Life Bookazines - Bob Dylan - 2020

87

He comes from the same streets as you. Don’t worry, don’t let

him push you around.’ Nevertheless, we got our cues right

and we shot the two songs that were used in the film.” And

those songs, for history’s sake, were “Baby, Let Me Follow

You Down” and “Forever Young.”

After the Band’s early morning encore of “Don’t Do It”

on November 26, 1976, the classic lineup of that well- traveled

rock ’n’ roll ensemble essentially retired: It would never

perform together onstage again. Dylan went back into hid-

ing, and back to work on his movie. Renaldo and Clara was

released in 1978. The Village Voice, which had once lionized

its fellow down town citizen Dylan, dispatched no fewer

than seven reviewers to deal with this remarkable 292-min-

ute thing. “Did you see the firing squad of critics they sent?”

an obviously wounded Dylan asked Robert Shelton. Wrote

James Walcott in one of the broadsides, claiming the film was

sinking a whole bunch of theretofore estimable reputations:

“It’s like watching the defeat of the Spanish Armada.” More

insightful was Pauline Kael in The New Yorker: “Despite all

his masks and camouflage [he’s] still the same surly, mystic

tease... more tight close-ups than any actor can have had

in the whole history of movies. He’s overpoweringly pres-

ent, yet he is never in direct contact with us... we are invited

to stare... to perceive the mystery of his elusiveness—his

distance.”

Indeed. A central paradox of Dylan’s life and career is

that he has always encouraged—actively courted—the star-

ing, and then, as he rails on about it for pages in Chronicles:

Volume One, has not only recoiled from the effects of it but

blamed the staring on others, as if he had nothing to do with

it. Certainly when disciples were knocking on his door in

Woodstock or protesting outside his New York City apart-

ment building that he needed to return to the political fray,

that was much too much. It was bad, even threatening behav-

ior. But just as certainly, when Dylan writes, “No place was far

enough away. I don’t know what everybody else was fantasiz-

ing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five

existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket

fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice.

That was my deepest dream”—well, when he writes that, and

then issues Renaldo and Clara and then returns to the road

later in 1978 for a world tour that eventually encompasses 114

AT LEFT, BILL GRAHAM IS ONSTAGE WITH

Dylan before a show. The year is 1975, and

Graham, America’s preeminent rock concert

promoter, is soon to take on the intricate

planning of the Last Waltz, the swan song

performance of a group with which he has

long been affiliated: the Band. That show,

which will live on forever in Martin Scorsese’s

film, will take place in San Francisco,

Graham’s home base, and will of course

feature Bob Dylan (below, with his Band

mates Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and

Garth Hudson on the night of the Waltz).

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