Pledging my Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, edited by Ray Padgett
(EWP Press, 2023, £20.99, 441pp.)
Nearly every possible angle on Bob Dylan has been covered in book form over the last fifty years (yes, I know, fifty years), except perhaps one of the most obvious. Interviews with the man himself being rarer than hen’s teeth, what about those who’ve played alongside him during the twists and turns of his lengthy, storied career?
Ray Padgett set out to talk to as many of these fellow-travellers as he could, recording their memories and, in some cases, exploring their hurt feelings as they recall standing onstage night after night, feet away from the main man. Curmudgeonly, sweet, incommunicative, frustrating, magical, unpredictable – all these sides of Bob Dylan are clearly on show here, set out in simple Q and A format. As a bonus, they’re illustrated with some genuinely rare photos, many of which have not been used in Dylan books before.
Many interviewees here are clearly still under Dylan’s spell, whatever their rancorous feelings, and would do it all again in a moment. Some, like former Heartbreakers drummer, Stan Lynch, remain gushing fans at heart. Others reveal surprising aspects to his character, not least many testifying to their genuine sense of how crushingly difficult it must be to be Dylan, with the weight of expectations never far away.
The interviews gathered run mostly chronologically, from Noel Paul Stookey (the ‘Paul’ of Peter, Paul and Mary folk trio), who first ran into Dylan in the Gaslight folk venue in 1960, right up to Benmont Tench (another Heartbreaker), who played on 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and most points in between. There are a few notable absentees – Robbie Robertson of The Band, for instance, or Al Kooper, or even Joan Baez, but I’m guessing these names operate at an altitude beyond Padgett’s range. Conversely, I’ve never read interviews with Scarlet Rivera (violinist on the Rolling Thunder tour, 1975) or Richard Thompson about playing with Dylan, so there is a pretty wide selection of voices represented here, many of them interesting in themselves.
While most of those interviewed look back on their time onstage with Dylan fondly, there are exceptions: Duke Robillard, for example, who played on Time Out of Mind and then toured with him, seems genuinely angry and bitter about Dylan’s changeability and lack of communication skills. There are plenty of comments about these character traits, but most of the musicians interviewed seem to accept that this goes with the territory of being Bob Dylan. Marshall Crenshaw stoically acknowledges this as one who auditioned, but eventually didn’t get the gig in Dylan’s band of the time, freely admitting that he didn’t fit in.
Purple patches in Dylan’s career get plenty of coverage: the ‘born-again’ years of Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love are described lovingly by session drummer ace Jim Keltner, backing singer Regina McCrary and guitarist Fred Tackett, the potency and power of those tours now fully available for all via the recent Trouble No More Bootleg Series release. Similarly, the Rolling Thunder travelling circus tour of 1975 is fondly recalled by some participants, although here the witness of someone like Joan Baez (or even Roger McGuinn) might have added more context or possibly been less fulsome.
Some of the most interesting interviews are with those not actually onstage musicians at all. Richard Alderson, sound engineer on the 1966 ‘Judas’ electric tour, has only a few pages, but is fascinating. He also outs himself as the source of the 1962 Gaslight live tape, a widely distributed bootleg, now legitimised by a CBS release. Tour manager Richard Fernandez also fills in some of the day-to-day logistical issues behind an important tour: incidentally, here and elsewhere in the book, Tom Petty and his fellow Heartbreakers come across as the uncomplicated musos with hearts of gold that we always suspected they were.
Other peculiar detours in Dylan’s career also feature: his 1984 appearance on the David Letterman Show in the US, backed by The Plugz, a Latino punk group, his guest appearance in an episode of US sitcom Dharma & Greg in 1999, playing for the Pope during the Never-Ending Tour – the somewhat random nature of these incidents perhaps illustrates Dylan’s unpredictability, something which seems to have increased as he’s grown older. No one, for example, can explain why he might appear onstage sporting a long wig and false whiskers at the 2002 Newport Folk Festival; no one can explain why he strikes up some casual acquaintances yet refuses to speak a word to some of his own backing musicians for long weeks on tour. It’s just Dylan.
Ultimately, this is why books like this continue to be compiled, and why large numbers will read it: it’s just Dylan. What these interviews underline, again and again, is that there’s no one like him. There is literally no one who’s put up with the trials and perks of fame for so long and remained so dour, curmudgeonly and so…so Dylanesque, for want of a better term, for so long. Those of us who admire his music put up with it because every now and then an Infidels or a Time Out of Mind comes along to remind us of his gifts as an artist and songwriter. Of course, if your luck’s out, you might get a Down in the Groove or a Dylan and the Dead instead – you pays your money and you takes your chance.
Ultimately, this book goes a long way towards capturing the essential Bobness of working alongside Dylan very well. There are famous names in the world of Zimmerman – Spooner Oldham, Dickey Betts – who are just as puzzled and prone to mixed-up confusion as the rest of us who follow his career. This book takes you as close to that phenomenon as the man’s own Chronicles, and maybe more reliably. It won’t unravel the essential paradoxes of the man, but then we wouldn’t really want that, would we?
M.C.Caseley / July 2023