DYLAN TOUR GETS SCORSESE TAKE
Fact and fiction find common ground in documentary about musician’s 1975-76 tour
Bob Dylan dabblers likely will find “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese” a ragged and confounding viewing experience, as it is described fittingly in its production notes as “part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream.” But Dylan enthusiasts will certainly want to climb onto the bus for the two-and-a-half hour ride. The film screens tonight at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is now available on Netflix.
Esteemed as an Oscar-winning director of feature films, Scorsese has also worked on all manner of music films, dating back to a job as an editor on “Woodstock.” He shot “The Last Waltz,” a farewell concert for the Band, and has done documentaries on Dylan and George Harrison.
But with “Rolling Thunder Revue” he takes a different approach than any of his other music-related work. The film takes a fantastic reality and melds it with flashes of fantastic fiction in telling part of the story of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan’s medicine-show-style tour. The resulting “Rolling Thunder Revue” is part Marty Scorsese and part Marty DiBergi of “Spinal Tap,” an enlightening and sometimes puzzling mix of film, both real and staged.
Scorsese had some great material to work with, too. The tour was pretty thoroughly documented, but only a little of that footage was ever seen via Dylan’s experimental 1978 film “Renaldo & Clara.” Scorsese makes much better use of the
material than Dylan did. Or he certainly offers greater focus and clarity with the Rolling Thunder Revue, while using just enough magician’s misdirection to add to Dylan’s decades-spanning mythology. I’ll say no more about the film’s narrative makeup so viewers can navigate fact and fiction as they please. In an age where information is more attainable than ever, yet truth is easier to obscure, “Rolling Thunder” is perhaps the perfect music documentary for our times.
Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue ran through parts of 1975 and 1976, which puts it between “Blood on the Tracks,” an album that restored his standing with many listeners, and “Desire.” Also around that time, the muchbootlegged ’60s recordings he made with the Band were released as “The Basement Tapes.” Rolling Thunder pulled from that catch-all Americana of “The Basement Tapes” — with Dylan and a misfit crew of collaborators ( Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, T Bone Burnett, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) playing old country, blues and folk songs, some young and original, some old and classic. The vibe of the tour was connected to the age of vaudeville, only it was undertaken at the height of dunderheaded arena rock. Parts of the songwriter’s legion would like to place ’60s Dylan in amber. But his affinity for American song goes back much further.
Scorsese has always been sympathetic toward a song, so he lets several songs run their course in “Rolling Thunder Revue.” The film is better for it, more immersive, with some great performances, particularly a zesty “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below).” Dylan on that tour had newer stuff (“Hurricane”) that sounded urgent, but he also dug into his own past (“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol”) for songs that continued to resonate a decade after they were written.
The off-stage musical moments are also telling, touching on an American musical history that by the ’70s had been largely forgotten. In one brief scene, Dylan references Victoria Spivey, a Houston native and blues pioneer who started her own record label and had a subtle but influential effect on Dylan’s work.
Spivey grew up in a family of musicians and was a star in her day. But like many other great singers from the1920s and 1930s, her work wasn’t canonized like, say, that of Bessie Smith. She’s just one of dozens of bright musical threads that are stitched into the film, part of an American music patchwork, the construction of which caught Dylan’s attention when he was a young man.
In another scene, Dylan references Jim Kweskin, a ’60s contemporary dedicated to preserving old jug band music. “Rolling
Thunder” puts all this music in a continuum, with Dylan leaving fingerprints at every stage. Dylan and the film also look forward with footage of Patti Smith, jittery and seemingly wracked with insecurity. Music texts will tell you Smith was a next-gen counter-cultural figure in punk rock. But such distinctions are off. In love with words and art, she fits with Dylan’s ragtag bunch, serving as a youthful counterweight to the tour’s other poet, Allen Ginsberg.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself,” Dylan says in the film. “Life is about creating yourself.” Which speaks to his appearance throughout the tour, with bright streaks of clown makeup clumsily applied to his face. He plays a part throughout: As though he weren’t Bob Dylan, but rather like a vaudevillian doing “Bob Dylan.”
And Scorsese’s film isn’t about “finding” the Rolling Thunder Revue as much as it is about creating a version of it. The Rolling Thunder Revue marks a curious point in Dylan’s timeline. The tour generated a mythology for all sorts of reasons. For one, Dylan routed it through smaller venues that a more money-minded manager would have skipped.
Add to that the weird communal quality with the guest artists, the facepaint … Rolling Thunder possessed a theatrical allure. That said, it was pretty poorly represented in the ’70s by “Renaldo & Clara” and a couple of live recordings that aren’t among Dylan’s best. So Rolling Thunder had an elusive quality about it, too. Those who went spoke of an incredible experience, but the souvenirs, for lack of a better word, were underwhelming.
Scorsese does a nice job restoring weight to Rolling Thunder. He establishes a sort of rootsy, improvisational feel to the tour, while also imbuing it with a feeling of cultural gravity.
I found the audience footage intriguing, too. Even in the mid’70s, Dylan was already drawing a cross-generational crowd, with young listeners attending rather than revolting against their parents’ totem. Among them is Sharon Stone. Yes, the actress. Accompanied by her mother, the 16-yearold Stone showed up to the tour wearing a Kiss T-shirt, prompting a lesson from Dylan on the history of kabuki makeup.
The film, like the tour, isn’t without confounding moments. Perhaps I’ve long put too much emotional weight on Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” As used in the film “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” it’s a devastating piece of music attached to a heartbreaking scene. In the film, presented on stage, it plays as though pulled from “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” with a facepainted Dylan trading verses with a bug-eyed Roger McGuinn, wearing a velvet suit looking like a deranged doctor from a Dickens novel. Maybe they were trying to divorce the song from its grave cinematic association. If so, mission accomplished.
But more often the concert scenes radiate energy, as Dylan takes tunes like “Hattie Carroll” and re-creates them. And in a way, Scorsese has done the same thing, taking material from a tour and presenting it anew. As the film’s credits roll, Scorsese scrolls a list of the tours Dylan undertook since Rolling Thunder, decades of performing on what has been called the Never Ending Tour.
The shows have been all over the map since then, from standoffish to satisfactory to sublime. But none quite matched Rolling Thunder for lore, as the tour drew from what rock critic Greil Marcus defined as “old, weird America.” Nearly 50 years later, Rolling Thunder Revue has become a part of that old, weird America rather than a tribute to it.