Bob Neuwirth
Musician, Artist, Scenemaker BORN 1939
“BACK THEN it wasn’t money-driven,” explained Bobby Neuwirth in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home. “It was about if an artist had something to say.” He was discussing the early-’60s Village folk scene, but he might as well have been referring to any point in his adventurous life, in which he was pivotal in the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson, Patti Smith, John Cale and others. A singer-songwriter as well as an acclaimed painter, he became a countercultural legend as Dylan’s acid-tongued road manager and sidekick in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 doc Dont Look Back. He co-wrote Joplin’s a cappella Mercedes Benz, urged Smith to turn her poems into songs and helped Dylan wrangle 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue.
Albums included his eponymous 1974 solo debut and Last Day On Earth, 1994’s apocalyptic collab with Cale. He was the stage manager for the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67 and later worked with Hal Willner and T Bone Burnett on various multi-artist concerts. In 2011 he presented an exhibition of his paintings spanning 1964-2009. As a cheerleader, he inspired Smith, songwriter Vince Bell and others to create. To his occasional dismay, however, he’ll be best remembered for his wiseass “taste for provocation,” as Dylan called it in Chronicles Volume One. His considerable loyalty made many forgive him at day’s end. “Neuwirth was quick-witted, funny and fun to hang out with,” notes Al Kooper. “But Dylan also trusted him implicitly, which Bob didn’t often do. No one else came close.”