Down the Highway by Howard Sounes

Author:Howard Sounes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802195456
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

AFTER A SPRING BREAK of almost three months – during which time Bob worked with Eric Clapton on Clapton’s new album, No Reason to Cry, sleeping in a tent of bed sheets in the garden of the Shangri-La studio in California – The Rolling Thunder Revue reconvened in April 1976 in Clearwater, Florida. The venue for rehearsals was the Belleview Biltmore, a big resort hotel that was popular with retired people. When the musicians arrived to begin work, they found the atmosphere was very different from that of the first leg of the tour. Bob had finished filming Renaldo & Clara, so the film people were gone from the entourage. So was Sam Shepard. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had been rather cruelly dropped from the show, though he went to see Bob personally in California during the spring break to ask to stay on. ‘I was anxious to know and willing to go out again. [Bob] was embarrassed by this question, because they weren’t planning to take me. He said, “I don’t have anything to do with who gets to go, but I heard a rumor that Joan Baez is going and Kinky Friedman.”* Indeed, Kinky Friedman was my replacement, and they never called me.’ Stars who had been invited back began demanding better billing and more pay. Joan Baez in particular wanted more money. Bob seemed removed from all the politics, spending his time instead with various girlfriends in a bungalow in the grounds of the hotel. There was no sign of Sara for the time being.

During rehearsals in the Starlight Ballroom, Bob and the musicians learned that drunken, crazed Phil Ochs had hanged himself at his sister Sonny’s house in Queens, New York. He had been thirty-five. One of his final disappointments had been the fact that he was not asked to join the tour. Bob and Phil Ochs had always had an uneasy relationship, and had disagreed in the past. Bob was clearly upset by the news that Ochs had killed himself. Still, he did not attend the funeral or even respond when asked to take part in a tribute concert held on May 28. ‘If Dylan really cared about Phil he would have had the courtesy to pick up the telephone or write a letter,’ says Sonny, who was left feeling very bitter about Dylan, perhaps with some justification.

Meanwhile, Bob began the second leg of The Rolling Thunder Revue. After giving warm-up concerts in nearby resort towns, a show was staged at the Belleview Biltmore in Clearwater on April 17 for an NBC television special. During the show, a row of torpid bodies sat behind Bob on a platform raised above the stage. It was partly because of this lifeless audience that Bob hated the film and refused to allow it to be screened. As a consequence, he would have to make a replacement concert film for NBC before the end of the tour. Unfortunately, the subsequent tour of the southern United States lacked joie de vivre.

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