48 Monday May 23 2022 | the times
Register
seemed almost like the singer’s shadow.
There he was standing behind the
singer in the photo on the cover of
Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisit-
ed, his upper body and face not visible
but his legs in black jeans, thumb in
pocket, a camera on its strap dangling
from his hand.
Michael Gray notes in his magisterial
750-page The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
(2006) that the legs contributed “a hint
of Warholian arty eroticism” and were
what gave the cover “its cutting-edge
modernity and cool”.
Where Neuwirth and Dylan first met
is debated. Neuwirth claimed it was at a
folk festival in Indian Neck, in Connecti-
cut, where both men were performing in- He was drawn to Dylan “because
he was the only other guy with a har-
monica holder around his neck”. In his
own memoir, Dylan locates their meet-
ing around the same time but suggests it
was at the Gaslight Café, a folk music
hangout in Greenwich Village.
Either way they found an instant rap-
port and Neuwirth was soon even act-
ing as matchmaker, introducing Dylan
to Baez at a folk club in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. She was already a star
and he was still unknown but she and
Dylan embarked upon a two-year affair
that made them folk music’s king and
queen.
“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm,
the centre, the catalyst, the instigator,”
said Eric Von Schmidt, a folk singer from
Cambridge who was there at the time.
“Wherever something important was
happening, he was there, or he was on
his way to it, or rumoured to have been
near by enough to have had an effect on
whatever it was that was in the works.”
Neuwirth was also at the heart of
Dylan’s return to the road in 1975 with
the Rolling Thunder Revue, including
himself as a guitarist and backing singer
in the house band he helped to assem-
ble for the tour. He can be heard and
seen duetting with Dylan on songs such
as When I Paint My Masterpiece in the
live albums and footage from the tour.
Robert John Neuwirth was born in
1939 in Akron, Ohio. His father, Robert,
was an engineer and his mother, Clara
(née Fischer), was a designer. He stud-In the tumult and tumble of the 1960s,
Bob Neuwirth was the Robin to Bob
Dylan’s Batman, a Zelig-like figure who
was constantly at the singer’s side with
a sardonic aside or a caustic put-down.
Many felt that Dylan modelled the
acerbic persona he adopted in public on
his friend and aide-de-camp. “The
whole hipster shuck and jive — that was
pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in an
acclaimed 1989 biography of Dylan. “So
were the deadly put-downs, the wipe-
out grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had
mastered those little twists long before
Bob Dylan made them famous and
conveyed them to his best friend with
altruistic grace.”
The put-downs were seen in close-up
in DA Pennebaker’s documentary film
Don’t Look Back, in which Neuwirth
tells Dylan that Joan Baez, who is in the
room with them, “has one of those see-
through blouses that you don’t even
wanna”.
The film was shot in fly-on-the-wall
style during Dylan’s 1965 visit to Britain.
It was his last concert tour as a solo folk
singer and, without the safety in num-
bers offered by a band, he felt in need of
comradeship. Neuwirth, who had his
own pretensions as a singer-songwriter
and a painter, was not on the payroll of
the tour but Dylan tempted him to
accompany him with the promise of “a
leather jacket and all the canvas you
can paint on”.
As Dylan grappled with how to deal
with his “voice of a generation” fame, he
used Neuwirth as his shield to keep the
“straight” world at bay and together
they mocked and lampooned everyone
who was less hip than they were. Dylan
called him “a bulldog”.
“Right from the start, you could tell
that Neuwirth had a taste for provoca-
tion and that nothing was going to re-
strict his freedom,” Dylan wrote in his
memoir Chronicles Volume 1. “He was in
a mad revolt against something. You had
to brace yourself when you talked to him
... with his tongue, he ripped and slashed
and could make anybody uneasy, also
could talk his way out of anything.
Nobody knew what to make of him.”
They were so close that Neuwirth
He introduced Dylan
to Joan Baez at a folk
club in Massachusetts
Bob Neuwirth
Singer-songwriter who collaborated with a young Janis Joplin and became Bob Dylan’s sidekick as he shot to fame in the 1960s
FRANK LENNON/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGESEmail: [email protected]Denis Taylor
Stalwart of The Times foreign desk nicknamed ‘the Prof ’ who served as Dublin correspondent at the height of the Troubles
For decades Denis Taylor helped to
shape The Times’s coverage of wars, cri-
ses and political upheavals abroad,
while ensuring that there was room for
quirky stories on the culture and lifes-
tyle of the countries where correspond-
ents were based.
He began in journalism on The York-
shire Post and joined The Times in 1965
as a general reporter, specialising for a
while in education, before moving to
Dublin in 1971 to report for four years
on the Republic of Ireland’s reactions to
the turbulence in Northern Ireland at
the height of the Troubles. He moved to
a section called Special Reports, where
he produced regular in-depth profiles
of overseas countries and supplements
devoted to issues shaping the world.
The job involved a lot of travelling, to
Bolivia, the Soviet Union, Morocco, the
Middle East and Australia, where he
managed to track down the disgraced
British MP John Stonehouse, who had
faked his own death to run away with a
girlfriend.
The job suited Taylor’s academic
mind. He was a good linguist, with a
command of Russian, French, Spanish
and smatterings of other languages. He
was also diligent in the pursuit of detail
and liked nothing better than
to pore over a fairly ob-
scure point to ensure
absolute accuracy,
something that was
good for the news-
paper’s reputation
but at times infuri-
ating for his time-
pressed colleagues.
His time on the
foreign desk, where he
was one of the vital liai-
sons between the corre-
spondents abroad and the de-
mands and interests of the paper’s edi-
tors, included the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the first Gulf war and the Bosnian and
Chechen wars. He spent a brief spell re-
porting from Warsaw at the height ofthe crisis over the rise of Solidarity.
Stolid and unflappable, Taylor was the
reassuring voice that correspondents in
lonely places needed to hear. He was
particularly kind to a veteran Times
correspondent, Dessa Trevisan, who
reported from Belgrade for many
years, and he arranged care for
her when she was old and was
her executor after her death.
An only child born in Sun-
derland in 1936, Denis
Grainge Taylor finished his
education at Trinity Hall,
Cambridge, where he read
history. He was one of the last
generations that had to do
National Service and was posted
to the army base at Catterick. It was
hardly strenuous; he later recalled that
most of the time he was on the golf
course. He considered a career in the
Foreign Office but began instead in
journalism after sending a piece on
Albert Camus to The Yorkshire Post.
In his early days he had been a keenrugby player. He was also an accom-
plished pianist and rented a converted
barn in Holwell, Oxfordshire, in which
to keep his valuable grand piano, driv-
ing there in his dilapidated old car from
time to time for a day’s playing.
In 1990 he began a Christmas tradi-
tion of booking a row of seats at the
Albert Hall for the annual performance
of Handel’s Messiah, attended each year
by a dozen of his friends and colleagues.
He always gave a knowing smile at the
start of the aria “For we like sheep”, say-
ing that it proved, by the musical phras-
ing without a pause before the phrase
“like sheep”, that Handel was not a na-
tive English speaker.
Taylor was a shy man. There were
various attempts to find a companion to
settle down with, but they were never
fruitful as he was often too shy to move
beyond pleasantries. He had several
close female friends but remained a
bachelor and lived alone, spending
much of his time looking after his
mother in Durham. He inherited fromhis father a furniture store and let it to a
computer company, having refused to
let it as a betting shop. The income
helped to fund his peripatetic lifestyle.
On retirement from The Times in
2000 he undertook a history of the 1905
Russo-Japanese war. He researched
extensively for what was intended as a
magnum opus, but ever determined to
include the final detail, he missed dead-
line after deadline and never produced
a final manuscript.
Generous and somewhat absent-
minded, Taylor was nicknamed “The
Prof” by correspondents. His academic
and sometimes pedantic manner set
him apart, and his interest in the arcane
and obscure often paid off when he was
able to dredge up a telling detail.Denis Taylor, journalist, was born on
June 29, 1936. He was found on April 25,
2022, having died at home aged 85Neuwirth, right, with Bob Dylan and Mick Ronson in 1975. His legs featured on a 1965 album coveried art at the
School of the
Museum of
Fine Arts in
Boston and
painting re-
mained his primary passion, more so
than music, in which he admitted he
was “winging it” as a singer-songwriter
who “couldn’t sing and couldn’t play”.
After art school, he spent time in Paris
before returning to Boston, where the
early-1960s folk revival was gathering
pace. He sang and played banjo and gui-
tar in the local clubs and hitchhiked to
Greenwich Village and San Francisco to
check out their thriving bohemian
scenes. In San Francisco in 1963 he met
the young Janis Joplin, newly arrived
from Texas, and in whose career he was
to play a significant part.
One day at Chelsea Hotel in New
York several years later, he taught her
Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby
McGee. She recorded it days before she
died and the song went to No 1 in 1971.
He also co-wrote the lyrics to Joplin’s
song Mercedes Benz, which appeared onher album Pearl that same year.
Although he was dismissive of the two-
minute ditty, calling it “a throwaway, a
fluke”, he appreciated the royalties when
the German car manufacturer started
using the song in television adverts.
Shortly after Joplin’s recording of Me
and Bobby McGee had topped the charts,
Neuwirth was introduced to Kristoffer-
son in a New York folk club. “‘You’re the
guy that taught Janis my song,” Neuw-
irth recalled the writer saying.
“I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Have a drink,’
and he takes a hip flask of tequila out of
his boot. I thought, ‘This is my new best
friend.’”
An outgoing personality meant
Neuwirth had the knack of making
numerous “new best friends” and
another of them was Patti Smith, whom
he spotted one day in 1970 in the lobby
of the Chelsea Hotel, writing in a note-
book. “He came up to me and asked me
if I was a poet and said, ‘Let me see what
you’re writing’,” Smith re-
called. “He started reading
and said, ‘You should be
writing songs.’ He was the
person who encouraged me
to sing and gave me my first
start.”
Neuwirth is survived by
his partner, Paula Batson.
Former paramours included
the Warhol starlet Edie Sedg-
wick, rumoured to be the sub-
ject of Dylan’s song Just Like A
Woman. Neuwirth broke off
the relationship in 1967 owing
to her drug habit and erratic
behaviour. “The only true,
passionate and lasting love scene I had
and I practically ended up in the psycho-
pathic ward,” Sedgwick, who died of an
overdose in 1971, said.
Neuwirth recorded several albums
over the years but he knew he could
never compete with his famous friends.
“When you’re around people like that,
you’re not driven to be a musician. I
have other outlets”, he said.
According to Smith he was being
overly modest. “He was good at every-
thing,” she told Rolling Stone magazine.
“He was a great songwriter. A moving
singer. A really fine painter. He had so
much magnetism, you couldn’t not be
drawn to him.”Bob Neuwirth, musician and artist, was
born on June 20, 1939. He died of heart
failure on May 18, 2022, aged 82marypassionmoresoc
a
w
p
to
sh
F
th
w
je
W
th
to
b