survivor, despite his advertised aversion to all things hippy. Within a couple of years he would be explaining to a reporter from
Rolling Stone
, for one example, that Jesus had taken on ‘the bad karma of all the people he healed’. 10 His own sleeve note for the
Desire
album – written as though to prove that the world can never have too many Allen Ginsberg impersonators – would announce that Dylan had ‘A WHOLE LOT OF KARMA TO BURN’. This time, Indian religions would take the fall for his understanding, if any, of causality and eternity. In practice, he was rolling the dice.
As Rolling Thunder coalesced around him, mere ancient wisecracks seemed to have become his creative strategy. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine,’ he had said back in 1965, dictating still another entry in pop culture’s dictionary of quotations. ‘It’s like I accept him; does he accept me?’ Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, his interlocutors from the
New York Post
, had been further informed that ‘Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.’ In 1975, Dylan’s album and his tour would test this seductive, risky theory to its limits.
General confusion became a characteristic of this phase in his career, and of the Rolling Thunder carnival. The roadshow was intended as some sort of statement, but what was said meant different things to different participants. Dylan would take inspiration, some of the time, from a pair of French movies. One was Marcel Carné’s
Les Enfants du Paradis
(1945), the other François Truffaut’s
Tirez sur le pianiste
(1960), otherwise known as
Shoot the Piano Player
. The young playwright Sam Shepard, a former lover of Patti Smith hired by Dylan to ‘work on a proposed film with the Rolling Thunder Revue’ by ‘providing dialogue on the spot’ – though that idea ‘very quickly dissolved into the background’ – would be questioned specifically about his knowledge of the works when he arrived amid tour rehearsals in October. 11
Both pictures are, to summarise grotesquely, studies in performance, revolving around ideas of acting, disguise and identity. Carné’s piece of romantic ‘poetic realism’, written by the poet Jacques Prévert – of whom Dylan was well aware – involved the tale of four men in pursuit of the same beautiful woman. One man was an actor, one a mime artist, one a master criminal, and the fourth, it is generally supposed, the allegorical representation of Nazi occupation in the person of a villainous aristocrat. You could equally describe the four as aspects of human desire. Only the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, was entirely pure in heart, his whitened face an unblemished canvas. Whatever else he took from Carné’s romance – interconnected relationships, unattainable love – Dylan would seize on that idea.
In fact, he took a great deal more. In this instance, the artist would not be shy about his influences. Carné, still a very-much-alive 69-year-old when Dylan’s troupe began to shoot over 100 hours of film for what became
Renaldo and Clara
, would be reminded, if he cared, that there is no copyright in ideas. Whiteface? Check. ‘Woman in White’, a flower motif, certain resonant passages of dialogue, the old contrast between performance and backstage reality, the actual and the imagined? Dylan overlooked very little. On the other hand, he would not attempt to conceal the fact. The only small details he would miss, according to most critics of
Renaldo and Clara
, were Carné’s cinematic daring, his lyricism, his staging, his ability to inspire magical performances and his self-knowledge.
Shoot the Piano Player
is a crime story, in the main, but it too turns on the erasure of identity. As depicted by Charles Aznavour, the piano player is another figure attempting to escape from his past. Who is he exactly? ‘Bob Dylan’ liked that kind of question. Beneath the gangster movie plot, the picture veers abruptly between tragedy and farce, at one minute
Rolling Stone
, for one example, that Jesus had taken on ‘the bad karma of all the people he healed’. 10 His own sleeve note for the
Desire
album – written as though to prove that the world can never have too many Allen Ginsberg impersonators – would announce that Dylan had ‘A WHOLE LOT OF KARMA TO BURN’. This time, Indian religions would take the fall for his understanding, if any, of causality and eternity. In practice, he was rolling the dice.
As Rolling Thunder coalesced around him, mere ancient wisecracks seemed to have become his creative strategy. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine,’ he had said back in 1965, dictating still another entry in pop culture’s dictionary of quotations. ‘It’s like I accept him; does he accept me?’ Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, his interlocutors from the
New York Post
, had been further informed that ‘Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.’ In 1975, Dylan’s album and his tour would test this seductive, risky theory to its limits.
General confusion became a characteristic of this phase in his career, and of the Rolling Thunder carnival. The roadshow was intended as some sort of statement, but what was said meant different things to different participants. Dylan would take inspiration, some of the time, from a pair of French movies. One was Marcel Carné’s
Les Enfants du Paradis
(1945), the other François Truffaut’s
Tirez sur le pianiste
(1960), otherwise known as
Shoot the Piano Player
. The young playwright Sam Shepard, a former lover of Patti Smith hired by Dylan to ‘work on a proposed film with the Rolling Thunder Revue’ by ‘providing dialogue on the spot’ – though that idea ‘very quickly dissolved into the background’ – would be questioned specifically about his knowledge of the works when he arrived amid tour rehearsals in October. 11
Both pictures are, to summarise grotesquely, studies in performance, revolving around ideas of acting, disguise and identity. Carné’s piece of romantic ‘poetic realism’, written by the poet Jacques Prévert – of whom Dylan was well aware – involved the tale of four men in pursuit of the same beautiful woman. One man was an actor, one a mime artist, one a master criminal, and the fourth, it is generally supposed, the allegorical representation of Nazi occupation in the person of a villainous aristocrat. You could equally describe the four as aspects of human desire. Only the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, was entirely pure in heart, his whitened face an unblemished canvas. Whatever else he took from Carné’s romance – interconnected relationships, unattainable love – Dylan would seize on that idea.
In fact, he took a great deal more. In this instance, the artist would not be shy about his influences. Carné, still a very-much-alive 69-year-old when Dylan’s troupe began to shoot over 100 hours of film for what became
Renaldo and Clara
, would be reminded, if he cared, that there is no copyright in ideas. Whiteface? Check. ‘Woman in White’, a flower motif, certain resonant passages of dialogue, the old contrast between performance and backstage reality, the actual and the imagined? Dylan overlooked very little. On the other hand, he would not attempt to conceal the fact. The only small details he would miss, according to most critics of
Renaldo and Clara
, were Carné’s cinematic daring, his lyricism, his staging, his ability to inspire magical performances and his self-knowledge.
Shoot the Piano Player
is a crime story, in the main, but it too turns on the erasure of identity. As depicted by Charles Aznavour, the piano player is another figure attempting to escape from his past. Who is he exactly? ‘Bob Dylan’ liked that kind of question. Beneath the gangster movie plot, the picture veers abruptly between tragedy and farce, at one minute
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