Andrew Curry writes: In the second of our three pieces to mark the 50th anniversary of the Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue we look at the film project that Dylan tried to wrap into the tour. Eventually that turned into Renaldo and Clara, but Sam Shepard, the star playwright he hired to write it, quit the Revue. Instead, he wrote the Rolling Thunder Logbook.
DYLAN HAS INVENTED HIMSELF. He’s made himself up from scratch… The point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in? He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan. (Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook)
When Bob Dylan called Sam Shephard in 1975, Shephard was 31, and living in California. He was America’s hottest young playwright, with a string of awards and a screenwriting credit on Zabriskie Point, an actor who would later get an Oscar nomination for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and a musician who had played drums on and off with the psychedelic band The Holy Model Rounders.
When Shepard rang back, he was told that Dylan wanted Shepard to write the screenplay for a film that would be based on his upcoming tour.
The two men had not met before, and Shepard had a deep fear of flying, so he travelled by train to meet Dylan in New York. As Shepard’s biographer Robert Greenfield writes,
Like a pair of large and powerful planets revolving in entirely separate solar systems, Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard had slowly been gravitating towards each other.
When they finally met, Dylan asked Shepard if he had ever seen Children of Paradise or Shoot the Piano Player. Shepard had seen them both: was that the kind of film he wanted to make?
‘Something like that’, said Dylan.
The film later became Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling four hour piece that switches between concert footage, interviews, and improvised scenes shot during the day. The clip above gives a flavour of it, good and bad—it’s worth persevering to the Blowin’ In The Wind story at the end. Sam Shepard appears in the film, but he wrote almost none of it.
It quickly became clear that even if Dylan had imagined some kind of impressionistic movie that was set against the backdrop of the Rolling Thunder Revue, the logistics of the tour schedule were against it. Shepard wrote scenes that weren’t used, but quickly realised that trying to get musicians who were playing in the evening and then travelling between cities to rehearse or remember lines wasn’t going to happen.
As Greenfield related:
Although Dylan had brought him on to write the script, everything about the film project was so disorganized and chaotic that Shepard confessed he had no idea how to relate to “this rock-and-roll lifestyle.”
And he hated being on the road.
Shepard was married, but he quickly started an affair with the tour publicist Chris O’Dell. She’d been on the road a lot, but he wasn’t cut out for it.
“Sam hated it,” O’Dell says. “He hated everything about it. He hated the moving from place to place. He hated that he had to be at a certain place at a certain time, all of that. He was upset and he wanted to leave the tour, because the whole film thing was just kind of a mess.”
The film wasn’t going well, and the tour’s co-producer, Lou Kemp, called Shepard into a meeting and told him they were going to get in Francis Coppola or Orson Welles to get it off the ground. As Kemp told him,
“We’re after heavyweights, you understand.”
‘A malcontent for the entire tour’
Larry Sloman, who by general consent wrote the best book on the Rolling Thunder Revue, On the Road with Bob Dylan, was one of the few people on who knew that Sam Shepard was a successful playwright. He recalled,
“Sam was a malcontent for the entire tour. He had all those Obies [off-Broadway awards] and a name and an ego and then he came on this tour and got slapped around by Dylan, who basically threw out everything Sam had written and said, ‘Let’s just make it all up.’
By the time the Revue got to Bangor, Maine, Sam Shepard climbed into a rental car and drove to New York City. But not before he’d also managed an on-tour fling with Joni Mitchell as well.
The book he wrote, The Rolling Thunder Logbook, tells the whole story, or at least his version of it. My copy is long gone, but I found one on The Internet Archive—you have to sign in to get it.
In some ways, it is the film he was hired to write, with descriptions of scenes, insights into character, moments caught from the weirdness of the whole Revue. In Rhode Island, for example:
THE HOME OF THE VANDERBILTS. Strange sensation of visiting the ghosts of the privileged class and us, a class of privileged nomads, sometimes verging on spoiled-brat status. Plenty of opportunities for radical juxtaposition with scenes of Jack Elliot in cowboy gear waving from a hundred-foot-high balcony to the peons below… T-Bone [Burnett] is lining up a tee shot off the front lawn of a hacker’s dream. He misses four times straight with the cameras rolling.
Sam Shepard skates over the fact that he quits the tour, and it’s disguised by the episodic structure of the book. But it’s noticeable that he only writes about the trip through the north-eastern States, although he comes back for the Madison Square finale. But he gets more detached as the book continues:
FEEL MYSELF NOSE DIVING INTO NEGATIVITY. Just wanna go back home. Be in the mountains. Near horses. Near my woman. Back. The organization of the film has fallen into smithereens till it has no shape or sense. No way of planning a day’s shooting. Everything’s at the mercy of random energy. Ideas flying every which way but no plan. Meetings up the ass…
Color TV is my only hope now. Room service… Pacific. Blue. Ocean. Far off.
If Shepard couldn’t get off the tour fast enough, Larry Sloman quit his reporting assignment with Rolling Stone to stay on the tour to write a book about it.
It’s a complicated story—one of the tour producers, Louie Kemp didn’t want him on the tour, and hassled him a lot, but by day Sloman was helping the film crew get hold of interviewees, and they helped him out until Dylan told the tour co-producer Barry Imhoff to fix him up with a room each night and per diem expenses so he could eat.
When Martin Scorsese’s film about the Rolling Thunder Revue came out, Sloman got the red carpet treatment for the premiere. And he never wrote another story for Rolling Stone.
There’s a postscript for Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan as well. Shepard co-wrote the lyrics for Brownsville Girl, which appeared on the Dylan record Knocked Out Loaded. Perhaps without a hint of irony, it opens with the words,
Well, there was this movie I seen, one time.
—
The thumbnail photo of Sam Shepard at the top of the post is from the website sam-shepard.com.
Read on: Part 3 is here:
And you can read Steve Peck’s first piece about Rolling Thunder Revue on Salut! Folk here:
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