USA TODAY International Edition
‘Thunder’ spotlights Dylan, Baez partnership
In 1975, a ragtag group of artists embarked on an unorthodox nationwide tour with Bob Dylan, including folk singer Joni Mitchell, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
But none left a more indelible impression on Dylan than Joan Baez, his longtime collaborator and onetime lover, whose personal and professional relationship is sweetly chronicled in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese,” now streaming on Netflix.
Part documentary, part concert film, the nearly 21⁄2-hour “Rolling Thunder Revue” chronicles Dylan’s nowlegendary tour of the same name, edited down from 120 hours of previously unseen, newly restored archival footage. The film also features new interviews with Dylan and Baez, both 78, in which they talk about – among other things – each other.
“We could sing anything together. In fact, a lot of times in bed, I’d hear her voice,” Dylan says in his first on-camera interview in more than 10 years. “Joan is so courageous. She always seems like she’s just come down from a meteor.”
Baez echoes Dylan’s praises, saying, “The charisma that he has, I’ve never seen before or since.”
Dylan and Baez were introduced in 1961 while coming up in New York’s flourishing folk scene. They casually dated and toured together for the next few years, encouraging each other to engage politically through protest music before eventually breaking up around 1965 (a split that later was documented in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 concert film “Don’t Look Back”).
But the two remained close friends, regularly joining each other on stage to duet on songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Water Is Wide” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” all of which are included in “Rolling Thunder Revue.”
Watching the film, “it’s really clear how close they are and were, and that connection was forged in such a crucial time in both of their lives,” producer Margaret Bodde says. “When you make those kinds of friendships, they stay with you for your lifetime. Obviously for (fans) for whom those two performers are deeply meaningful, it’s really a wonderful, intimate glimpse that you would never expect to have seen.”
Along with interviews and performances, the documentary includes some refreshingly candid backstage moments between the two musicians.
Sparks fly during one particularly tender exchange as Baez laments how she “went and married the man I thought I loved,” journalist David Harris, whom she divorced in 1973. There also is a playful scene of Baez impersonating Dylan: wearing his white makeup and flowered hat and convincing stagehands that she was him.
“She made herself up to be Bob,” Bodde says. “It’s so fascinating to their relationship, and deals with a lot of the things (Scorsese) was interested in exploring in the film: these ideas of performance and masks and identity, and that very thin line between truth and fiction.”
Along with those more esoteric themes, “Rolling Thunder Revue” delves into the cultural landscape and significance surrounding the tour.
Rather than play 20,000-seat arenas as his label wanted, Dylan chose to play smaller, less-expected venues, including a mah-jongg parlor in Massachusetts, a Native American reservation in New York and a women’s prison facility in New Jersey.
Dylan’s goal was to forge a connection with everyday Americans, many of whom were disenchanted with their government after Watergate and the Vietnam War.
“It was a very dark and complicated time in the 1970s, and we’re really in that same moment (now),” Bodde says. “It really emerged as (Scorsese) was making the film that this kind of political moment is somewhat of an echo of what we had in the 1970s.”