Bob and Joan and Scarlett and Joni... Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue

Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Dylan, Mick Ronson, Ronee Blakley, David Mansfield

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue movie is a magical snapshot of a musical legend. How can something so special have been kept under wraps for so long?

The film footage of Bob Dylan's 1975/76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour has been available in unofficial rough-looking clips in the Youtube era. Some of it was even included in Dylan's obscure and quite awful 1978 film 'Renaldo and Clara'.

But it's taken over 40 years for the full treatment to be given to this unique gathering. Thankfully, Scorsese was at hand to work his magic on it. It's not perfect, and on second viewing I skipped over the fake narrative bits. But the concert footage is just so vivid it's almost breathtaking.

Just as he did with 'No Direction Home', his documentary on Dylan's early career, Scorsese has collated this amazingly vibrant footage to showcase Dylan's remarkable artistry and charisma.

Rolling Thunder Revue contains some of the most thrilling performances of Dylan's long career. If you liked the 'Desire' album, it's a kick seeing many of those songs performed by the same band, with the same intensity and warmth. On stage, Dylan is more animated than he's ever been.

It's a lot of fun to watch. The up-to-date Dylan is as enigmatic as ever and there's a lot of his customary misdirection in the narrative. But the real riches lie in the onstage and backstage interactions. You get a strong sense of the collective spirit among the musicians involved.

Joan Baez has a strong supporting role, as do several other women on the tour, such as violinist Scarlett Rivera, singer Ronee Blakley and the amazing Joni Mitchell.

The relationship between Bob and Joan Baez has an enduring fascination. It is one of the great examples of unrequited love in the history of art. Bob used Joan as his jumping off platform early in his career - she invited him to share her stage and became his muse and his musical sidekick.

But, as we saw in the movie Don't Look Back ten years earlier, Joan’s love for Bob goes way beyond the music and it's really not clear how far Bob's love for Joan extends. The interaction in Rolling Thunder Revue, where they discuss how their lives diverged in the mid-60s, is poignant because it's clear even then that Joan still holds a candle for him.

Bob and Joan in the early 1960s

Dylan acknowledged the debt he owed to Baez, but he did a poor job of repaying it in 1965, when Joan accompanied him to the UK. It was fairly obvious he didn't want her there. The circus that surrounded him just made her feel even more marginalised.

Bob would later say he was just trying to deal with the craziness of his life at that point; and it was crazy. Joan should never have gone with him to the UK. She described it as hell (everyone else was on drugs - she was straight). And Bob didn't - as she had expected - reciprocate Joan's generosity by inviting her onstage to perform with him.

For more insight into their complex relationship, I'd recommend David Hadju's excellent book 'Positively 4th Street'. It interweaves Bob and Joan's lives and their relationship, with Joan's sister Mimi and her partner Richard Fariña.

For her part, Joan was guilty only of blind devotion. As Hadju's book notes: "This gorgeous woman, who is an icon in her own right, latches onto you and says, 'I'll be your everything, including being your lover'. She adopted him. She found this guy who gave voice to all that powerful stuff, and she nurtured him in that role. He made out on every level."

Hadju's book also gives a glimpse of their happier side, noting how they had a similar sense of the absurd and at times it appeared as if they were having a private joke against the world. "A lovely thing was happening and I didn't want it to end," she said later.

Joni not easily intimidated

The most noteworthy cameo in Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue comes from Joni Mitchell. We see her playing an early version of Coyote - which appeared on her next album Hejira - in an upstairs room at Gordon Lightfoot's house in Toronto.

She had just written the song and the words are ever so slightly different, on the section "he's got a woman at home...". It's astonishing that all these years later we get to see it like this. Joni handles the situation with such assurance. How many other artists could have done that - come into Dylan's world and match him stride for stride?

Joni said, "I joined Rolling Thunder as a spectator. I would have been content to follow it for three cities just as an observer, but since I was there I was asked to participate. Then, for mystical reasons of my own, I made a pact with myself that I would stay on until it was over. 

"It was a trial of sorts for me. I went out in a foot soldier position. I made up songs onstage. I sang in French, badly. I did a lot of things to prevent myself from getting in the way. What was in it for me hadn’t anything to do with applause or the performing aspect. It was simply to be allowed to remain an observer and a witness to an incredible spectacle."

Sensibly, she requested that any footage of her not be used in Renaldo & Clara. "I preferred to be invisible. I’ve got my own reasons why."

Although Joni obviously enjoyed the experience, it took a toll on her health and caused her to cancel some of her own shows soon after. She said, "Rolling Thunder was mad. Heavy drama, no sleep – a circus. (Afterwards) I had bronchitis. A bone in my spine was out of place and was pinching like crazy. So I was in physical pain."

Dylan and Scarlett Rivera

The other key female interaction among the musicians on the tour was the mysterious violinist Scarlett Rivera. She provides wonderful accompaniment to Dylan on stage, showing a fine sense of taste in her playing on several of the featured performances.

She describes their meeting in the movie as an audition followed by a surreal evening jamming with Muddy Waters at the Bottom Line club in New York.

Dylan had such faith in Rivera's ability that she became the foil for all his recording and live dates during this highly productive time, including a memorable performance of Simple Twist of Fate, Hurricane and Oh Sister at a tribute TV show for legendary CBS executive, John Hammond, the man who signed Dylan.

The recording of the album Desire involved the other core musicians on the Rolling Thunder Tour, bassist Rob Stoner, drummer Howie Wyeth and guitarist singer Bob Neuwirth. But it was Rivera who captivated everyone, by virtue of the amazing musical understanding she had with Dylan. 

The song 'One More Cup of Coffee', for example, was recorded in one take. Emmylou Harris was caught off-guard by this and had wanted another run-through to get her vocal right. But that was it. Bob was happy with the first one. Onto the next song. 

The insight and magic shown in the Rolling Thunder Revue movie is quite unbelievable for those of us who have lived with the music and legend for over 40 years. I still have my copy of Sam Shepherd's Rolling Thunder Logbook and the movie fills in a lot of the gaps in Shepherd's sketches of the tour, like Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visiting Jack Kerouac's grave.

As a follow-on from Scorsese's No Direction Home, which finished after Bob's 1966 tour of the UK - and his withdrawal from music - the Rolling Thunder Revue is a perfect complement.

A bonus item this, from Acoustic Guitar magazine (see my recommended blogs at the side here) is a clip of Bob and Joan in 1976 on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, duetting on Blowin' In The Wind.

Joan Baez talks about Dylan and her activist life on Desert Island Discs.

For more on life on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue, check out this interview with tour manager Chris O'Dell.  

ALSO ON THIS BLOG:
Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's artistic peak in the 1960s 

Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton at Blackbushe, UK 1978

Why Powerage is AC/DC's best album

What is the definitive AC/DC album? Most casual fans probably think Back In Black or Highway To Hell is their best. Purists, and especially those who consider Bon Scott era the best vintage, will tell you that Powerage is the winner.

And they'd be right.

All the great rock bands reach a point where they are locked in tight and rocking at their majestic best - but it doesn’t last forever. It may not even coincide with their most successful period commercially.

Powerage came out in 1978, just as AC/DC had their first big hit single in the UK, Rock n Roll Damnation. I bought the 12” single and found I preferred the b-side, Sin City. It led me to one of the greatest rock albums ever.

I got Powerage when it came out and instantly fell in love with its perfect mix of riff-rockin boogie and tall tales from the pen of legendary singer Bon Scott. As a collection of songs, especially the UK vinyl version that kicks off with Gimme A Bullet, it is programmed to perfection. (see my recent Nick Drake piece for more on album track sequencing).

Powerage was the last AC/DC album produced by Vanda and Young and marks the point at which the marketing people at Atlantic Records started to really push them, getting them on Top Of The Pops to promote their hit single and making plans to hire a top name producer for their next album.

The weekly music paper 'Sounds' (was it Sylvie Simmons?) gave Powerage a 5-star review, hailing it as the point at which AC/DC had hit the nail firmly on the head.

As a rock album, it has just the right combination of ballsy energy and production values - not quite as polished as Highway or BIB but with better quality material over the entire album. And the band are tight, almost funky at times on this. With new bass player Cliff Williams and the great Phil Rudd on drums, the band moved up several notches in the quality of their delivery.

Later versions of the album put Rock N Roll Damnation as the lead-off track. But the first pressings of Powerage in the UK, the core market for AC/DC as they were breaking through, led with Gimme A Bullet, followed by Downpayment Blues, Gone Shootin' and Riff Raff. Side two was Sin City, Up To My Neck in You, What's Next To The Moon, Cold-hearted Man and Kicked In The Teeth.

It's a rocking album from first to last, but with just a hint of blues, a bounce from the rhythm section and a real step-up in the lyrics front from Bon.

It wasn’t as successful sales-wise as the following albums and was rather unfairly dismissed for years because of the subsequent success of Highway to Hell and Back in Black. But if you want to hear that point where AC/DC are at their majestic best, give Powerage a listen. From beginning to end, it just rocks.

Also on this blog:

Who's Next - Lightning In A Bottle

Deep Purple's Smoke on The Water - 50 years on

Robin Trower - Crossing the Bridge of Sighs

Nick Drake - better programming might have helped

As this weekend marks the annual pilgrimage of Nick Drake’s most devoted fans to Tanworth-In-Arden - the village in Warwickshire where his family lived - I thought I would explain my contention that his records were perhaps not presented optimally.

I fell in love with Nick's music for the guitar playing, and specifically the harmonic richness of his sound through the use of alternate tunings. I don't think enough was made of his pure talent as a guitarist during his short career.

After he died, in November 1974, I had read Nick Kent’s NME long-form obituary, ‘Requiem For A Solitary Man’, which familiarised many people with his story, if not his music. Even that excellent piece wasn’t enough to generate more interest and sales of Nick’s three albums, Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970) and Pink Moon (1972). For myself, I knew them then, but I only grew to love them later.  

In the mid-80s I bought a cassette copy of an Island Records retrospective called ‘Heaven In A Wild Flower - An Exploration Of Nick Drake‘. I played it constantly (you remember how cassettes in your car stereo would loop continuously). It is pretty much ‘The Best Of Nick Drake’, cherry-picking tracks from the three albums in roughly chronological order.

My copy of Nick's first album

For me, the key to this new appreciation was the sequencing - the order of the songs. Heaven In A Wild Flower works so well as a compilation because there's a seamless musical arc created by the first few songs. 

It also, from the outset, highlights Nick Drake the guitarist. His first album, Five Leaves Left, begins with the song Time Has Told Me. I've never understood why this song was featured so prominently, here and on subsequent sampler albums. To me it's a lacklustre and rather old-fashioned arrangement. It certainly doesn't highlight Nick's guitar playing at all.

Heaven In A Wild Flower begins instead with Fruit Tree, a beguiling introduction to Nick Drake’s world, previously hidden away on side two of Five Leaves Left.

Above all else, Nick was an excellent acoustic guitar player, and that slightly hesitant, exploratory guitar line at the beginning of Fruit Tree is your doorway into his bedroom at the family's grand Warwickshire home, Far Leys, where he worked up most of his early songs.

Cello Song was track 2 on ‘Heaven…’ upping the tempo and building the intrigue with a more assertive guitar figure and some inspired accompaniment from bassist Danny Thompson and conga player Rocky Dzidzornu. Then comes ‘Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, with its lilting pastoral melody. Over the first three tracks, a variety of moods have already been created.

Not taking anything away from the individual songs on Five Leaves Left - River Man and Three Hours especially are astonishingly accomplished pieces. Song programming is so important on records, though, and I genuinely believe that if Five Leaves Left had been programmed differently, it would have been more successful.

And it very nearly was.

The original master tape box for Five Leaves Left has a suggested alternative numbering for the tracks, as follows:

Side One

Fruit Tree

Cello Song

Thoughts of Mary Jane.......

River Man is suggested as track 5, instead of track 2 as it appears on Five Leaves Left.

I’d have been hooked on Nick’s music much sooner if Fruit Tree had been the first track on Five Leaves Left. The song programming could certainly have been better. I’d like to believe that is why Heaven In A Wildflower is programmed as it is, because Joe Boyd, or someone at Island, decided to try the sequencing suggested on the original tape box. 

 

Having said all the above, this new bid to gain acceptance for Nick Drake in the 1980s made not the slightest difference to his sales numbers. The compilation was actually deleted by the time Drake's music started to really become popular in the late 1990s. You'd think the sheer quality of the songs would have been enough to gain wider recognition. 

 

An original pressing of the second album, Bryter Layter,
with the two posthumous compilations on cassette, all quite rare today

Around the same time in the 1980s, I bought a compilation issued by Joe Boyd's Hannibal Records, called Time Of No Reply. This contains early demos, outtakes from Five Leaves Left and some songs that might have made it onto a fourth album. They were recorded as far back as 1968 in some cases. It is hard to understand why some of them (the title track, Joey and Clothes of Sand for example) were not released during his lifetime. His playing is clean, crystal clear and emotionally engaging, sometimes painfully so. The album also included songs from his last recording sessions, including the bleak cri de coeur 'Black Eyed Dog' and the simple beautiful melody of Voice From The Mountain.

Many of the songs are certainly good enough to have been included on previous albums, but it wasn't until after Nick died and they checked the vaults for unreleased material, that Boyd and engineer John Wood realised what treasures they still had.

It's easy with hindsight to speculate whether Nick could have been better presented as an artist. Personally, I think maybe they should have marketed him less as a singer-songwriter and more as a guitarist. It seems that Nick's refusal to actively promote the records by playing live frustrated the marketing people at Island Records, who had many other artists to focus their attention on.

There is no question that Nick Drake possessed the talent to have made a successful career in music, if circumstances had been different. He was a gifted guitar player, but because he used a number of different tunings, he needed time to retune his guitar between songs. Audiences at his few concerts would become restless and Nick, lacking the street-wise bravado of a John Martyn, didn't have the banter to keep the audience engaged.  

As Nick himself wrote to a prospective psychotherapist in 1973, "There was a lot of pressure around, and I suppose I sort of cracked up."

 

His withdrawal from live performance was undoubtedly a major factor in his failure to break through. His only known radio session was recorded for John Peel between the first two albums. This was all well before the video age. There is no film of him in any form as an adult. 

 

The indifference of the record buying public must have come as a shock to Nick, especially after the sacrifice he made by dropping out of Cambridge in his final year. His deepening depression has been well-documented, but perhaps not enough has been said about the lighter side of his personality. 

 

The hardback book compiled by his sister Gabrielle, entitled 'Remembered For A While' gives a well-rounded account of Nick's life and shows how the darkness that fell on him was perhaps not inevitable.

Nick's music is a very personal thing, but I was delighted to find that the annual gathering at Tanworth is an uplifting celebration. Although he didn't live to see how much his music has touched people, there is some consolation in the fact that his music lives on and now inspires many millions of people around the world.

If you’re still wondering what all the fuss is about Nick Drake, get hold of a copy of 'Heaven In A Wild Flower'. It’s the perfect introduction.

See also on the blog:
A Visit to the Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake