Is it surprising that Bob Dylan, he with the craggy face and constant dour expression, loves corny jokes? If you’ve seen him play in the last 30 years or so on his Never Ending Tour you may have heard the musician mutter something like, “This is a love song. We love to play it.” Or “George got a baseball bat for his wife. It’s the worst trade he’s ever made.” For a musician who furiously guards his private life, casting up veils and veils of feints and false claims over the year, reveling in such simple humor seems out of character.
Take for example a joke he made on October 31st, 1964 at New York’s Philharmonic Hall: “Don’t let that scare you. It’s just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I’m masquerading.” At surface level, Dylan was riffing on the holiday but there is something deeper afoot. The musician has long been interested in what Greil Marcus coined the “old, weird America,” an alternative history of minstrels, con men, sideshow performers, tent revival ministers and traveling musicians who don’t adhere to the conventional narrative of the United States we’re taught in school.
So how does Dylan, recently turned 80, still remain slippery, a conjurer by trade, even in the days where the divide between celebrity and the public has grown slimmer? In 2020, Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways, his best album in more than a decade that finds him referencing Walt Whitman and releasing his own version of how the ‘60s went down in “Murder Most Foul.” He also released Shadow Kingdom, an online concert that saw Dylan reinterpret some of his older songs. Filmed in sparkling black and white, face obscured by shadows, Dylan used the concert to establish himself in a liminal place of our musical history, a sleight-of-hand trick by a master who constantly remains one step in front of his fans.
Yet, that mask quip perhaps figures most appropriately in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a multilayered “documentary” that premiered on Netflix in 2019. Chronicling Dylan’s 1975-76 tour in support of Desire, the film begins with images of America celebrating its bicentennial anniversary. But the patriotic images only mean so much. This is an America exhausted from Vietnam, exhausted from a president who has resigned in disgrace, exhausted from years of groups fighting for equal rights. It is also a step towards rebirth for Dylan who, after spending 1966 to 1974 living a life away from the spotlight, had just finished a soulless arena tour backed by the Band. If you believe Scorsese’s documentary, or “Bob Dylan Story,” a corporate tour isn’t what the singer had in mind, especially after years away from the stage following a motorcycle accident in 1966. So, Dylan took a step back and conjured the Rolling Thunder Revue.
In its conception, Dylan imagined this shaggy tour much like an old timey revue, a traveling act that played small venues and featured a rotating cast of performers that including (at times) Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joni Mitchell, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Neuwirth and others. Dylan spared no detail, wearing white makeup on his face and giving folks on the tour a character name from the Balladeer (Baez) to the Sailor (Elliott). Much of the footage that Scorsese uses was shot by Dylan himself for his panned film, Renaldo and Clara (1978). But the director and musician have found a new way to spin the narrative, introducing a cadre of talking heads who tell tales about the tour, including modern footage of Dylan himself, creating the mythology with a straight face.
Consider Sharon Stone, who claims that Dylan saw her waiting to get into one of his shows and whisked her inside. Never mind that Stone would have only been 17 at the time and that she claims Dylan started using face paint because he liked her Kiss sweatshirt. Also, ignore the Photoshopped picture of Dylan signing autographs for the young Stone. The biggest zinger is when Stone says Dylan claimed that he wrote “Just Like a Woman” about her. Only later did she realize, the actress claims, that the song was 10 years old. It’s a joke within a joke. A riddle wrapped in an enigma, one of many that Scorsese and Dylan tease us with in the film.
But trying to parse “truth” from “fiction” ruins the fun of Rolling Thunder Revue. It is easier to succumb to the illusion. Accept the mystery, so to speak. So what if it’s Bette Midler’s husband, Martin von Haselberg, pretending to be Stefan von Dorp, a pretentious filmmaker commissioned to chronicle the Rolling Thunder Revue? It’s just another layer of the Bob Dylan mask we must accept, much like the clear mask Dylan sometimes dons during his performances. Even Baez dresses up as Dylan at one point, surprising the crew that she isn’t the man himself.
The most important, and truest, part of the film is the songs themselves and Scorsese wisely allows many of them to play uninterrupted. One person comments that this is the loosest they’ve ever seen Dylan on stage and it’s true. He is all charisma, legs spread wide in a rock star stance, eyes wide as he enunciates key phrases. This isn’t a perfunctory show with the Band. It’s a rock star coming alive again.
This also isn’t the confrontational Dylan from the mid-‘60s, once called Judas and booed by fans who felt betrayed when he went electric. We don’t see hippies in the crowds or freaks with flags unfurled. These are everyday people, thrilled to see Dylan back on the stage and playing in small rooms. Nothing is more telling than one woman who, as she exits post-show, breaks down in tears. They have witnessed something powerful. Something otherworldly.
The proof is in the performances. Already released in audio form in the musician’s Bootleg Series, watching Dylan perform gems such as “Oh, Sister” and “One More Cup of Coffee” (backed by Scarlet Rivera’s emotive violin) is a real treat. It is hard not to be captivated by Dylan, hiding beneath his white, wide-brimmed Baron hat. Garlanded with flowers and feathers, the hat caps an outfit that could have stepped from the 19th century. But it doesn’t feel like a brazen attempt at something like a Mumford and Sons show. Dylan is feeling the music.
So, beneath the jokes and the masks, what is authentic? Isn’t America all about creating oneself? We are nation that admires self-made men and women, people who come from nothing to become something. The whisper of the American Dream is always there, even for those of us who see through its wooly guise. But Dylan is an artist constantly in motion, constantly reinventing himself from protest singer to speed-fueled rock star to progenitor of country rock to family man to minstrel to born-again Christian to balladeer of doom to bluesman to crooner and back again. Perhaps by looking back we move forward. Modern Dylan is taking stock by watching past Dylan become a rock star again. Or maybe it’s all one big joke. But maybe it isn’t.
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