On the Road with Bob Dylan by Larry Sloman Read Free Book Online Page A

tune up and made a few false starts on some songs, lapsing into mumbled apologies after each. “Roll it, Phil,” David Blue screamed encouragingly from the back, but apparently a drunk in the second row had a knife and Ochs glared at him, “You better use it or I will.” “C’mon, Phil,” Neuwirth shouted out, “we’re not making a snuff film.”
    So with a strained voice, Ochs started into a medley of old folksongs, seemingly afraid to sing the material that he himself had penned. But the songs were beautiful and the performance was stunning and sensitive, as Phil poignantly sang his way through “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” “There You Go,” “Too Many Parties,” and “I’ll Be a Bachelor Till I Die.” Moved by Phil’s incredible courage and spirit, everyone in the Dylan entourage was standing. “Oh man,” Dylan whistled to himself, “I haven’t heard these songs for such a long time.”
    Phil went on with his trip down folkdom memory lane, singing “The Blue and the Gray” and Marty Robbins’ “Big Iron,” but Dylan began to worry about his hat and Kemp, Dylan, and Blue plotted out a strategy, covering the exits, setting up an ambush to waylay Ochs and regain the hat. Dylan started off to the bar, where Neuwirth was posted, and Ochs called out feebly, “Where you going, Bobby, c’mon onstage and sing this with me.” “I’m just going to the bar,” Dylan reassured him, and mollified, Phil said, “Well, here’s a song of yours I’ve always wanted to do.” He broke into a dirgelike “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” and then stumbled offstage into the waiting arms of David Blue, who rescued the hat and returned it to Dylan. Kemp then moved into action, rounding up the performers, hustling them out of the bar and escorting them to the proper cars for the ride back uptown. Within minutes, they vanished, leaving only the gapers, the usual Gerdes regulars, a slew of empty beer bottles to clear up, tables to wipe down, chairs to be turned over, and one more magical memory for Mike Porco.

I f the Village and the old hangouts like Gerdes and the Kettle provided a vehicle for some sort of musical re-enactment of Dylan’s past, it was Hurricane Carter who provided the fuel that propelled this band of minstrels on their whirlwind tour. For in Hurricane Carter, the troupe found a cause that conjured up the old days of Dylan and Baez and civil rights rallies down in Mississippi. Once again, a black man was getting fucked.
    Carter was a dynamic boxer, probably one of the most exciting fighters of the ’60s, with his Fu Manchu moustache-goatee and his stone-shaved head. Dylan sings “Rubin could take a man out with just one punch,” and that’s really no exaggeration. He’s a stocky man, 5’8” and 155 pounds of solid rock. He won 27 of his 39 professional bouts, 21 of them KO’s, but unlike most of his black counterparts in the ring, Rubin was no Mr. Nice Guy outside the canvas. He had a “problem childhood,” namely early tastes of poor environment, gang cohorts, police run-ins, reform school crime educational courses, the whole rags-to-rags story. But then, what the social workers call his “antisocial behavior” was channeled into prizefighting and Rubin did well enough to drive around in a monogrammed black Eldorado.
    But Carter also developed a nascent racial consciousness, and he began speaking out on social and racial issues, something that boxers just didn’t do in the pre-Ali/Floyd Patterson era. And when Carter had the balls to offhandedly tell a reporter during the Harlem Fruit Riots of 1964 that blacks should protect their communities from invasion by occupying police, even if it meant fightingto the death for self-protection, Rubin became a marked man in the eyes of the New Jersey justice machine.
    So it was no coincidence that Rubin and companion John Artis were hauled in by the Paterson, New Jersey, police the night of June 17, 1966, on suspicion of murdering three whites in a