Life Bookazines - Bob Dylan - 2020

54 LIFE BOB DYLAN

PLAYBOY: One final question: Even though you’ve more or

less retired from political and social protest, can you con-

ceive of any circumstance that might persuade you to rein-

volve yourself?

DYLAN: No, not unless all the people in the world

disappeared.

Playboy magazine was, even back in the day, able to

cross the Atlantic—the British said they liked it for the

articles, essays and short stories—and by the time Dylan

stepped foot in the kingdom on this tour, Newport and

Playboy were both on the table, and the knives were out.

None of what followed went well, the “Judas” allegation

in Manchester being only the most enduring moment.

The Royal Albert Hall shows in London were perhaps

the most dispiriting. Dylan mixed it up with his accusers,

seldom a sound strategy for rapprochement, and the situ-

ation devolved, with the Beatles at one point shouting

from their box to others in the audience, “Leave him

alone—shut up!”

I

n May 1966, Dylan and the Hawks returned to America,

beaten if not quite broken. All Dylan wanted was rest,

a slower speed. Woodstock looked, in his imagining,

to be the answer for the next little while—Sara, the baby, et

cetera. But he soon learned that Woodstock, and whatever

it represented in his mind, would have to wait. ABC was

eager for a documentary film of the world tour that had

been contracted earlier. The Macmillan publishing firm

was pointing to a deadline for an agreed-upon book (which

would end up being the narrative poem Tarantula). Gross-

man handed Dylan an itinerary of tour dates that he had set

up for the rest of the summer, extending into autumn.

The late Robert Shelton, a journalist who made the jour-

nalist’s mistake of growing too close to his subject, remem-

bered in his 1986 book, No Direction Home: “Late Friday

night, July 29, I received a telephone call from Hibbing.

Dylan’s father sounded distraught: ‘They just called me

from the radio station here. They said they had a news bul-

letin that Bob’s been badly hurt in a motorcycle accident. Do

you know anything about it?’ I said this was the first I had

LEFT: AS DYLAN BREAKS BREAD IN

Birmingham, England, with his backing

musicians, the Hawks—most of whom

eventually will become better known as the

Band—the feeling at the table might well

be what this tableau so resembles: a last

supper. Certainly there are laughs behind the

scenes (below, with friend Bob Neuwirth),

but just as often there are whispered

strategy sessions with manager Albert

Grossman (opposite). Everyone is trying to

cope with something that is unspooling not

quite as hoped. And yet night after night, as

Robbie Robertson of the Band attests, the

music is getting better and better. The tour

will end—and there will not be another one

for nearly eight years—but this new sound

will live on.

BARRY FEINSTEIN (3)

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