That Thing Only Bob Can Do
The Joan Baez of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review movie is light years away from the dejected ‘what am I doing here” waif of Don’t Look Back. Baez had introduced Dylan to the world at Newport, and while touring in 1963, invited him onto her stage to sing with her, and assumed, wrongly, Dylan would return the favor on his tour. That uncomfortable reality was recorded in Don’t Look Back. In the Rolling Thunder Review movie, a rather maddening mash-up of fiction and truth, Baez is all grown up, wiser and plenty tough. She dresses up as Dylan to be his mirror image, sings along with him, alert and bemused by his unpredictably on stage. She looks great, trim and tomboy sexual, with shorter, stylish hair, and even dances all the over the place.
There’s a scripted scene out of the footage for Renaldo and Clara where Baez and Dylan go back and forth about why they never married. It’s not real, it’s fictionalized reality, part of the show.
At one point in the Rolling Thunder Review movie, she says, “The charisma that he has, I’ve never seen before or since… everything is forgiven when I hear Bob sing.”
If you haven’t had the experience of seeing Dylan in the way she describes him here, you might say, well, but Jagger’s charismatic, McCartney too. If you’re a fifteen year old girl, I’m sure Taylor Swift is charismatic. But this is different. Twice I saw what Joan was really talking about.
I’ve seen Dylan about ten times in different size venues, some good shows, some great, one sloppy and bad, in the early 90’s when he was drinking. But two times it stands out for me in memory, this thing, this amazing thing. One was at what they used to call Great Woods, Foxboro Mass. Now they call it some corporate something, until they decide to rename it another corporate something. I thought Great Woods suited it just fine. It’s a wonderful outdoor place, holds around 10,000 people. I’d smoked a little pot because the person beside me gave me some, and just after that he sang “Girl from the North Country.”
Now he was a small spot down there on stage, they didn’t have a big screen TV, it was just him and his guitar. But I was glued to him, and as he sang, time disappeared. I don’t mean it slowed down or anything like that. I mean, the time I was in disappeared. Modern time disappeared. I was being told a tale that was outside of any particular time. The elements were a girl, the country up north where it got cold, and memory. The immersion into that was complete, it could have been somebody from a hundred years ago singing this song. I was hearing a forever tale. And it wasn’t Bob Dylan I was listening to. It was the story, an old story, of heartache, wistful longing, the memory fresh as today of an event receding, forever drifting away. There’s was no Bob Dylan there. There was the song there. The song existed on its own. Then it was over and the portal closed.
This is the thing no one else can do. At least, I’ve never heard anyone else do.
The second time I was standing up close to him. I’d stood in line in the cold outside the Orpheum theater one morning to get tickets to see him at a very small place on Lansdowne St, near Fenway, in Boston. There were no seats, it held around 1500 people and I was very near to the stage, with my girlfriend. Maybe fifteen feet away. No pot this time. He comes out and you feel all this awe and everything, but that goes away in a sec and then it’s, okay, let’s see what he does.
When it happened was during Hattie Carroll. Two things. First, time went into reverse. I could see him in two time periods, back and forth, as he was, then he would suddenly morph and it was the protest singer, the young guy, onstage. I mean, I could actually see him as younger, his face looked younger. I was transfixed to watch this, then he was back to who he was, older, singing.
The second thing was, it was as if I were seeing justice itself brought out onstage. Justice as an entity, a living entity - you want to know what it looks like? Here. And within that justice was contained injustice, of course. That’s why justice was there.
I tried to tell my girlfriend and some people I was with, after the show, about how he’d changed like that, gotten younger and they nodded I guess but didn’t say much about it and left me there to be standing completely alone in my reality, but I was used to that by then.
But if I’d have told this story to Joan, she’d understand exactly what I was talking about.