to
Desire
was, equally, more than just an experiment or an artist’s whim. The journalists who would style the Rolling Thunder Revue a ‘gypsy caravan’ got closer to the contents of Dylan’s imagination than they realised. He had met the Romani ‘king’ in the Camargue. The aged personage had never heard of the singer, but the possessor of, allegedly, 12 wives and 100 children had been another unwitting contributor to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. After they had rehearsed, Rivera, for one, understood that Dylan was ready to record, and perhaps to perform. Whatever the collaboration with Levy involved, however it bridged the gulf between partners, intentions and abilities, the process was beginning to bear fruit. The crop would vary in quality somewhat.
If a larger plan was emerging, meanwhile, it amounted to this: yet again Dylan would trust to instinct and to luck. Auditioning musicians found on the street was hardly standard practice. Picking co-writers on the basis of chance meetings on corners or in Greenwich Village bars was not risk-free. Recruiting a band and a supporting cast from club-dwellers and drinking pals was surely tempting fate. To do all this with no apparent thought for the roles to be filled, the cost involved, the structure of the performances to be given, the personnel to be managed, the music to be made or the compatibility of those being hired was nuts. It was exactly what Dylan did, nevertheless, in the summer and autumn of 1975, with only charisma, ample funds and a couple of ideas to sustain him. His break for artistic freedom would become a gargantuan and costly undertaking. Then again, making money from the Rolling Thunder notion was his second thought, not his first.
He might well have felt the need for help with his writing in such a circumstance. Levy meanwhile seems to have had no qualms about his fitness for the work, or over his right to be treated as a partner, with that 35 per cent share – since he wrote none of the music – in the songs produced. 9 Nevertheless, if Dylan had misplaced some of his self-assurance at the end of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s, he had not lost his habit of assuming that anything he cared to attempt would come good in the end, somehow or other. Not for the first time or the last, he was ready to take a risk.
Whether Dylan’s troupe of friends, acquaintances, hired hands and hangers-on understood his logic is less certain. Suddenly the ascetic self-discipline that had characterised the making of
Blood on the Tracks
was gone. It was as though he needed the change for the sake of his rest. Equally, you could find prior evidence for a recurring pattern in Dylan’s behaviour to explain his improvisations in mid-1975. He had been this way before, veering from the hard, painstaking graft of
The Times They Are a-Changin’
in the second half of 1963 to the drunken, album-in-a-night exercise that was
Another Side of Bob Dylan
on 9 June 1964. Later he had switched, suddenly and without warning, from the bacchanalian improvisations with The Band in the spring and drowsy summer of 1967 to the austere, sculpted delicacy of
John Wesley Harding
towards the end of that year. It amounted almost to a personality trait: tension and release, tension and release. Besides, who could have borne a career forever on the raw edge of existence, devoted only to the universe of
Blood on the Tracks
?
In the summer of 1975, Dylan’s planning might as well have been based, as perhaps it was, on the opaque Chinese wisdom of the I Ching and its cosmic bar codes. One discarded version of the song ‘Idiot Wind’ certainly made explicit reference to the oldest of self-help manuals. By the summer, Dylan was improvising, trusting to luck and fate, whatever they represented. It caused him no intellectual problems; quite the reverse. Even before God made His appearance at stage right, the artist was as susceptible on occasion to esoteric waffle as the next counter-culture
Desire
was, equally, more than just an experiment or an artist’s whim. The journalists who would style the Rolling Thunder Revue a ‘gypsy caravan’ got closer to the contents of Dylan’s imagination than they realised. He had met the Romani ‘king’ in the Camargue. The aged personage had never heard of the singer, but the possessor of, allegedly, 12 wives and 100 children had been another unwitting contributor to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. After they had rehearsed, Rivera, for one, understood that Dylan was ready to record, and perhaps to perform. Whatever the collaboration with Levy involved, however it bridged the gulf between partners, intentions and abilities, the process was beginning to bear fruit. The crop would vary in quality somewhat.
If a larger plan was emerging, meanwhile, it amounted to this: yet again Dylan would trust to instinct and to luck. Auditioning musicians found on the street was hardly standard practice. Picking co-writers on the basis of chance meetings on corners or in Greenwich Village bars was not risk-free. Recruiting a band and a supporting cast from club-dwellers and drinking pals was surely tempting fate. To do all this with no apparent thought for the roles to be filled, the cost involved, the structure of the performances to be given, the personnel to be managed, the music to be made or the compatibility of those being hired was nuts. It was exactly what Dylan did, nevertheless, in the summer and autumn of 1975, with only charisma, ample funds and a couple of ideas to sustain him. His break for artistic freedom would become a gargantuan and costly undertaking. Then again, making money from the Rolling Thunder notion was his second thought, not his first.
He might well have felt the need for help with his writing in such a circumstance. Levy meanwhile seems to have had no qualms about his fitness for the work, or over his right to be treated as a partner, with that 35 per cent share – since he wrote none of the music – in the songs produced. 9 Nevertheless, if Dylan had misplaced some of his self-assurance at the end of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s, he had not lost his habit of assuming that anything he cared to attempt would come good in the end, somehow or other. Not for the first time or the last, he was ready to take a risk.
Whether Dylan’s troupe of friends, acquaintances, hired hands and hangers-on understood his logic is less certain. Suddenly the ascetic self-discipline that had characterised the making of
Blood on the Tracks
was gone. It was as though he needed the change for the sake of his rest. Equally, you could find prior evidence for a recurring pattern in Dylan’s behaviour to explain his improvisations in mid-1975. He had been this way before, veering from the hard, painstaking graft of
The Times They Are a-Changin’
in the second half of 1963 to the drunken, album-in-a-night exercise that was
Another Side of Bob Dylan
on 9 June 1964. Later he had switched, suddenly and without warning, from the bacchanalian improvisations with The Band in the spring and drowsy summer of 1967 to the austere, sculpted delicacy of
John Wesley Harding
towards the end of that year. It amounted almost to a personality trait: tension and release, tension and release. Besides, who could have borne a career forever on the raw edge of existence, devoted only to the universe of
Blood on the Tracks
?
In the summer of 1975, Dylan’s planning might as well have been based, as perhaps it was, on the opaque Chinese wisdom of the I Ching and its cosmic bar codes. One discarded version of the song ‘Idiot Wind’ certainly made explicit reference to the oldest of self-help manuals. By the summer, Dylan was improvising, trusting to luck and fate, whatever they represented. It caused him no intellectual problems; quite the reverse. Even before God made His appearance at stage right, the artist was as susceptible on occasion to esoteric waffle as the next counter-culture
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