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Pledging My Time – Conversations With Bob Dylan Band Members

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Author:Ray Padgett

My name is Junior and I am a Bobaholic. If you are one too, this is a book for you. I heartily recommend it.

Pledging My Time – Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members is a remarkable collection of interviews with people who have intersected with Dylan across his career. The book is written by Ray Padgett who demonstrates impressive attention to detail and clearly does deep research before each of his interviews. I think this is why the interviews are so successful. The interviewees are engaged by being able to have a discussion rather than just being asked questions – there are a lot of “I had forgotten that”; “I didn’t know that” and “really you tracked that down” type comments. Sometimes Padgett has sourced pictures or recordings the interviewee has never seen which adds to the rapport. Also, I expect, interviewees who had a positive experience put him in contact or endorsed him to others in the Dylan world.

So, a bit on the author. From his bio: Ray Padgett is the founder of Cover Me, the largest blog devoted to cover songs on the web, and author of Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time (2017)and the 33 1/3 book I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (2020). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, SPIN, The AV Club, Vice, and MOJO, and he’s been interviewed as an expert on cover songs by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, SiriusXM, and dozens more. He also runs the email newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s, essays inspired by live Bob Dylan shows from yesteryear. He lives in Burlington, Vermont and works as a publicist.

This book was crowdfunded and I pre-ordered it direct from the author. In. the comments I will include a link to various places to order in various formats – or just go to the evil empire at Amazon. The book includes interviews from his email newsletter but also a bunch of other interviews. Having read quite a few of the interviews in Padgett’s newsletter I enjoyed re-reading them in chronological order.

I have all the Dylan albums, a stack of bootlegs and over 40 books on him. Why get another book? Well, because this book is different. Padgett wants to know what it was like working with Dylan, in the studio, how it felt playing live, what sort of interactions did you have? For me the fact that he has a very weak handshake or that he has bad breath or that he is a hopeless driver is interesting. It helps to fill out the whole picture of this remarkable artist who has loomed large in our lives, in my case, for over 50 years. I am part of a small group of fellow obsessives and everyone describes this book as one the most fascinating books they have read on Dylan. I rate it up there with Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s book about the Rolling Thunder Tour “On The Road with Bob Dylan” – and there is a lot on that tour by the way.

The recurrent description of Dylan is of a weird cat, well, we all know that. Reclusive, verbally non communicative especially in terms of musical direction. Even though he continues to draw from the well of traditional roots music he is always moving on to do something different even if that might mean going back to some musical style / musicians. The change is a change from what came just before. I hope this makes sense.

How do you play with Dylan? You never take your eyes off him for the cues. What song, what key, faster, slower, pauses -he ain’t gonna tell you and if you can’t go with the flow, you are not going to last long. Dylan would deliberately turn his back or obstruct the view of other players so they couldn’t see what he was doing on guitar to force them to work out what fits the vibe at that very moment. Dylan’s attitude appears to be “I will play whatever I want to play however I want to play it whenever I feel like playing it.” Quite the challenge and clearly not a way of working that would suit a lot of musicians.A recurrent description is that playing with Dylan is like playing jazz and the the way he varies his phrasing is of a jazz singer. Jim Keltner categorises Dylan and Willie Nelson as jazz singers because of their phrasing and, interestingly, musicians with jazz playing experience appear to adapt most quickly to Dylan’s approach. To quote Keltner, “it wasn’t about finding a pocket but searching for the vibe”. From doing songs a different way every night to spending rehearsals playing everything but the songs they were going to actually play on tour, to, a la Miles Davis, offering the musicians the barest guidance as to the direction for a song – you work out the rest. If he did give guidance, it was usually through one person. One interviewee recounts how they would all be in the rehearsal room and Bob would whisper into the ear of the anointed one who would then say to the assembled musicians “Bob says…….” Like, why not just say that yourself Bob? Weird cat.

In the comments I will post a picture of the contents page listing all the 48 interviewees. The interviews go from early folk scene people like Paul Stookey, Ramblin’ Jack and Martin Carthy (fascinating that one) a whole range of musicians he played with a lot for particular tours, who he interacted with on a number of occasions over the journey (this is a pattern – he goes back to the people he knows, sometimes, nay, often many years later having had zero contact in the interim) and some people who just out of circumstance happened to play with him just the once either on stage or in the studio. Some of the unusual ones include a woman who brazened her way into meeting Dylan in Sydney on the Heartbreakers tour and ended up opening a show and that Soy Bomb dickhead from the Grammys. My favourites, include Martin Carthy, Jim Keltner, Billy Cross guitarist from the 78 tour, Rob Stoner, Spooner Oldham from the Gospel period, the story of jamming with the Plugz for over a year, Winston Watson from the Never-Ending Tour, Freddy Koella and Benmont Tench. Oh yeah, Duke Robillard. The way Dylan turned on him was scary – but you’ll have to read the book to find out about that.

As I was reading the book, I scribbled down stuff that interested me, without giving away too much of the book here’s a few.

-The Rolling Thunder tour hired Frank Zappa’s tour bus called Phydeaux, replete with a picture of a dog on the side
-The Rolling Thunder 76 harder edged rock versions came from what the band worked up in rehearsals before Dylan joined them. He just went with it.
-Dylan wanted Lowell George to tour with him as guitarist. My comment: Given Lowell’s micro manage, endless re-takes and Dylan’s slap dash approach – it would have been a disaster
-At rehearsals for Letterman Paul Schafer kept trying to be part of it. As they left rehearsal Dylan said “lose the clown on the keyboards”.
-Kinky Friedman caught Dylan and Joni M rooting in Friedman’s sister’s bedroom when the RTR group came over for a gathering
-A woman who attended tons of gigs had her name changed to Sara Dylan and had a passport in that name, presumably to help her get in to shows, hotels etc.
-One of Grateful Dead roadcrew was amazed to see drummer Winston Watson chatting to Jerry Garcia. He said he had worked with him and never spoken to him in 15 years.
-Benmont Tench reckons playing with Dylan taught the band how to “swing”. Presumably the roll part of rock’n’roll.
-How did Fairport Convention get those early unreleased Dylan songs? They went to his London publisher and asked “have you got any unreleased Dylan songs”? Sure, try these! Dylan loved their versions BTW.

If you found any of this interesting, you will love the book. It’s fascinating and will give you as good an account of what it is like to be in the weird world of Bob Dylan,

Length of Read:Medium

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

Dylan fans

One thing you’ve learned

Too many

6

Comments

  8. Remember this fabulous story from Dave Stewart about the, uh, “challenging” nature of playing live with Mr Z

    Some of the stories the Heartbreakers come out with about that tour are a scream!” claims Dave Stewart, who was one of the principals in engineering the Dylan-Heartbreakers alliance.
    “My favourite’s the time they were all onstage playing some open-air stadium and an argument broke out because the Heartbreakers had just vowed to Dylan that they could play anything, so Dylan started in on a song he was inventing as he went along. He was just changing chords at random and at the same time glowering at the bass player Howie like he was making mistakes. So he stopped playing and walked over to Dylan saying, ‘This song doesn’t even exist! How’m I supposed to know how to play it?’, and Dylan’s screaming back ‘Yes it does! Yes it does!’.
    “Then they all stopped and had this huge row, and Tom comes over to Dylan and says ‘F*** this! What do you think we are? Machines? How would you like it if I were to choose any Beach Boys song, y’know, could you sing it?’…This is all going on in a stadium, right — so Dylan screams back ‘Sure I could. Name anyone. Any one!’ So Tom goes, ‘OK, do ‘Help Me Rhonda’!’. Dylan screams back, ‘No problem’ and starts crashing out these, y’know, weird, loud, inappropriate guitar chords and singing ‘Help…Help…Help…Help me Rhonda’ over and over again, completely out of tune to, like, 70,000 people. The Heartbreakers were just standing there, mouths agape, saying “What the f*** is goin’ on?”

    -“Bob Dylan: The Untouchable,” Nick Kent, Vox, October 1990″

  11. I remember Richard Thompson saying that when he played with Dylan at a multi-artist celebration of him they rehearsed 5 songs and on the night Dylan played completely different ones. ‘But he’s Bob Dylan. He can do what he likes.’ Very limited images of Richard in this clip, but it does cut to him just after the 2 minute mark. Love Bob’s shirt!

    https://youtu.be/aB-_4NiDr9M

    • Thanks for the tip about Apple, JW, but have no idea how to do that on
      Kindle. Be great if Mr. P could get the problem sorted before readers
      Start canceling their purchases and leave negative reviews that affect
      Sales of an otherwise excellent book.

      While page numbers are pretty irrelevant and most Kindle books don’t have
      them for the reasons you state, the standalone nature of the interviewees here
      means a list of names is essential.

      Hooked after two chapters, i’ll struggle manfully along using the list JW
      Supplied earlier

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