Boos & Booze: Dylan Knows a Bit About Both

Dylan as guest with The Band, NYC 1 January 1972.
Photo Joseph Sia, courtesy Bill Pagel archives.

Did Dylan really like boos? Levon Helm, in his autobiographical This Wheel's On Fire, shares an insider's take on Dylan's first world tour after going electric at Newport. The Band, formerly the Hawks, had never experienced anything like it. They were accustomed to being enjoyed, appreciated, loved. So when Dylan took his backing band on the road, not only were his fans shocked, the band was similarly in a new zone. According to Helm's account, the more the crowd hated it, the more Dylan seemed to enjoy it. (Levon ultimately dropped off the tour. That wasn't his thing.)

Greil Marcus, in his Like A Rolling Stone, offers this account of the Newport Folk Festival experience that preceded that world tour in 1965. "The crowd was with Dylan all the way for the acoustic half of the show, instantly catching the rhythm and refrain of the still-unreleased, never-before-played 'Desolation Row"... When Dylan came back with the band, for "Maggie's Farm," and electric "It Ain't Me Babe,"... and more songs that would appear on Highway 61 Revisited, again and again fury coursed through the crowd like a snake, the wails of hate beyond belief."

Eventually, Marcus writes, once they climaxed with "Like a Rolling Stone" the cheers outnumbered the boos.

For Dylan the being misunderstood didn't begin at Newport. When he was performing in a Hibbing High School talent show/assembly, standing at a piano, playing and singing, the music he performed was quite different from anything Northern Minnesota teens were accustomed to. While he was playing, the theater curtain was slowly and unceremoniously pulled closed.

And being disrespected didn't end a Newport either. In 1981 my brother and his wife caught a Dylan performance in Philadelphia during his three-year Gospel phase. Unfortunately, their fourth row seats were directly behind a group of belligerent drunken hecklers who had no qualms about expressing their hot displeasure as regards Dylan's latest iteration.

* * * *

The trigger for this blog post was a typo. That is, I was doing a Google search for Dylan books, and left off the "k" so that Google fed me links related to Dylan and "boos," which itself is a homonym for Booze. What follows are a few links to stories on this latter theme, beginning with this first, a website with 38 photos of Bob Dylan drinking.

If you didn't check it out, the big surprise is how in most of the photos he's drinking either tea or coffee.

The Google search was for "drinking Dylan" which resulted in a number of other Dylan's besides Bob, including an Irish Times story titled Drinking with Dylan, as in Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. I might have passed this over but for the surprise discovery that DT's firstborn son was named Llewelyn, which is awfully similar to Llewyn, the young folk singer navigating 1961 Greenwich Village in the Coen Brothers 2013 homage to the scene. Intentional?

The introduction of Heaven's Door, Dylan's new line of whiskeys, surprised a lot of folks, though the big surprise for one reviewer was that he'd never pegged the Bard as a whiskey man. My take is that he seems perfectly suited to the role, appears quite natural while sipping.

The image that first came to mind for me with regard to Dylan and drinking was of that evening he famously recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single evening, many of the songs in one take, "lubricated by Beaujolais." I'd just looked up an account of that event while researching "My Back Pages" last month, so the story was fresh. Less fresh in my mind are a few descriptions I'd read of Dylan in the latter 80's drinking too heavily and performing while not always into it or at the top of his game. Word on the street at that time was that catching a good Dylan show was hit or miss, and it may have had something to do with...

Dylan fans who have taken delight in his Theme Time Radio Hour may recall that he did one of his early shows on Drinking, which begins with Dylan scarfing out this intro: “Sit down and enjoy yourself as we discuss the world of liquid libation, booze, sauce, hooch, white lightning, fire water, hard stuff, pick me up, gin and juice, moonshine, canned heat. We’re going to start out with George Zimmerman and the Thrills doing “Ain’t Got No Money to Pay for this Drink.” I need it bad...."

* * * *
A good place to sum up might be here with this excerpt from a Reddit Q&A with Jacob Maymudes. Maymudes' father Victor (1935-2001) served as Dylan's tour manager, body guard, companion and chess opponent over a period of decades. After a falling out and before his death Victor recorded stories from his lifetime of inner circle experiences. Jacob later completed the project of turning these stories into the book Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Here's an excerpt from the Reddit site:

Q: How did his drug use evolve over time?
Jacob M: Like a bell curve from one extreme to the other, now he's clean and sober. My father mentioned that they tried everything under the sun but the only thing that really "worked" for them was smoking pot and drinking booze.

Q: How did Bob Dylans personality change during all these years?
Jacob M: Stopping drinking had a big impact on Bob's personality. That was the biggest change. Anyone who's fought addiction like that can attest to the changes you endure, alcohol is mask you can wear to hide your insecurities, when you stop drinking you're forced to confront yourself and redefine who you are socially. That happened to Bob, he was much quieter the first couple of years sober but then began to be much more social.

You can read the full exchange here.

Meantime life goes on all around you. Get into it.