Bob Dylan Is Rolling Thunder (A Bob Dylan Story, Chapter 4)

you thought you knew died. This is his story. Day four, Yes, it's day four, Monday, August first, nineteen. This is Dr Ed Sailor. Once again, I'm reviewing the progress of the patient. Robert Zimmerman, a k a. Bob Dylan. H. Bob is still on a fair amount of distress. Fever, dreams and moments of severe anxiety are not uncommon after the type of distress he experienced. He has mentioned ghosts or apparitions a few times in the last twenty four hours as well.

His physical injuries seemed to be healing just fine. There are no problems to really speak of, but he has taken to wearing a neck brace. Although it's my professional opinion that that is more for mental comfort than it is for physical support. He also, in more feverish moments, has been talking about running away. I ran away from home when I was very young. I told you that, Yet the police picked me up. So I did it again and again and again. I wanted to be a

circus hand, a carnival boy, a road bump. But I couldn't get out. I couldn't slip the net. Eventually I did, though. I guess that's where this need for reinvention came from, a desire to get out and make yourself, to become someone no one ever thought you could be that you never thought you could be. When you break free from life and go out and live, you really see what it's all about. That's what I did in seventy five.

I got out and saw the world. Sure, I've been to see it many times before, but this time I really saw it. I really experienced it, and I was the one who left so much blood on the tracks. Chapter four, Bob Dylan is rolling thunder. Ye. I'm still haunted by these people. There are people I've never even met, but they haunt me. I guess I lost myself. And what happened when writing that song. Sometimes songs can take you over like that. I still see that man slumped

over a bar, his back all ripped up. You can see flesh and bone and blood. This idea of transfiguration that I'm always talking about, it's real, you know that, right. The Rolling Thunder review was all about that. People ask me why I wore masks and white makeup on that tour. Well, when a man wears a mask, he's gonna tell you the truth. I was living my truth, break free from life. I grew up in northern Minnesota. The carnival came and went when I was young. I was always captivated by it.

We all were. I wanted that for this tour, a traveling show, a carnival. I wanted to do something I've never done before. I wanted to invent for reinvention. The tour I had staged the previous year had been huge. It was all private jets, arenas and outdoor shows. I got out and saw the world. The mid seventies was like that. People realized music could be a global industry. I just released an album called Blood on the Tracks, and I was on a real high in my career.

But with this tour, I wanted the opposite. I wanted to get back down to Earth. So that's what we did when we were on the road. I even drove the bus most of the time. I had this old motor home i'd go around in. It was the antithesis of a private jet. It wasn't just me, though, everyone was like that. On Rolling Thunder. Roger mcgwinn from The Birds went around in this thing called the Green Machine Man. I don't even know how that thing started up, let

alone how it lasted. The whole run, the whole thing really felt like I was at the start of my career all over again, like I was a new man, reborn. I was the happiest I think I've ever been. We played all over the country, and our friends came with us too. Joni Mitchell shown by is Rambling, Jack Elliott, t Bone, Burnett Hell. Even a young Sharon Stone was there, at least I like to pretend she was. There was one person who summed up the whole thing. Her name

was Scarlett Rivera. I met her thanks to our old friend Destiny. Before the tour, I was being driven around Greenwich Village one day with no particular place to go, and we passed a woman and I don't know. She had a strangeness about her. I wanted to be a circuit hint. She had long, flowing red hair, and she was dressed like she had been beamed in from another time. But I couldn't get out. You know. She was stick thin,

but she had a weight to her soul. I immediately asked the driver to stop the car and jumped out. I asked her if she could play the violin she was holding, and she said she could, so I asked her if I could hear it. The next thing, We're in my apartment and she's playing man. She played her violin sounded like an old traveler was playing it. It was mystical. Go out and live. You really see what it's all about. I had been writing a new album,

but it needed something, something I didn't have. I thought that this, the sound of this mystical violin, might be what is missing. But I needed to be sure, so I tested her. I was due to go to a Muddy Waters show at a bar in the village, so I asked her if she would tag along. Of course, she said, without missing a beat, so we went. I took to the stage with Muddy that night. There was always a pleasure to play with him. During the show, I couldn't stop looking at Scarlett sitting at the bar.

She was like nothing I'd ever seen before. She didn't just look like a normal person, she didn't act like one either. She was kind of scary, but fiercely interesting, break free from life. After a few songs, I jumped onto the microphone and announced to the crowd, I'm going to bring my violin player up now. Scarlet's eyes wide until they were the size of oranges. Ladies and gentlemen, Scarlett Rivera, I said, I didn't know how she'd act

a desire to get out and make yourself. The bar fell silent slowly, everyone started to look where I was looking. It was now or never. She jumped up from her stool. I thought she might make a break for the exit, but her eyes narrowed and she walked directly towards the stage. She casually opened her violin case and said, shall we reinvention? We kicked into the song with Muddy taking lead. Everybody in the band got a solo, and so after a while,

Muddy nodded to Scarlett to take the spotlight. This is it, I thought, let's see what she can do. Scarlett stepped into the middle of the stage and burned the damn place down. Her violin wasn't even miked up properly, but it sounded like a fire tearing through the joint. The crowd went crazy. Scarlett had shared the stage with the blues legend and held her own. She had passed the test,

and thank god too. Scarlett ended up playing on that album I was making, which turned into a record called Desire. I co wrote that album with a friend of mine, Jacques Levy. It featured great musicians like Emmy Lou Harris. Even Eric Clapton was supposed to be on it, but Scarlett. Scarlett made that album. During the recording, I'd already been playing the Rolling Thunder toour, and it became obvious that Scarlett sound her style, her soul. They were everything the

tour should be. She embodied its madness. Yet on the road there were rumors she kept a snake in a box in her dressing room. In fact, a few snakes. I don't know about that, but I do know she had a whole collection of swords that she carried around. They went everywhere with her. Also, I remember one day. She was on the bus. We were driving somewhere and she was chanting a Santa Rea type verse over and over. No one knew what the hell she was saying or

where it had come from. T Bone Burnett looked unnerved by the whole thing, terrified even. He turned to me and said, this is the bus to Hell. I couldn't stop laughing at him. That's what I did. It turned into the best tour we've ever done. I laughed and smiled for that whole tour. Thirty five shows that fall and another leg in the spring. But you know, like everything, that stuff never lasts. And what was up next? Divorce and murder? There as a woman now she floats along.

She's wearing a uniform, a waitress uniform. It's covered in blood. It's soaked right through, it's everywhere. I try to tell her, but she can't hear me. The rolling thunder of You was so long ago. I wasn't even born yet. There was so much drinking on that tour, A lot of coke too. I remember one day rambling. Jack Elliott said it was suspicious if you weren't on drugs. While on that tour. He refused to carry anything in case he got busted, so he'd have someone else carry it for him,

and he'd just before walking out on stage. One night, Bruce Springsteen showed up, except he wasn't the Bruce we all know today. Who's this guy at Springfield? I asked my bass player Rob Stoner, Sorry, Bruce. My wife Sarah had come on that tour too. She had come because she was playing a role in the home we were making on the road, my attempt at a European art house Flip called Ronaldo and Clara. I wanted it to be like Trufos, Shoot the Piano Player or Marcel Kanne's

Children of Paradise. Sam Shepard came to help too. He met Joni Mitchell on that tour. That's when she wrote that song Coyote. That song stopped us all dead in our tracks. Did you know she wrote that one about Sam to become someone no one ever thought you could be. Joan Bayez was also with us, and in my film too. I'd love Joanie. For years we had been called the King and Queen of folk, and I guess that was true. We've been involved too romantically, you know, back in the

early days, but it hadn't ended well. Yet one day we went to a bar called Gypsy's Place. We were all drinking hot toddies, and Joanie disappeared upstairs into an apartment or this old traveler women lived. This woman showed Janie a pillow that was stuffed with the ashes of her dead husband. She said, the pillow was the best night's sleep you ever had. She put on one of the woman's old dresses and danced back into the bar. We had a couple more and then she dragged me

outside and stood me under a huge oak tree. I could tell something is wrong, something important. She looked me right in the eyes and said, I've been wanting to ask you this for a decade. Okay, before I finished that part of the story, I have to fill you in on the history between me and Janie. I remember seeing her for the first time. She was something else. I didn't want to blink. I was worried that if I blinked, she wouldn't be there when I opened my eyes.

She just didn't feel real. Eventually I did. Though. She had an unusual way of playing guitar. I could never master that. And her voice, my god, what a voice, that soprano. It was heart stopping. She did a lot for me in those early days. She brought me on tour with her. I ran away from home when I was very young. Johnny was a big deal then she still is, but she was already the queen then, you know. She brought me on stage with her, calling me her little vagabond. She was even there for me at the

Newport Folk Festival. That was the summer of sixty three, just a few months before the whole world would grow a little darker from a most foul murder, and two years before Newport grew darker with all that judas nonsense. We started to spend time together, and by the summer of sixty four we were close. But the truth is I wasn't always truthful with Joni, this need for reinvention. We'd spent a lot of that summer at Albert Grossman's

house in Woodstock. Joan was taking a break between tours, and I was either writing or riding around on my three fifty Triumph, not the bike that get us into this mess, but another one. I have sweet moments from that time. We talked about our futures, our futures together. We talked about maybe having kids one day, and we even named one. I think I even proposed again and again and again. I was kind of half joking, but Joan was the sort of woman you could easily spend

the rest of your life with. We spent a lot of time in a crummy hotel over in Washington Square two. It was twelve dollars a night. I wanted to be a circuit Hint had no room service and a regular clientele of junkies, pushers, alcoholics, and other dubious New York riff raff. It was like home to us, though. Joan bought me a big black suit jacket with a white shirt and crowning glory a pair of cuff links made out of lumpy, opaque violet rocks. She wrote about that

in her song Diamonds and Rust. She wrote about it almost word for word, no filter. I love that song to be included in something that Joni had written. I mean, to this day it still impresses me that you never thought you could be. We did a tour together and who played the packed houses with grave reviews. But by the time we got to England and sixty five things weren't so great. I had begun seeing someone else at the same time Sarah, the woman who had become my wife.

I never wanted to hurt Jonie, so I kept the two apart, couldn't slip the net. Sure that was the wrong decision, but at the time I felt like I was protecting the people I loved. I don't know. I don't expect you to understand. It all came to a head at the Royal Albert Hall, the Grandest Venues for my betrayal. We were playing a show there at the end of that England tour. I got out and saw the world. Me and Sarah were in this little dressing room before the show, and all of a sudden, there's

a loud rap at the door. Sarah, still jet lags, slowly got up and opened the door with a tire yawn. Who's standing on the other side, Joanie clutching a huge present must have been for my birthday. I felt the color drained from my face. I mean I actually felt it, but I couldn't get out. Joanie had never seen Sarah before, not knowing of her existence until this moment. Sarah, not recognizing her, took the gift and politely said thanks. Joan couldn't even bear to look at me as the door closed.

It's all over now, Baby Blue, was the final song that night. I could barely get the words out. Back to the story I was telling you under that old oak tree with Joanie. I've been wanting to ask you this for years, she said, and I felt the blood drained from my face again, but this time, as I said, it was a decade later, a breeze passed over us and animated that traveler woman's dress. Why did you never tell me about Sarah, she asked. I struggled to answer,

couldn't slip the net. She looked me dead in the eyes. There was pain in there, deep pain. I didn't answer. We just stood in silence, painful silence. It's because I'm too political and you lied too much, she said, before smiling one of the saddest smiles I've ever seen. I really saw it, I really experienced it. She walked off back to the bar, leaving me under that old oak tree. No one had ever said a truer word in my life.

My marriage was falling apart at this point too, and one night Sarah took to the stage and sang the song I'd written for her, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. She dedicated it to Joan. By the time it came to book the second leg of the tour, I invited Joanie to play the entire run, but she declined my invitation. I didn't try to convince her otherwise. We'll be right back after this word, word word. There's another man now. He's walking towards me. His right hand is covering his eye.

His palm is pressed right over it. Slowly he takes it away and there's there's nothing there. It's just an empty socket. You know. I've always loved boxing right the beast from Hibbing Sugar, Ray Zimmerm. That's what I would call myself in the ring. I've even got a gym in Santa Monica. Not many people know that. There's pictures of Muddy Waters and those British bad boys, the rolling stones on the wall. Boxing has always been a passion of mine. You give me a boxer's name, and I

can give you his record, just like that. Boom oh. Mancini thirty four fights, nine wins, twenty three knockouts, five losses. Manny Pacquiao two fights, wins, knockouts, thirty nine eight losses. I met him once he was a great fighter. But there's one boxer I'll always forever be linked with, Ruben Carter desired. I became involved in Reuben's story ten years after he was convicted of murder. Someone had given me his autobiography and I was hooked on his story, hooked

on the injustice of it all. You really see what it's all about about. I wrote the song Hurricane about him and what happened. So what happened is a tale that is a lot like a boxing match. I guess he was knocked down time and time again, but like all fighters, he got back up. I admired that if you don't know the story, then allow me to be your narrator for the evening. Are you sitting comfortably well? Good, give me a bell. Round one. It's Muggie and Patterson,

New Jersey. Despite being two thirty in the morning, it's July n s there's these two men. They enter a place called the Lafayette Bar and grill. It's unusual because they're black. Black folks stayed away from that bar. Hell, most people stayed away from that bar. It was a dump, but it wasn't friendly to people of color, so much so that the bartender Jim Oliver slings a bottle at the two men as they enter, just because they're black. It would be the last thing he did on this earth.

A shotgun pellet severs his spinal cord moments later. Within seconds, the two men are spraying bullets into the Lafayette. Some bullets are coming from a shotgun, others from a pistol. A woman called Hazel Tennis, who stopped into the bar after her waitressing shift, jumps off for a stool and tries to run, but the bullets catch her, knock her to the floor and she starts bleeding out right away, so much blood. Two other guys are having a conversation

at the bar there. Next one dies instantly. He doesn't even have time to get off his stool. The other turns his head at both the right and wrong moment. A bullet passes through his eye and explodes out of his forehead. He's not dead, but he passes out. Blood stains the wall, the bar, the floor, and the ceiling of the bar. So much blood, part of an eyeball comes to rest on the pool table. Silence finally reigns

down on the bloody scene. Round two, Patty Valentine this local woman who I'd go on to meet in person in the courtroom by the way. Because a sleep on her couch, her TV silent, the grainy picture dancing on the wall of her unlit room above the Lafayette, she as up to a loud noise gunshots possibly nothing unusual there times. She goes to her apartment window and sees these two men leaving the Lafayette, one holding a shotgun, the other a pistol. They drive off into the night.

Valentine swiftly heads downstairs into the bar, and upon entry she sees Hazel Tannis, her white waitress uniforms turning red. This time I really saw it, blood soaked through the white cotton, and Valentine screaming least she never has before round three later, Ruben Carter, Middleweights wins nineteen knockouts, is lying down in the bed of his rented sixty six white Dodge Polara. It's been a long night. We've all been there, right. He'd been out at a night spot

and now he was heading home. John Artists, a young athlete and Ruben sparring partner, is driving the vehicle. A red police light flicks across his eyeline and like a silent alarm. It makes him uncomfortable. The lack of an actual siren is unnerving even to a man like Ruben Carter, who has had more than a few brushes with the police due to his skin color. His car has stopped for the second time that night. On the first occasion, they were told by the police that they were looking

for two men fitting their description. This time, the officer has decided it is them. I couldn't slip the net. Within thirty minutes, Reuben is in the hospital where that guy who was shot through the eye tells the cops he ain't the one. Remember that, the guy that had just been shot is telling the cops it ain't Ruben Carter and John artists. You really see what it's all about. Still they go back to the police station, of course they do, and after seventeen hours, both men are released.

But round four, two men, Alfred Bellow and Arthur Dexter Bradley, had been near the Lafayette Bar that night. Bellow was on the lookout for Bradley. Bradley was a what do you call it, a career criminal. He was apparently trying to break into a nearby metal company below grew bored of watching Bradley and turns to walk towards the bar in search of cigarettes. After several loud noises, he sees two men come out of the Lafayette, one carrying a pistol,

the other a shotgun. One he said was Ruben Carter, the other John Artists. They jumped into a white car and drove away. Pretty damning testimony, right, well maybe if it wasn't for the fact that this testimony came four months after the shooting, when the police offered a ten thousand dollar reward. Round five, the day after Bellow and Bradley came out with that report, John Artist is stopped while buying soda. A shotgun appears under his chin, and

he and Ruben Carter are arrested for triple murder. Do you really see what it's all about? The trial is a laughing stock. They both go down the final round. Almost ten years later, there was a campaign for a retrial. I was more than happy to get involved. We played a gig at the prison where Reuben was being held. Do you know what struck me the most when I met him? It was only a small thing, but it chilled me to my bones. I couldn't stop thinking about

his prison number. On his shirt, he had the number four, five four seven two in black type. I couldn't stop thinking how he had gone from the number one contender to number four or five four seven to for reinvention. We played another show for Reuben Madison Square Garden between rolling thunder legs. Any day now I shall be released, right wrong? It was all for nothing. In the retrial, they found him guilty again, but I couldn't get out of it. Wasn't until the nine teen eighties he finally

got free. Man. They took all that from him. I mean, they literally stole his time. How do you recover from something like that? When you leave something like that and you come out of the other side, how can you reinvent yourself from such a broken place? Someone told me. In the mid nineties, he was arrested again when Toronto police thought he'd sold drugs to an undercover officer. How long have I been singing about this ship? How long will the world be like? This makes you wonder will

it ever change? The Atlanta courtroom was hot. It was the middle of July nine. Bob Dylan slouched in the witness stand and watched a ceiling fans spin round and round. Mr Dilon, the prosecuting attorney, ingrad, Pivnic asked, or should that be Mr Zimmerman? She smiled. Dylan sat up, rubbed his nose, and finally looked at Pivnic properly for the first time. Sorry, what was the question? I was asking about your wealth? Pivnic responded, How much money have you

made from the song Hurricane? The song from the The attorney sentence tailed off. She checked her notes, pausing for dramatic effect, her eyes scanning the page. In the courtroom silence from the gold selling album Desire, she finally said. Dylan took off his a v her sunglasses for the first time and asked, you mean my treasure on Earth? I suppose, the attorney said, but Dylan didn't continue. There

was silence. Once again. Pivnic, with growing impatience, directed her next line at both Dylan and the courtroom at large. In a case like this, defamation, invasion of privacy, unauthorized publication of a name, it is only fair that my client receives what is owned. She motioned to her client, who sat behind a dark wooden table no more than

a few feet away from her. Her client was Patricia and Valentine a k a. Patty Valentine, the witness to the aftermath of the shooting at the Lafayette that landed Reuben Carter in prison. Dylan's eyes drifted back to the ceiling. Fan Pivnic carried on, I would assume you've made quite a lot a big song like that, a song that's been on the radio, one that you've played live, and

that was on a successful album. In the song, you clearly imply my client has something to do with this heinous crime, which I might add, was committed by a man according to a court of law, by a jury of your peers, that you yourself are defending. Dylan put his shades back on. Why are you defending a criminal? Pivnic asked, the question fell on deaf ears. She picked up a sheet of paper from the table in front of Patty Valentine. I was reading the lyrics to the

song Hurricane, and there's a fool mentioned. Who exactly is the fool you speak of? Dylan sat upright in a flash, suddenly engaged. He drew in close to the courtroom spindly microphone and said, whoever Satan gave power to whoever was blind to the truth, it was living by his own truth. That's who the fool is. For the first time that day,

Pivnic was at a loss for words. Five days later, the Washington Post published Bob Dylan's comments on Satan at the very same time that it was revealed that he had joined an evangelical Christian movement called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Dylan's private embrace of Christianity had gone public. What started that day in print would go on to give birth

to the next Bob Dylan. But while Dylan was moving on and once again becoming someone knew like a slow train coming, the same could not be said for Patty Valentine, who was continuing her struggle to shake off the events of nineteen sixty six, and the first thing she did after her defamation trial against Dylan fell apart was to drop Valentine as her last name. She moved from New Jersey to Florida and sought out the quiet life. Years later,

in she met some friends for an evening out. They were old friends she used to know from back in her time in New Jersey. As they walk to the Port St. Lucy Movie Theater, they passed a bar. Inside was loud and hot. Condensation frosted the part of the window not taken up by the red knee on bar sign. She stole a glimpse inside two guys shooting pool. She had been hiding her anxiety well, but now old memories

began to bubble to the surface. She barely talked to her friends about the movie they were about to watch. Inside the pitch Black Theater, Patty and her friends sat waiting the moments later, the giant's screen was filled with the image of Denzel Washington, who within the year would win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as boxer Ruben Carter. Denzel's eyes dazzled as he stared into the eyes of a young friend and asked, do

you believe I killed those people? His friend replied, I know you didn't. And there was a moment of silence in the St. Lucy Theater, and then someone in the little row broke that silence with a steel, hard voice. I know you did. The voice was Patty's. Sitting next to her was James Lawless, a retired police officer who

lived less than two blocks in the Lafayette bar. He was the man who spoke to Muhammad Ali when the Greatest of All Times showed up with a quarter million dollars in cash in a suitcase for Hurricane Carter's bail. Also in her group was Patty's lifelong friend, her roommate, who lived with her above the bar at the time of the murders. Her name was not public knowledge, nor will it ever be. On the night of the murders,

she was visiting her mother out of town. If she had been home, there's a strong chance that she and Patty would have been downstairs playing pool at the very moment the two men entered the bar brandishing firearms. When Patty was confronted by herself on the screen, played by Pipa Pear, three, her friends broke the silence once again, this time with laughter. The on screen version of Patty looked gaunt and pale, like a junkie with no home.

In the theater, Patty laughed the loudest before declaring, I hope I looked better than that. Now she was bluffing. Her laughter couldn't hide the years of trauma she'd endured since renting the room above the Lafayette. The sound of the gunshots from under her floorboards, the bodies lying motionless, the sleepless nights that followed, and there was so much blood then, and every time she looked back, it was

all still there. The Blood on the Tracks. Blood on the Tracks produced by Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio. It's hosted an executive producer by me Jake Brennan, also executive produced by Brady Sather. Zeth Lundie is lead editor and producer. This episode was written by Ben Burrow, Story and copy editing by Pat Healy. Mixing and sound designed by Colin Fleming. Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spreaker. This episode feature Chris Anzeloni is Bob Dylan.

Sources for this episode are available at double Elvis dot com on the Blood in the Tracks series page. Follow Double Elvis on Instagram at double Elvis and on Twitch at s Grace Sland Talks Need You Talk to Me per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace Land, Pond Rock and Wood or Dad