Origins of Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour

Original painting by Susan Laing. John Bushey on the Air at KUMD

After Sam Shepard passed last month I was visiting with John Bushey, host of the KUMD's Highway 61 Revisited, when the topic of the Rolling Thunder Revue came up. I had written a blog post tribute about Sam Shepard the day before. John asked if I'd read Shepard's Rolling Thunder Logbook about the tour and I had to confess I was unaware that he'd written such a book. John then mentioned that he had a signed copy of the book at one time, which included signatures of several others who were on the tour and in the book, but he know longer had it because he showed it to Jessica Lange, even she did not know Sam, her husband, had written this book. (Trivia: Both John Bushey and Jessica Lange are originally from Cloquet, 20 minutes south of Duluth.)

This led John to ask if I'd read Larry "Ratso" Sloman's On the Road with Bob Dylan, a.k.a. Rolling with the Thunder. Though I own and have read two dozen other books about or by Dylan, I confessed I had not, and later than night decided to order up a copy. I was reading Sartre's What Is Literature? and Hillbilly Elegy when it arrived, so it took a couple weeks to finally get to it.

Right off the book has captured me. By pages nine and ten we're getting introduced to Scarlet Rivera, whose electrifying violin became one of the mesmerizing elements of the Revue's signature sound. On page ten I read about how Scarlet was walking through Greenwich Village, violin case in hand, and Dylan, in a car, rolls down his window and asks where she's going.

Scarlet, who went on to have a long career of her own, has won the hearts of many here in the Northland for her performances on behalf of the Duluth Armory and water conservation issues. Her violin continues to sizzle and her musical interests continue to evolve. My interview with Scarlet in 2012 has the most accurate account of her first meeting with Bob.

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THE NEVER ENDING TOUR

I'm not sure if there's really a specific date when the Never Ending Tour (NET) actually began, though Swedish researcher Olof Björner claims that Dylan's October 2007 concert in Dayton was his 2000th show on the NET. That kind of declaration would indicate that the NET's birth was indeed at a specific moment in time. Whether true or no, and as with many Dylan truths it's ambiguous, nearly everyone is in agreement that it was in the late 1980's that a lifestyle of touring had re-commenced.

According to the Wikipedia account of the Tour the name Never Ending Tour was coined by a journalist writing for Q Magazine in December 1989, Adrian Deevoy.

The origin for this travelling gypsy circus, I'd somehow come to believe, was shortly after Dylan's cross-country tour with the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1988. What I'd always speculated, with no visible means of support, was that Dylan took his inspiration from the Deadhead caravan that followed them endlessly, a readymade devoted fan-base.

Where my idea for this theory came from I can't entirely say. It may have been suggested in my readings or it may have come from some of the people who circulate here in the swirl of Duluth Dylan Fest.

Well, I have a new piece of data to add to this concoction. It's on page 19 of Ratso's book that I've this week begun reading. Dylan starts talking about taking this group out on the road. He wanted to tour big time. He cites an Off-Broadway play called The Fantastics that's been running for ten years and it sets his imagination on fire. "And he said," Sloman writes, "that what he really wanted was the kind of tour that would last forever."

The vision he had at the time for the never ending was not one in which he was the center of attention. Rather, it was a band of gypsies made of all stars and when he wanted he could come and go, leaving for family time and returning to re-connect when he got bored. It would be an energy center, power tour. "It was very important to him that everyone know that there was this show going on..."

Everyone thought it was a great idea, so they set out to name it. The show would be self-contained, including sound systems, lights and crew, with the only real need being stages on which to play. "Wherever there was an empty stage we could perform."

This all took place more than a dozen years before that first concert cited by Mr. Björner

Well, so much for all that.

If you have other references for the origin of Dylan's Never Ending Tour, I'd like to here about them.

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