Rolling Thunder Revue: American Multitudes

In the summer of 1976, my parents took me to see the tall ships in New York Harbor. I was ten, and I remember very little about it other than that I went and that the ships, tall, did not disappoint. This harbor celebration, held on the Fourth of July, was for the American bicentennial, which I had heard about in school and on TV for all of 1975. It seemed important to have something to mark it beyond your regular fireworks. We all wore red, white, and blue, but the occasion didn’t feel particularly patriotic. It felt the way a parade or a pageant always felt to me, like a spectacle for which everyone got to wear funny clothes, eat junk food, and make noise. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019), a documentary about Dylan’s 1975–76 tour with a revolving group of performers, begins with the bicentennial celebration. Scorsese shows the tall ships in New York Harbor but also complicates things right away with footage of a street performer dressed like Uncle Sam, waving a Confederate flag. We see and hear Dylan singing and strumming the familiar verses of “Mr. Tambourine Man” intercut with images of parades and Americana, and then we hear a familiar voice giving a rousing, earnest speech about the promise of the American dream and the nation’s coming celebration. It is Richard Nixon, speaking before the Watergate scandal and his resignation in 1974. Present-day Dylan then appears in an interview, reminding us that, in 1975, Saigon had fallen and the United States finally been chased out of Vietnam. Americans had lost their “sense of conviction for just about anything,” he says. Right away, the film is undermining any singular, simple take on the bicentennial, and marking out America as one of its primary subjects. Here, as in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), Scorsese’s documentary about Dylan’s origins and 1965 turn from acoustic to electric music, the director curates the archival footage to make an argument about how the tensions of the American cultural moment are a crucial part of the story of Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter’s own acts of self-invention and reinvention seem to work out American contradictions on the plane of music and performance.

But let me correct myself. This film doesn’t actually open with the tall ships. It opens with clips from Georges Méliès’s 1896 film The Vanishing Lady in which a magician makes a woman disappear and reappear. It is fitting that we begin with magic, as magic works partly by admitting that it is a trick. The fun is that it is a good trick, theatrical. But of course, The Vanishing Lady isn’t a magic show—it is a film of a magic show. Movies, too, are illusion, with the appearance of movement coming from static images shown at twenty-four frames per second. After the glimpses of the Méliès film, we get a version of the documentary’s title, in an old-time font: “Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue,” with the subtitle: “A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.” We have been warned: tricks are afoot, punches are being pulled, and the truth in this film is tricky, elusive, and liable to change with each telling. By indicating that there are fictional things woven in among the real things, the film admits its artifice. This makes it more honest than a straight documentary, which also shapes the truth and has a point of view—so why not play with that?

Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America gearing up to celebrate its bicentennial requires something that can look in multiple directions at once. As E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (also from 1975) shows us, mixing fictional characters with real people makes the true things seem more artificial and the fakes seem more believable. That tension enables us to both question and believe at the same time. To see the old stories in new ways. To pause and linger in the freedom of contradiction.

“Scorsese knows it all matters only because of the performances. He showcases Dylan’s songs at length, and that decision makes this film essential, sublime.”

The spirit of what Greil Marcus famously called “old, weird America” creates a kind of counternarrative to the mainstream American story. The marginalized people, the autodidacts, orphans, outcasts, eccentrics, and radicals had, of course, existed all through America’s first two hundred years. This contradictory history is what Gilbert Seldes celebrates in his brilliant 1928 book about nineteenth-century American reformers, The Stammering Century. Against the tyranny of materialism and industrialization, there grew not only the powerful, righteous movements for abolition, suffrage, and temperance but also “spiritualism, medical quackery . . . mesmerism and phrenology.” The fake-mixed-with-real runs deep in the American ethos: America was the place where a woman could go to the Burned-Over District in Western New York and reinvent herself as a vicar of a new religion. Or a criminal could go west and simply become someone else. Herman Melville has Ishmael narrate Moby-Dick as both an outsider and an insider, a mystic and a joker. In the twentieth century, there was Orson Welles, whose real genius coexisted with his magic tricks and his confidence games—not least among them his very fake The War of the Worlds. This is the American tradition that Dylan aligns with, as much as he aligns with any tradition. So it makes sense that, after an eight-year retreat from touring and then a moneymaking but stultifying tour of arenas with the Band, he reached back. Not to the sixties but to the beatniks—poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, who both joined the Rolling Thunder tour. And back further, to the radicals of nineteenth-century America, with all its energy, baggage, and legacy. He started up an old-time revue—ragtag, vagabond, fake in fun ways but real (because the music is always 100 percent real) in the most important ways.

And with this embrace by Dylan of the theatrical (the masks, the makeup, the name and concept, the simultaneous filming by David Myers, Howard Alk, and others of what would become the 1978 fiction film Renaldo and Clara, where much of the archival footage in Scorsese’s movie comes from), it becomes important for any documentary of the tour to explore this aspect. We get a number of fictional (maybe apocryphal is a better word) anecdotes from real people, as well as fictional characters, such as a filmmaker, a groupie, and a concert promoter. Some of the best fakes in this film are already embedded in the archival footage. At one point, Joan Baez dresses up like Bob, and they stand side by side. She looks even more like Dylan than he does. There is another fictional/not-fictional moment with Baez, an outtake from Renaldo and Clara. Baez, as the Woman in White, sits at a bar next to Dylan, and they converse about having married other people. It is a put-on, a performance, but it is also true. Baez, featured heavily in the present-day interviews, is quite touching in her wry affection for Dylan. (She is also captivating to watch, somehow lovelier as an old woman than she was as a young one.) At one point, the interviewer asks her, “Any idea why he wore a mask?” and she responds by laughing, then says, “Are you being funny?”

But through all the play and sly framing, Scorsese knows it all matters only because of the performances. He showcases Dylan’s songs at length, and that decision makes this film essential, sublime. Dylan has never sounded or looked better than he does here. As astonishing a presence as he was in Dont Look Back (1967) or No Direction Home, in Rolling Thunder he seems to have reached a new state of confidence as a performer. His band, featuring some musicians who played on Desire (which was released in January 1976, between the two legs of the Rolling Thunder tour), clearly tightened, loosened, evolved with the energy of performing, so much so that the live versions of the songs in the film exceed their studio counterparts. In particular, Scarlet Rivera’s more adamant violin playing onstage gives the music an edge and a new intensity. Dylan himself sounds like a man at the peak of his gifts, and someone who finally seems comfortable performing live. When he sings “One More Cup of Coffee” or rips into an urgent, incandescent version of “Hurricane,” he radiates emotion. Here in the small venues of forgotten America, one gig after another, perhaps via the makeup and the theater of the revue, he comes down to earth and connects with his audience.

And Scorsese does dwell on the audiences. Unlike in the later stretches of No Direction Home, where Dylan’s electric apostasy is met with boos and threats, his performances here are met with love (in one scene, we see a fan break down in sobs). The warmth and proximity of the crowd seem to make Dylan expansive, better. Watch him smile. Watch him do dancelike moves. And behold him. Part of what enchants us is how beautiful Dylan looks, and the footage that Scorsese has foregrounded lavishes close attention on the drama of Dylan’s face. When, for example, he sings “Oh, Sister,” his eyes and most of his face are in shadow from the brim of his hat (festooned with feathers and flowers, including baby’s breath, like something worn by a backwoods bridegroom). As he leans his mouth toward the mic to sing, light reveals his face: the sharp blue of eyes lined in smudgy black, the slight squint, the dark eyebrows, the curls of his hair from under his hat, and of course the infamous white makeup streaked on his cheeks and nose. He is mesmerizing, striking, impossible to look away from. At the end of the song, someone says, “Bob Dylan for president!” and he doesn’t scowl, he laughs. “President of what?” As a limo driver says after seeing the show, he has never seen anything like this between an audience and a performer. “Like one battery charging another.”

Another counter is “Hurricane,” Dylan’s rousing plea to liberate Rubin Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of murder because of his race, which is prefaced by a searing electric version of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” an earlier song about another egregious example of racial injustice, drawing the line from sixties Dylan to seventies Dylan. We see photos of Dylan visiting Carter in the Trenton State Prison, and Carter himself talking about how they are both searchers. The sequence ends with the revue performing “Hurricane” at the Clinton Correctional Center for Women in Clinton, New Jersey, when Carter was temporarily in custody there. The audience is rapt, seated in folding chairs close to the stage. There are loud cheers at the end. So how do the performances at the reservation and the prisons connect to the fictional aspects of the film? If we think of the fictions as pointing to alternate versions of reality, then these moments show another version of America, removing the mask of the bicentennial fiction and asking us to consider the complex legacy of the American narrative—which seems more necessary than ever in our current historical moment.

Amid the protest songs, we get a clip of Jimmy Carter mentioning Dylan as he sort-of quotes “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” but in terms of the country: “America . . . is busy being born, not busy dying.” Carter responds to Dylan’s sincerity rather than his theatrics. Of course, Dylan has always had this sincere vein (along with his other veins). The masks, the jokes and playfulness, and the refusal to be categorized are connected to the moral urgency he sometimes asserts. He has said he doesn’t write protest songs and also that all his songs are protest songs. He isn’t being slippery; he retains his mystery so he can resist clichés of thought about himself, which allows him the freedom to become whoever he needs to be.

Jimmy Carter is also the segue to Michael Murphy as Representative Tanner. Tanner is my favorite fake in the film. Murphy is an understated actor, and his character is precisely executed. In fact, the room we see him in, with a polished wood farm table and austere decor, suggests a whole biography. Which he does indeed have, because not only is Tanner not real, he was invented for Tanner ’88, Robert Altman’s 1988 satire of the American political process. Tanner describes being snowed in near Niagara Falls and how Carter used his pull to get Tanner into a Rolling Thunder Revue show. The use of Tanner is witty in a number of other ways: the Tanner ’88 miniseries likewise used real people juxtaposed with fictional characters. It also connects in a sly way to some of the bigger themes here. Tanner makes us think of Altman’s other work, especially Nashville, in which Murphy had a role, as did Ronee Blakley, one of the stars who joined the revue for a while. Nashville also came out in 1975 and is framed by the bicentennial (who can forget the opening number in which Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton does take after take of his song “200 Years”?). This nod to Altman encourages us to see the tensions between “America” in theory and the America we are actually creating.

Early in this film, present-day Dylan says, “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding things. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.” Yes. Why isn’t this invented self—the self you create—the authentic self? Why is that faker than the self of birth and happenstance? It is critical to admit the complexity of this idea. Self-invention liberates us, but the past still exists. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows how our past can’t be left behind; it always catches up to us. Dylan is famous for not looking back, but what are the Dylan archives, or the interviews here, if not a form of looking back? Maybe the past shapes the possibilities we imagine. This is as true for the individual as for America. The reinvention we need as a nation won’t come through amnesia or whitewashing but rather through facing the past. Maybe the invention of self, or reinvention of self, also comes through a similar process of reckoning. By looking at the past—the Native people cheated, displaced, and killed; the Black people enslaved, incarcerated, and killed—you earn the right and power to do the reinventing, the creating, the starting anew. Create yourself, create things. But also: create your America.

Rolling Thunder Revue: American Multitudes

Rolling Thunder Revue: American Multitudes

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