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| Joan Baez & Bob Dylan. Photo: Netflix |
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese tells a timely poetic truth, if not a journalistic one. Under the circumstances, that might be understandable.
BY
MIKE HOGANJUNE 10, 2019
There is a scene in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese in which Bob Dylan and Joan Baez talk with rare candor about their much-mythologized relationship. Dylan, who infamously dumped Baez during his 1965 tour of England, tells Baez they might have ended up together if she hadn’t gone off and gotten married. Baez points out that it was Dylan who got married first. Dylan, who seems a bit spaced out, pauses for a long time. Then the answer comes: “Yeah, but I married the woman I love.” Baez replies, “And I married the man I thought I loved.”
At that, Dylan goes from bashful to gloating in record time. Thought, he wants Baez to know, is what ails her. “Thought will fuck you up! See, it’s the heart; it’s not the head.”
The effort required to unpack this single scene tells us a lot about both the impossibility of ever getting a straight version of Dylan’s story and the way that challenge is met by Martin Scorsese, who first captured the singer-songwriter on film in 1978’s The Last Waltz, and later directed the seminal biographical documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). To begin with it’s not even clear if the Baez-Dylan encounter is real life or acting. The reason we have so much revelatory footage of 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour is that Dylan hired two film crews to document it for what became the nearly four-hour art film Renaldo and Clara, in which Baez, Dylan, and his wife, Sara, form something like a doomed love triangle.
Rolling Thunder Revue barely acknowledges the existence of Sara, who would split from Dylan in a messy, expensive divorce just two years later. But according to his biographers, Dylan in 1975 was frantically trying to win her back—even as he was rumored to be sampling the many sexual opportunities available to him as perhaps the world’s most celebrated rock-and-roll genius. Baez, for her part, had amicably divorced her husband in 1973. Who loved whom, and who just thought they were in love? Hard to say.
One thing is for sure, though: Dylan really did believe that thought will fuck you up. How much of this was strategy, and how much was sheer perversity, is open to debate, but the effect was the same. The Rolling Thunder tour represented a breakthrough in Dylan’s understanding of how manufactured chaos and enforced spontaneity could enable him to pierce the bubble of wealth, power, and fame that had enveloped him over a decade earlier, so he could make some music with a genuine spark of life. And this documentary represents a new effort, by Dylan and Scorsese, to confound those seeking for anything as mundane as the objective truth.
Scorsese’s implied thesis is that this effort by a burned-out singer-songwriter to recapture his muse had a larger meaning. It was a quest on the eve of the Bicentennial to resuscitate the optimistic, can-do spirit of America, which had run aground on the twin shoals of Vietnam and Watergate.
I’m not convinced that’s what Dylan was really trying to do. After saying that “life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything,” he eventually cops to searching for “the holy grail.” But that strikes me as his usual wordplay-as-evasion tactics. It might even be pure, unadulterated bullshit. Nevertheless I think there are lessons for 2019 America in this very 1975 adventure. And so what if there aren’t, when we’re having so much fun, and listening to so much great music, with so many brilliant, talented, interesting, and/or attractive people?
Source: Vanity Fair