just weren't available to me yet. I meant no disrespect, I was just working with the material I had, starting with the Beatles and then I radiated out via the linking to Clapton, Hendrix, Chicago (yes, that progression makes sense...), Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and The Doors (umm, that progression made sense at the time...). Whew, and that was just part 1 of 4! Part 2 covered everyone from Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga to Glen Campbell, George Michael, Whitney Houston and Joe Cocker. Let's call that the "In Memoriam" section, except for Lady Gaga, of course.
Part 3 kicked off with a comprehensive documentary about the Eagles, then covered Clive Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, James Brown, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, the Who, and circled back to George Harrison for his tribute concert. And Part 4 started with David Bowie and then veered into heavier stuff like Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and it all wrapped up with Rush's farewell concert. What a whirlwind it was - but see what I mean, where the hell was Bob Dylan? And as you may imagine, since then I've watched a couple docs here and there, like "Quincy", when they fit into the chain, but still, they've been building up ever since, and I've tried to keep track of who's in them, so I could link together as many as I could - I think I've got an even dozen linked together, the only trick was linking in and out of this chain.
To start us off, Sharon Stone links in from "Sphere", and I'm not exactly sure what role she has here, maybe she's just glimpsed in the audience at a Bob Dylan concert, who knows. But I'm about to find out. One other thing you need to know about this Summer Music Concert series, it's going to end in disaster and ruin. Fair warning.
THE PLOT: In an alchemic mix of fact and fantasy, Martin Scorsese looks back at Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a country ripe for reinvention.
AFTER: Before I get any further, some behind-the-scenes business to take care of - I have to go into a different mode once I hit the documentary section of the year, because the IMDB doesn't do a great job of keeping track of who appears in docs, especially when it comes to archive footage. Someone like a U.S. President or a newscaster, who might pop up in a documentary through the use of licensed video footage, won't show up in IMDB's search engine, for that web-site's purposes, a news clip of Richard Nixon doesn't always count as an "appearance". But for some reason, a credit as a songwriter or a vocal performer on a soundtrack DOES count to the IMDB, but for my purposes, if that person didn't appear on camera, it doesn't count as an "appearance" (umm, except for animation voice-work and other recorded voice work, those credits count to me). "Appearance" implies that the person was SEEN and recorded for this movie, or was SEEN (or heard) in archive footage. So for a prominent musician like Bob Dylan, interview footage counts, old concert or news footage counts, but playing a Dylan song in the background of a scene doesn't. Got it? I now have to keep a separate document with a running total, because I can't trust the IMDB's search engines for this, if I want an accurate count of how many times each actor or singer "appeared", according to my rules.
Well, we might as well start with the Sharon Stone thing - she appears here in an interview where she claims to have gone to see Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour in 1975, with her mother. (Jesus, who goes to a rock concert with their mother, how embarrassing. Did her mother get busy with a roadie to get them backstage?) In an act of defiance, she wore a KISS t-shirt to a Dylan concert, which just seems like bad form. Everyone knows you either wear a t-shirt of the act you're seeing that night, or no band shirt at all. Would you go to a Beyoncé concert and wear a Nicki Minaj shirt? But allegedly this led to a conversation between Dylan and a 17-year old Sharon Stone, where they discussed KISS and Japanese kabuki and other things - because yes, Sharon Stone got backstage, and later claimed to have met Dylan again later and became some kind of backstage muse and/or wardrobe assistant (more on this in a bit...)
Now is where I have to admit to being a lacking dilettante when it comes to Bob Dylan's music. I only know what appears on his "Greatest Hits" compilations, but at least I own all three of them. I know true fans know all the deep cuts, and even have the entire "official bootleg" series, but I'm just not that guy. There's no question to me that this man changed pop culture and the music scene, several times in fact, but there are HUGE gaps in my Bob Dylan knowledge. I know early Dylan (thanks to Greatest Hits 1) and I paid attention to the "Traveling Wilburys" phase because I was a fan of George Harrison and Tom Petty. And I saw Bob Dylan perform live once, at a Dave Letterman anniversary show, of all places - it was an all-star performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" at Radio City Music Hall, put together by Paul Shaffer of course, and it was, well, completely incoherent. My first impression of Bob Dylan live was not good, because he was always a line of the song behind the band, I don't know if he was drunk or stoned or just goddamn sick of that song, but I was not impressed. But they had two seatings of the show, so the song was recorded twice, and the one that aired was clearly not the one that I saw live. (This was January 1992, and you can now watch that performance on YouTube - I had an uncle who had ALWAYS wanted to see Dylan live, and I made that bucket list item happen for him.). Watch it and you'll see what I mean - it's like the band is playing one song, and Dylan was singing another, yet it is the SAME SONG.
So here's what I know about Bob Dylan - you just can't tell him what to do, how to be, because he's just going to go ahead and do it the way he wants to do it. This was confirmed for me later on when I watched that four-hour documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (I was home sick one day, this was back before starting the blog in 2009) and Petty talked about being the backing band for Dylan on a joint tour. They had to be ready on any given night to play any song from the set-list the way Dylan wanted to do it. If he said, "OK, guys, let's do "Just Like a Woman" in the style of a fast waltz...", they had to be ready for that. Or here comes "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" with a bossa-nova beat, shit, let's try it, that might work. This is what an artist does, or should do - he should be allowed to constantly re-invent himself and his work, on a whim, and never get bored with what he's doing. If he's bored, something's wrong, and then why do it? He'd rather try something new, or something old in a new way, and have that sound awful, rather than just get stuck singing the same songs the same way until the end of time. Maybe this is why so many rock legends die at age 27, because they're staring down a life of singing their hits the same way for the next 40 years, and becoming a lounge act or a joke, so they blow their brains out, or do themselves in with drugs and alcohol, just to avoid a future of tedium.
And that's a bit of what "Rolling Thunder Revue" is about - Dylan, of course, had re-invented himself before, most notoriously by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. After several acoustic albums that were received well, and being labelled "the spokesman of a generation", Dylan decided to change his sound and sing with an electric guitar, and this was not received well. I think I'll learn more about this in tomorrow's film, but for changing his sound, Dylan was called "Judas" and booed by fans, but when you look at the big picture, this was just one small part of a constant process of re-invention in his career. He even says at the start of today's film that an artist has to be in a constant state of motion, he gets up each day and not only creates art or music, but creates himself. You know he wasn't born "Bob Dylan", right? He was Robert Zimmerman from Minneapolis, and he moved to New York, changed his name, his look, his sound, everything. He built himself from the ground up, so who the heck are the fans to tell him what to do, how to sound, what to say, how to act? Just buy the records, or don't, and shut the hell up.
Anyway, after the bad experiences on the 1965-66 tour, and a subsequent motorcycle accident, Dylan didn't tour for a while - but he still put out albums, alternately entertaining and confusing his fans. It wasn't until 1974 that he put a live touring band together again (they became known as "The Band", more on them in a couple days) and after that tour ended, he once again decided to do something different, which came to be called "Rolling Thunder Revue". This would be an assembly of different performers from the Greenwich Village folk scene, touring the nation in 1975, playing smaller venues in smaller towns, gradually leading up to the Bicentennial celebration. And it started in Plymouth, Mass, symbolically I guess, then circled around the Northeast and Canada in the fall of 1975, culminating in a big concert in Madison Square Garden, NYC, where Dylan made a very public plea for leniency at a benefit concert for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, falsely imprisoned for murder in 1966.
(The second half of the tour was in Spring 1976, and covered the southern and southwestern U.S., but we're only concerned today with the first half of the tour...)
The music here, for me at least, is beyond reproach. The hits I knew from the "early" Dylan catalog ("A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", "When I Paint My Masterpiece", "She Belongs to Me") were, by this point, probably on their third or fourth re-invention, and since he had assembled a rock band, were played hard in a fast tempo - otherwise Dylan himself would probably have been in danger of falling asleep on stage. And I think the point of this exercise was to play folk songs in a rock style, thereby ideally combining the best of the two worlds - having something to say, and saying it in a modern style that people might want to hear, not just as flat, boring folk tunes. (My wife loves to make this joke about early Bob Dylan - he sang, played guitar and harmonica at the same time. But put a pair of cymbals between his knees, and he'd be regarded as ridiculous.)
But eventually, near the end of the film, I started to realize that not all of what I was being told could possibly be true, which seems to be an odd direction for a documentary to take. The appearance of Michael Murphy as "Congressman Tanner" is what tipped the scales for me. Hey, isn't that a fictional character from Robert Altman's acclaimed cable series "Tanner '88"? Why, yes it is. How could this be? This man does not exist, yet he claims to have attended a Bob Dylan concert near Niagara Falls, or gotten tickets from Jimmy Carter or something. Next you're probably going to tell me that Dylan didn't drive his own tour Winnebago (yeah, unlikely) and Sharon Stone never worked behind the scenes in the wardrobe department when she was 18 (umm, she didn't.). So what, in fact is going on here?
Once you notice this, the whole storyline begins to unravel. That guy who claims to have been hired to follow Dylan around as the director of an eventual failed concert film? Yeah, he's an actor. I tend to believe the stories of the concert promoter and the band members, but then some other scenes start to appear staged as well, like the "private" conversation between Dylan and ex-girlfriend Joan Baez, during which they hash out the fact that they've both gotten married since they last sang together, and it's a bit like a double-betrayal, so everything's equal and OK. Come on, now...
My suspicions include the following: at the start of the film, when asked about the Rolling Thunder Tour, Dylan claims to not remember a thing. This is very possible, when you consider how well funded this tour was, the fact that it was 1975, and they probably had connections to get the BEST drugs. The other factor to consider is that rockers had learned by this time to control their own narrative, like how the Beatles had those fake press conference answers in "A Hard Day's Night". They're hilarious, sure, but were they improvised? Probably not.
Also, consider that some of the directions that the Rolling Thunder Revue fired in turned out to be complete duds. Writer Sam Shepard was hired to follow the tour to produce...well, something of note, apparently, only he never really felt connected to the music or inspired enough to create anything tangible. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also part of the revue, but frankly, I'm not a fan - I know, I know, some people swear by the poem "Howl" and "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked", but I just don't give a rat's ass. I don't know what it means, I don't WANT to know what it means. His work is overrated, and by 1975 what had he produced lately? He was out on tour with Dylan because he was aware that rockers were the new poets, and he desperately wanted to BE Bob Dylan, or be LIKE Bob Dylan. I think Dylan realized that Ginsberg's time had passed, because by the end of the tour's first half, Ginsberg's role had been reduced to that of baggage handler, roadie for the band and its entourage. Assuming that this documentary is to believed on that point, anyway, but I can't think of a better use for Ginsberg's skills.
(I walked away from "Rolling Thunder Revue" convinced that somehow, someday, the part of Allen Ginsberg really needs to be played by actor David Cross. Then I did a little research and remembered that this already happened, in the film "I'm Not There". I must have remembered that on a sub-conscious level, because I watched that film. Since then, I've worked my way through the whole series of "Arrested Development", so I essentially circled back to that other Dylan film without realizing it. I'm glad that the universe somehow accommodated my casting whim, before I even had it.)
So, without a consistent narrative for what happened on the Rolling Thunder tour when the band WASN'T playing, Dylan and director Martin Scorsese apparently felt the need to substitute their own reality. And after some debate, I've decided to be OK about it - because this is what an artist does, and another re-invention, even a re-invention of historical events, is on some level just par for the course. All performers are liars, to some degree. Writers and poets are liars, musicians are liars, filmmakers are liars, and magicians are liars. I'd say magicians are the biggest liars of all, except for Penn and Teller, who are least honest about the fact that they're going to lie to you, I've always admired that about them. Like them, Bob Dylan has a career that's long and successful enough that I'm not going to tell him what he can and can't do. If he wants to present a false narrative about a tour that happened 45 years ago, I think he's earned that right to some degree. Plus, as I learned from personal experience, Dylan's going to do what he wants to do, however he wants to do it, and he doesn't give a fuck about that.
I'd say this could be a commentary on reality TV or the widespread use of social media, where everything that's supposedly "real" is just part of what some celebrity WANTS everyone to know about them, and everything that's sad or unpopular just never gets mentioned at all, but Bob Dylan's way too cool for that. This man was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the basis of his songwriting, which just simply DOES NOT happen for anyone else, and then he couldn't be bothered to comment on the occasion, or show up for the public ceremony to accept the prize. He's going to do exactly what he wants to do, exactly how he wants to do it. Just shut up and stay out of his way.
Still, I think on one small level I might have preferred this as a concert film, with the main focus on the performances, in order, without interruption. Maybe a couple breaks to show us footage from the tour, or anecdotes from Dylan or Joan Baez in 2019 to tell us what he remembers about the show, even if that isn't much. That would go down easier for me than faked interview footage shot by Martin Scorsese that's essentially a lame magic trick. (And filmmaking's nothing but a big magic trick and/or a pile of lies, too, but at least I can usually figure out how the tricks are done.). I'm going to check YouTube now to see if there's a complete performance from the Rolling Thunder tour available, just to listen to it, without the film's connective tissue.
Plus, why the need to include EVERY SINGLE Bob Dylan tour and show since 1975 in the closing credits? I mean, really, before we even see the cast list we're shown a breakdown of every tour he's done, but to what end? We get it, the man's performed thousands of concerts - why do I need to know that he played at Soldier Field in Chicago in March of 1991? It adds nothing to the story, and just buries me under information I don't need. Can't we just keep the focus on the tour from 1975-76?
(EDIT: Yesterday, July 20, was the 55th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's single "Like a Rolling Stone, in 1965. I was checking famous birthdays, but I probably should have kept a closer eye on web-sites that feature "This Day in Rock History", I'll try to do a better job of that during the rest of the documentary chain.)
Also starring Bob Dylan (last seen in "Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine"), Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Martin von Haselberg, Scarlet Rivera, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Larry "Ratso" Sloman, James Gianopulos, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Sam Shepard (last seen in "Darling Companion"), David Mansfield (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Ronnie Hawkins (ditto), T-Bone Burnett (ditto), Anne Waldman, Ronee Blakley (last seen in "Nashville'), Joni Mitchell, Chief Rolling Thunder, Chief Mad Bear, Peter La Farge, Michael Murphy (last seen in "The Year of Living Dangerously"), Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Roberta Flack, Bob Neuwirth, Luther Rix, Mick Ronson (last seen in "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World"), J. Steven Soles, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth, Jacques Levy, Denise Mercedes, Eric Andersen, Barry Imhoff, Louie Kemp, Claudia Levy, Peter Orlovsky, Gordon Lightfoot, George Moran, Walter Yetnikoff,
with archive footage of Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, Bill Graham (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Rev. Billy Graham (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Bette Midler (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Bombshell"), Gene Simmons (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Paul Stanley (last seen in "The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years").
RATING: 7 out of 10 pointless rambling Patti Smith stories
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