On the Road with Bob Dylan Read Online Free PDF

ahead now and changed ‘Simple Twist,’ he’s gotten more into the plot, there’s much more of a plot now. Well, I love stories and plots, I think they’re just great, there’s nothing like ’em. They may be window dressing, you know, because they’re really not what’s really important, but even—”
    “Even ‘Sara,’ a song about his wife, has a plot. Like a fucking movie, with flashbacks.”
    “You know, that takes place because Bob was in East Hampton at the time. And he was writing all during the time that we were working on these other songs. And he was out on the beach and the place out there was a place that he and Sara had stayed at. But calling it ‘Sara’ isn’t that amazing. He’s been fooling around with that idea for years, he told me.”
    “So what was it like out in the Hamptons? Were you just wood-shedding, writing the whole thing …”
    “Yeah, right, we were doing that, going out at night shooting eight-ball once in a while, but not too much.”
    “Any people visit?”
    “No, nobody at all. We went out a couple of nights; one night we went to a bar and Bob sang a couple of the songs and we hung out with some people that night just to get away from things. The pressure was tremendous and intense on both of us, and we’d stop in the middle of a song and go shoot a game of eight-ball.”
    They returned to the city in late July and Dylan immediately began preparing to record the tunes that he and Levy had just crafted. And by the night of the first session, Monday, July 28, Dylan had assembled a cast of musicians that was Felliniesque in its scope. Crammed into Columbia’s studio that night were superstar guitarist Eric Clapton, his backup vocalist Yvonne Elliman, Kokomo—an eight-member English rhythm-and-blues funk band, Emmylou Harris, a country-rock singer, studio musicians like Hugh McCracken and Vinnie Bell. Then there were the Village stalwarts, people like bassist Rob Stoner, who was currently backing long-time Dylan pal Bobby Neuwirth, Eric Frandsen, who’d been picking his folk guitar around the Village for years, and even Sugar Blue, whose regular gig was blowing harp out on Eighth Street for spare change. And thrown in for good measure, Scarlett and Sheena. It was like a total madhouse, musicians wandering around in the studio, with no charts to aid them, only the very haphazard directions from Dylan, who also didn’t seem to know what he really wanted in terms of a sound. “No one in that room had heard the material and I’m prettysure Bob didn’t know what he was gonna do,” one observer recalled, “so everybody was improvising and you could tell that on the tapes. Sometimes it sounds too slick, because all these musicians were used to doing studio work, and sometimes it sounds like two different songs recorded at the same time.”
    They ran through about seven tunes that first night, a take of “Durango” with Eric Clapton on guitar that ultimately was used on the LP; two songs, “Wiretappin’” (“Wiretapping, it can happen”) and “Money Blues,” that never were released; “Catfish,” Dylan and Levy’s ode to Catfish Hunter; “Mozambique,” and “Oh Sister.” But there was no focus, and Dylan was unhappy with the results. “That was amazing,” Clapton later told a
Rolling Stone
interviewer. “He was trying to find a situation, you see, where he could make music with new people. He was just driving around, picking musicians up and bringing them back to the sessions. It ended up with something like twenty-four musicians in the studio, all playing these incredibly incongruous instruments. Accordion, violin—and it didn’t really work. He was after a large sound but the songs were so personal that he wasn’t comfortable with all the people around. He even wrote on the spot. All in one night. It was very hard to keep up with him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted. He was really looking, racing from song to song. I had to get out in the fresh air