SECTION ONE

sm

COLUMN FORTY-NINE, SEPTEMBER 1, 1999
(Copyright © 1999 Al Aronowitz)

Official insignia of the Woodstock Festival on the back of an official Woodstock Festival jacket.

MY DYLAN PAPERS: PART 2
THE ISLE OF WIGHT

I.

The enormity of the monster roosting in the alfalfa field on Max Yasgur's farm triggered a gigantic worldwide double take. Nobody would have paid all that much attention to the Woodstock Festival except for the massive crowd it attracted. The public couldn't help but fixate on the spectacle of this monster wallowing in the Catskill mud while another monster of a traffic jam kept another million and a half people trying to get there stuck on impassable highways. But although the populace fell for the monster at first sight, this massive creature sent nothing but a chill down the backs of the authorities. Obviously, the monster was enjoying an orgy of sex, drugs and rock and roll on the slope that formed the natural amphitheater facing the Woodstock Festival stage. But the authorities worried over what else this particular creature was capable of doing.

For governments, mobs are what nightmares are made of. For governments, there is no monster more terrible to contemplate, to confront or in any way to contend with than an enormous mass of people. Some 20 years later, for example, monsters almost as large as the Woodstock beast would succeed in overthrowing the governments of Eastern Europe, in some cases without firing a shot. It takes only a twitch, a sneeze, a shout for an apparently benevolent monster to turn malevolent. Meaning that it takes only an urge for a crowd to surge.

Could this mob turn ugly? To governments, all mobs are ugly, especially when the mob has so much reason to be fed up with the government. When enough people got fed up enough to march in the streets, the Berlin Wall crumbled. At the time of the Woodstock Festival, America was building its own walls. President Nixon found it so necessary to protect the White House from anti-war protesters that he surrounded it with a wall of Washington Metro buses, parked bumper-to-bumper like a wagon train pulled into a circle against an Indian attack. The Vietnam War had undammed an ocean of discontent. Many-legged monsters almost as enormous as the Woodstock crowd already had started showing up on the Washington Mall. Some ten months after Woodstock, a crowd of antiwar protesters would make America's government nervous enough to stage America's own Tiananmen Square---the Kent State Massacre. Not since the Civil War would America be so divided.

At the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in January of 1967 , a crowd of 20,000 lit up joints in a spontaneous public nose thumbing at the laws against marijuana. Some six months later, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, the number of pot-smokers willing to light up in public grew to some 35,000, all smoking marijuana spontaneously without a single bust. At Woodstock, a dissenting counterculture couldn't resist the idea of climbing out of its discontent to join in a three-day party that would feature almost all its music icons on the same stage. Bedecked in tie-dyes and other counterculture tokens, close to a half-million war-protesting and rock-loving pot-smokers surveyed one another and said:

"Gee! There sure is a shitload of us!"

This Woodstock monster did its own double take.

II.

The Woodstock Festival featured almost all the music heroes of the era but not the three acts which at that time were considered rock royalty---the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Otherwise, Woodstock offered the most all-inclusive collection of headliners available. Although Bob, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones weren't on the bill, some 30 of the biggest names and hottest acts in rock and in folk were---including George Harrison's friend, Indian classical sitarist Ravi Shankar. He'd become the rage among acidheads and other druggies because they found Shankar's ragas groovy to trip out on. But at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, there was only one truly big-time headliner. Bob Dylan.

The Isle of Wight Festival was scheduled for August 29 and 30, a Saturday night and a Sunday night, with Dylan's triumphant return to the concert stage scheduled on the Sunday night. Booked to headline on the Saturday night was The Who, also one of the headliners at the Woodstock Festival. Another Isle of Wight headliner was Joe Cocker, who was then only starting to make it big. But in those days, you couldn't mention either Joe Cocker or

There were 26 other acts
on the bill, including
Marsha Hunt and the White Trash

The Who in the same breath with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles or Bob Dylan. The most that could be said for The Who and Joe Cocker at that time was that they were a lot better known than the 26 other acts on the bill, typified by such transient dazzlers as Marsha Hunt and White Trash. At the Isle of Wight Festival, Dylan was the only monster on the bill capable of attracting a monster of an audience. In refusing to play the Woodstock Festival and in then letting himself be talked into playing the Isle of Wight, Dylan in effect was telling England's counterculture:

"C'mon. Let's hold our own Woodstock."

And so, on the Isle of Wight, a dot of land that certainly wasn't the easiest place in the world to get to, Dylan almost single-handedly proved an enticing enough attraction to collect an audience sometimes estimated to be as few as a 125,000 and sometimes as many as 250,000. This was more than twice the island's normal population and more than three times the largest crowd ever to protest the Vietnamese war in London's Trafalgar Square, a crowd that until then had been considered the most enormous gathering of pot-smokers in British history. The Times of London found itself impressed enough by the size of the audience Bob attracted to headline its story: The Isle of Dylan.

A few days prior to the festival, I watched the thousands arriving to take up residence in a growing tent city, pitched on a sixty-acre hillside at the north end of the Isle of Wight. From North America, from both ends of the Mediterranean and from Scandinavia, they came. They came from all over Europe but, for the most part, this monster looked at the world through the blue eyes of the thousands of British youths invading from across the Solent. For the first time in the memory of humankind, the ferries from Portsmouth to Ryde ran all night.

Hovercraft is faster but more expensive. The bulk of the Isle of Wight audience arrived at Portsmouth by bus or train to cross the Solent on the slower but less expensive regular ferries. Once, I went with Band drummer Levon Helm in the three a.m. darkness to watch the kids coming off the ferries at the Ryde terminal, where they debarked with a silence that seemed to show a well-mannered reluctance to break the still of the night. And yet, although they should have been burnt out from the trip, they looked bright-eyed and determined, with their rucksacks and their bedrolls piled on their backs. Some of the guys had crew cuts and some had tangled tresses down past their asses, but they were all die-hard Dylan fans, England's Woodstock Generation, all sharing the same agenda and following the same leader. Their facial hairs ranged from peach fuzz to beards, sometimes well barbered and often scraggly. The women, mostly with long hair and mostly in pants or jeans, all looked beautiful enough for me to fall in love with each and every one of them, even though some might have been as young as 13. The age of the crowd ranged up past hippiedom and into the 40s. With all the hotels and guesthouses on the island booked solid, some of the crowd found accommodations in boats and in house trailers, but most pitched their tents in the 60-acre canvas-city encampment Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim were said to be among those roughing it there. The local residents had expected the worst from this monster and the island's 130-man police force canceled all leaves and put itself on alert, assigning plainclothesmen to mingle with the audience. Although the monster was clearly smoking pot and treating itself to an exotic salad of other controlled substances, the authorities afterwards said they were pleased by the monster's comportment. Police Superintendent Arthur Maynard even commented:

"Everything has been very good-tempered. The kids have been well-behaved and there has been no trouble of a serious nature."

There were gatecrashers and the walls eventually came tumbling down and some anarchist and biker types had been reportedly looking for trouble. But this Isle of Wight crowd struck me as much more docile than Woodstock's benign beast. Perhaps the best illustration of just how out-of-line this crowd didn't get were the football-field-length queues waiting patiently at the four portable toilet trailers during the height of the festival. Although some of those kids had to wait as long as an hour each for a turn in the loo, they exhibited remarkable self-containment. The ugliest they got in grumbling over their agony amounted to maybe a painful joke or two about learning how a dog feels when its owner is too lazy to take it for a walk. These kids were so mannerly that they even lined up politely to get gypped at the food shops, which had stayed open to accommodate them. At the cash registers, each kid would sweetly give his or her thanks with a "Ta!" even though the prices had been jacked up outrageously for the occasion.

Band drummer Levon and I had hired a taxi for the ride into Ryde in our own hunt for a food shop and we couldn't help but stop to gawk at this crowd. We were on an expedition to rustle up some candies, snacks and other goodies to bring back to the rest of The Band, trapped at the Halland Hotel without room service in the middle of the night. This was still an island of thatched roofs and, with its curving, cobbled streets and its ancient fairy tale architecture, the Isle of Wight gave me the feeling that I was in a Disneyland, a miniature replica of the real thing, built for some theme park. At the Ryde Esplanade, Levon and I watched the ferries disgorging the kids, who then still had a five-mile walk to the festival site at Woodside Bay, where another encampment was already growing in a wheatfield overlooked by the stage and bounded by Wootton Creek. On our way back to the hotel, Levon and I rode along the road on which this throng walked. The line was endless, reminding me of the lines that march through the epic silent films of pioneer moviemaker Sergei Eisenstein, who always had lines stretching over the horizon, a trademark of his work. Le von, famous for his Arkansas outfielder's ability to keep a straight face, rolled down the window to get a better look at the kids in this line. Then he broke into an overpowering smile as he said:

"Look at how beautiful they are!"

At the same time, with a few jerky motions, he grabbed the care package we had bought for the rest of The Band, reached into it and he started handing out its contents to the kids through the taxi window.

III.

The promoters amateur enough to think that four portable toilet trailers were going to satisfy the needs of a crowd of 250,000 were three brothers, Ron, Ray and Bob Foulk. Who also had managed to cadge the facade of a Roman temple from the old Cleopatra movie set at Pinewoods Studio so they could use it as a frame for the Isle of Wight Festival stage. Which, they boasted, was the biggest ever built in Britain. Describing the promoters as "three small-time operators," Variety, the show business Bible, spoke for almost all the media by expressing mystification at how the Foulk brothers managed to persuade Dylan to make his triumphant return to the concert stage on a remote dot of land off the southern coast of England. And for only an estimated $60,000 guarantee! And especially after Dylan had turned down far more lucrative and more prestigious offers---such as the Woodstock Festival, held in his own back yard.

The Brothers Foulk had campaigned for months to sign Dylan as their main attraction, starting with a tactic no more imaginative than simple foot-in-the-door salesmanship. As expected, Dylan at first told them to get lost, but by that time their foot was far enough in the door for them to be able to hand Bob a brochure extolling the Isle of Wight as a vacation spot. It was a one-of-a-kind brochure which they had written and printed themselves. When that caught Bob's attention, they next put together a home movie for use as a travelogue. Naturally, Sara also had a say in Bob's decision to make his triumphant return to the concert stage on the Isle of Wight. When he got there, Dylan said that he had agreed to do the show because it would give him an opportunity to have the honeymoon he and Sara hadn't had time for. The poker-faced Bob told a reporter:

"I wanted to see the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson."

On his very first morning on the Isle of Wight, Bob went with Sara to visit Osborne House, where Queen Victoria had spent her summers with her eleven children. Bob was into having a big family at that time. Originally, Bob and Sara had planned a trans-Atlantic crossing aboard the QE2 with their two elder children, Maria and Jesse. It was 18 days before the concert when they boarded the ship, and already 40,000 tickets had been sold at six dollars apiece. My wife and I had driven the Dylans to the ship to see them off and we were in their stateroom when, 30 minutes before the ship sailed, four-year-old Jesse went into convulsions. We rushed Jesse to our doctor, who met us in the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, where, taking no chances, the doctor decided to admit Jesse for a day or two. Naturally, the QE2 sailed without the Dylans and the British Press wasted no time in gleefully reporting that Bob wasn't coming. Twelve days later, when Bob and Sara did in fact arrive at London's Heathrow Airport, they learned that since they'd carried Jesse off the QE2, not another ticket had been sold. When they reached the Isle of Wight, the first news they got was that the roof of the stage had collapsed because the crew had hung too much lighting from the overhead pipes. Then a reporter showed up to warn Dylan:

"You won't get another line in the papers unless you give me an interview!"

That's the kind of skirmishing that went on between Bob and the press. The media continually complained about Bob's aloofness, his inaccessibility, his uncooperative behavior and his camera-shyness. For his part, Bob fed the antagonism, making it clear that he wasn't a trained monkey doing tricks on command to please the press. His attitude was that he wanted the world to judge him on his songs, his music and his performances alone and not on his ability to butter up to the media. Bob took offense at the hair-trigger of the press, which stood ready to bust Bob for the slightest reason. Searching for nits to pick,

Press from all over the world
arrived looking for a chance
to knock Bob off his throne

the press was drooling for a chance to knock Bob off his throne. Radio and TV crews from all over the world started to arrive, with French, German and Swedish companies arranging for live broadcasts. The reporters, at first some 20-strong, had set up field headquarters at the bar of the Halland Hotel. Their numbers soon grew. The promoters, hungry for as much publicity as possible for their festival, kept pleading with Bob to hold a press conference. On the Wednesday before the show, I had to help arrange one.

It was held at the Halland. Mal Evans came down from his home outside of London to help me set it up. Mal, was the Beatles' gentle giant road manager and he came in response to my SOS. He was, after all, a little more experienced at road managing than I. Mal was the Beatles' number two road manager. Along with Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' number one road manager, Mal had been as much a part of the Beatles as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Mal joined the act as a bouncer at the Cavern Club, where he helped the Beatles out of a scrap or two. Mal was big but he was a teddy bear. He always won my Mr. Congeniality award. At the press conference at the Halland, Mal helped me act as Bob's bodyguard just in case fans decided to storm the Halland ballroom when Bob faced the TV news cameras. When the press asked its usual dumb questions, Bob responded with his usual put-ons, what one newspaper later described as "a few mumbled non-committal statements." At press conferences, Bob always did his best to sound as if he were mumbling "noncommittal statements." At the Halland, the questions certainly were irrelevant. Was there anyone in England that Dylan wanted to meet? What kind of performance could the audience expect? What of the Beatles' offer to use their recording facilities? What about the crowd? What about drugs? What about his marriage? When he was asked why he no longer sang with the raw whine that had distinguished his singing before his motorcycle accident, he explained that a man with kids learns how to sing more sweetly. Immediately, another reporter wanted to know if that meant Bob had turned square. That night, Bob could be seen on the evening news, looking straight-faced out from the telly as he soberly put off yet another reporter by saying:

"I don't understand your question!"

IV.

"When you walk near the chalk cliffs," Judy, the Forelands Farm hostess, sweetly warned me, "don't walk too close to the edge. The cliffs have a habit of crumbling underfoot and it's like falling into your grave. People can't walk straight when there's a pint or two in them and it's a long drop to the bottom!"

Judy was an ebullient woman whom I discerned as veddy English, with rosy cheeks, an eternal smile and long, graying hair with a wave. She looked extremely dignified, like a sorority den mother, and she all too soon began acting like one. She came from an aristocratic family and her title of hostess was in face-saving mitigation of the fact that she was hired to do the cooking and housekeeping. Though past her childbearing years, she certainly looked attractive enough. She started out as Mrs. Superefficiency and, although she was instant fun, her titillated toadying and her superservile style soon started getting on everybody's nerves. Then she appointed herself den mother and started sticking her nose into everybody's business. Worst of all, she started behaving like an overawed teenage bubblegum groupie gone gaga, starry-eyed and over the top from being in close proximity to such larger-than-life heroes as Bob Dylan and George Harrison.

When I'd called to ask Mal to come, I'd also called George, whom I'd also asked to please bring some smoke. George arrived a day after Mal, driving all the way to Portsmouth with his wife, Pattie, in his blue Italian sports car, which, he joked, had cost as much as a house. Of course, he ferried the car across the Solent. George felt safer making the trip by auto because he was muling Ringo's marijuana stash for delivery as a care package for Bob, The Band and me. This was the care package we were all jonesing for. We were all hooked on both tobacco and pot and none of us had enjoyed a toke of marijuana since we'd gotten to England. That's how big a part of our lives smoke was in those days. George also brought along a dub of the Beatles' Abbey Road album, which he played over one of the amps in the rehearsal shed. The audience included Robbie Robertson and The Band as well as Dylan and myself and, although I can confess that my own mind was blown by the album, I don't remember Bob and the boys lifting George on their shoulders to tell him how much they loved Abbey Road. In fact, if I detected any sentiment at all, it was envy.

Mal, George and Pattie joined our Forelands Farm family to stay with us until Bob's Sunday night performance, still five days away. But as soon as George and Bob and anybody else would get together in a conversation, Judy would make sure to stick her nose into the huddle. Ultimately, she touched off a wave of paranoia and she was soon suspected of being on the payroll of the tabloids. Bob told the promoters to fire her after George discovered she was not only eavesdropping but she was also doing something that I should have been doing. She was taking notes.

V.

Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones was lucky I happened to be in the courtyard when he showed up to say hello, appearing at the Forelands Farm gate with a retinue of friends. I had to rescue him from being turned away by the guards, who thought he was just another fan. After I ran into the cottage and got Bob to come out and greet him, Charlie joked:

"It's harder to get in to see you than it is to get in to see the President of the United States!"

We were told that Paul McCartney would have come, too, but his wife, Linda, had just given birth to their first child. There were rumors that Ringo and Maureen were going to bring Elizabeth Taylor but when they dropped in it was with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And they really did literally "drop in," arriving on the afternoon of Dylan's Sunday night performance aboard a helicopter that landed in the Forelands Farm garden. Yoko still hadn't fully recuperated from the back injuries she'd suffered in an auto accident. She'd come with John and a well-equipped video cameraman, who'd been brought to make a videotape record of everything John and Yoko did. The Lennons in addition had gone to the expense of printing thousands of peace leaflets to flutter down on the festival crowd from the helicopter. When the pilot nixed that idea, they decided to rain down balloons instead. At Apple Records, the staff was given the rush job of blowing up several hundred balloons until somebody realized that several hundred blown-up balloons would never fit into the helicopter.

As soon as Ringo and John stepped out of the helicopter, they got into a huddle with George. John grinned back at the rest of us with an apology:

"Please pardon us for talking shop, but we never see each other!"

With the video cameraman's tape rolling, Bob then invited the Beatles to a game of tennis on the Forelands Farm courts.

"I'll play on the condition that nobody really knows how," John quipped and, as Bob and John teamed up against Ringo and George, Pattie Harrison giggled:

"This is the most exclusive game of mixed doubles in the world!"

Tennis was too demanding a sport for a group of cigarette-smoking musicians, and, one by one, they were soon conscripting supernumeraries like Mal Evans and me to spell them in the game. I, who'd never before played tennis, didn't last long, either. Meanwhile, some citizens of Bembridge, which included Forelands Farm within its municipal boundaries, had been attracted by the helicopter dropping in out of the sky and showed up to enjoy the game, too. They had become accustomed to the presence of bank presidents, members of parliament and even the royal children on their resort isle, but they had never seen tennis played by celebrities like this. Soon, there was a crowd peering through the cyclone fence, the foliage and the slatted wooden baffles that surrounded the property.

Ultimately, the game ended and, at 5:30, Dylan piled into a white van along with Sara, Ringo, Maureen and me for the five-mile drive to the festival site. We joked all the way. A year or so later, the Apple Records press agent who had arranged with me for John and Ringo to land in the Forelands Farm garden sent me the bill for the helicopter. He expected that I would give the bill to Bob for payment because, after all, the presence of John and Ringo had helped promote Bob's show. The bill amounted to a few hundred dollars, but Bob wasn't talking to me at the time and so I got stuck with paying the bill out of my own pocket.

VI.

England has a climate in which everybody leaves the butter out all night and, at Wootton Creek, the growing crowd had been camped in the chill for several days and nights while trying to warm itself by trading rumors that Dylan would sing for three hours, that he would jam with the Beatles, with the Rolling Stones, with Blind Faith and that he would still be onstage with the Monday morning light. The two-day festival had already started, with a long lineup of acts parading onto the stage, including the already mentioned Marsha Hunt, a San Francisco girl who had made a name for herself in the London production of Hair and who sang at the Isle of Wight in a costume consisting of not much more than four tassels. The festival also included all-night film shows, poetry readings, talent contests, a stock car battle and a sideshow staged by a young couple making love in a foam bath while the audience applauded. The day before, a nineteen-year-old girl had danced nude through the press enclosure and onto the stage before police halted her impromptu performance by draping a jacket over her and carrying her off.

"Why can't they let me be what I am?" she protested. "I just want to be free!"

No one without proper credentials was supposed to be allowed inside the press enclosure, a heavily guarded area roped-off directly in front of the stage. The press enclosure offered the best possible view of the stage and should have been able to accommodate a couple of hundred reporters and photographers. But by the time Dylan got to the festival site, more than a thousand persons had managed to sneak into the press enclosure and they were packed as tight as asparagus tips in a can. Although this was one of those outdoor rock festivals at which the audience is supposed to bring its own chairs and blankets, the promoters had placed seats at the front of the press enclosure for special guests like George and Pattie, Ringo and Maureen and John and Yoko, who braved the crush despite the fact that Yoko was in the first hopeful months of a frail pregnancy. In the press enclosure behind the special guests, the standees were packed too close together to be able to sit down and they were blocking the view of the rest of the audience, who complained with shouts and curses. When the shouts and curses didn't work, the audience at first began to spit at the standees and then started throwing bottles and beer cans and rocks at them. Soon, there were calls for a doctor. The spotlights were then aimed at the audience to search for those calling for help and then to point the way through the crowd for the stretcher-bearers. The crush in the press enclosure was so strong that people were fainting on their feet without any room for them to slump to the ground. By now, the integrity of the whitewashed plywood fences, although patrolled by security men with police dogs, had broken down completely and gate crashers were stampeding into the arena, which already was holding the largest paying audience in the history of British rock. For as far as I could see, the crowd was so thick that no one could walk through it.

VII.

It had been Dylan's idea to put Richie Havens and Tom Paxton on the bill.

"Richie always delivers," Bob had said.

As for Paxton, he brought the sudden good humor of a lone folk singer to a crowd that had been sitting through a couple of days of British freak-out music. Tom's turn to perform was at dusk and when he'd finished, he said he'd had the feeling that people were listening to him on distant hilltops. Though told emphatically after two encores that Paxton would not reappear, the mob kept calling for Tom to come back on stage, chanting for four full minutes:

"Paxton! Paxton! Paxton! Paxton!"

When Tom finally did reappear, he said:

"Thank you, thank you! You have made me happier than I have been in my whole life."

Another high point of the night was Havens' spellbinding performance, which ended with a powerful and exciting Strawberry Fields Forever. Next on the bill was a set by The Band, who were supposed to go on stage at eight-thirty. But when the clock struck ten, The Band

The Band went onstage
an hour and a half late
but Bob didn't know why

still hadn't made an appearance. The MC was cursing and screaming from the battery of microphones in an attempt to clear the press enclosure of anyone without proper credentials, but that wasn't the reason why The Band finally went on stage an hour and a half late. The real reason was that there was something wrong with the Foulk Brothers' vaunted sound system, which, the Brothers Foulk had insisted, was loud enough to be heard for miles. Hadn't Tom Paxton gotten the feeling that they were hearing him on distant hilltops?

VIII.

Afterwards, I would remember how, when The Band did finally start playing, the MC had to interrupt the set to answer new calls for a doctor and, because the crowd was so thick, the St. John's ambulance squad had to ask the audience to pass the stretchers overhead. Afterwards, I would remember how, when Band pianist Richard Manuel began singing Dylan's I Shall Be Released, large portions of the crowd jumped to their feet, calling for Bob himself to come on stage. Afterwards, I would remember the deafening and throaty roar that went up when a deadpan Bob, armed with the guitar which George Harrison had lent him, finally did walk out to face the audience. The roar was as loud as any I'd ever heard from any crowd. Afterwards, I would remember how special I felt to be the one to carry the guitar in its guitar case to the stage and then, after the show, to put it back into the guitar case and carry it back to George.

Onstage, Bob sang some songs solo and he sang some songs with The Band. He sang some songs in his new sweet, high and romantic warble and he sang some songs in his old raw, raspy and sarcastic whine. In all, he sang 17 songs. The audience responded with the kind of oooohs and ahhhhs you'd hear at fireworks displays. Each time Bob would sing a song, the crowd would roar and Bob would say:

"Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here."

Afterwards, I would remember Sara unable to take her eyes off Bob. She glowed as she watched his performance from the wings. His show lasted an hour and ten minutes and when he came back on stage for an encore, he sang a new song he had written. He dedicated it to Paul McCartney:

Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?
Who's gonna let it down easy and save his soul?

Someone in the audience suddenly threw a coin and it hit the stage. Then The Band came on to help Bob finish with a rousing Rainy Day Women No. 12 and No. 35.

Afterwards, some newspapers would report that the audience jeered with complaints because the show was too short. Afterwards, Variety, claiming that Dylan ended up with some $84,000 for the appearance, would report that the audience received Bob's songs only coolly and then lit bonfires to protest his quick exit from the stage. Variety also would quote one of the Foulk brothers as saying:

"We were staggered when he walked off so soon. We paid him in advance and expected at least two hours!"

London's Daily Sketch devoted its entire next day's front page to a headline that said:

DYLAN WALKS OUT AFTER A MIDNIGHT FLOP

But afterwards, I, for one, would remember only the monster's loud, throaty, exultant and cheering roar of approval. Afterwards, I would remember only the loud, throaty, exultant roar of the crowd calling Dylan back.

IX.

As amateur promoters, the Brothers Foulk not only were assholes enough to think that four portable toilet trailers could serve the needs of a monster with a quarter-million assholes, but they also were short-sighted enough to think that a dressing room without a toilet would serve the needs of their star, their main attraction, the man whose very name had materialized this monster on this field at Wootton Creek in the first place. Just as the Foulk brothers had hired special trailers for use as portable toilets, they'd also rented a trailer to serve as Bob's dressing room. They'd outfitted it with a mirror, a dressing table and a few chairs but not a hell of a lot else. The dressing room especially did not have its own bathroom.

The truth is that I'd wanted a toilet in Bob's dressing room for myself as much as for Bob and I'd made a federal case out of demanding one at a meeting that I'd held with the Foulk brothers soon after my arrival on the Isle of Wight. We'd held the meeting to go over all the arrangements for the show and it was during this meeting that the Foulk brothers had assured me that Bob's dressing trailer would indeed come equipped with a bathroom. When I arrived at the trailer with Bob and Sara on the night of the show to discover that the Foulk brothers had lied to me, I immediately exploded.

"I TOLD them to make sure the dressing room had a bathroom!" I said, feeling a little like a pitcher who had just walked the first four batters in the first inning. "They PROMISED that it would!"

Yes, I was enraged but my rage was tempered by paranoia. Not only had the Foulk brothers thought they could get away with lying to me, but I expected a needling from Bob.

The first thing I wanted to do about the lack of a toilet was to take it up with the UN. I wanted to confront the Foulk brothers. I wanted to make an enormous stink about the lack of a toilet. But Bob told me to forget about it. He said it was no big thing. Bob had a habit of pooh-poohing my ideas. He always seemed to decide to do the opposite. Even when I'd be proved right, he'd never give me a chance to tell him I told him so. It seemed difficult for Bob ever to give me or anybody else much credit for anything. No, there's nothing to be gained by busting the Foulk brothers' balls, he said. Forget about it. This is no big thing.

Ultimately, I was the first to have to take a pee. When I stepped out of Bob's dressing trailer and asked for directions to the nearest loo, some one told me there was only one bathroom in the whole backstage area. The Foulk brothers had provided only a single portable toilet trailer to accommodate the crew, the performers and the star. I had to keep asking directions as I made my way through the maze of tents and trailers in the backstage area, but I suppose I could have simply followed my nose. The toilet trailer certainly wasn't the sweetest smelling place on earth. Nor was it the most inviting. I didn't think Bob would enjoy a visit to this place.

In his dressing trailer, Bob, readying himself for the show, sat tuning George Harrison's favorite acoustic guitar. One reason I had felt so proud when George had offered the guitar to Bob for him to use at his Isle of Wight show stemmed from the fact that I was, after all, the one who had brought Bob and George together. To me, George handing Bob the guitar was a beau geste of great symbolism and sentiment. Otherwise, there was little else for Bob and Sara and me to do in the dressing trailer but sit around and wait. For what seemed like hours, Bob stayed quiet and stone-faced as he tried to be patient. Sometimes he'd get up and pace. As 8:30 approached, he looked at me with annoyance and said:

"I don't hear The Band on yet. Ain't The Band on yet?"

He said it as if it were my fault. He said it as if he wanted me to do something about it. Instead of busting my balls about the lack of a toilet in the dressing room, he was busting my balls because The Band wasn't on stage yet. It seemed to me that Bob very rarely passed up an opportunity to bust my balls. Or was I just being paranoid?

"Shit!" he said suddenly. "It's past eight-thirty! Why ain't The Band playin' yet? What time is The Band s'posed t'be on? I thought they were s'posed to go on at eight-thirty!"

"Yeah," I agreed. "They were supposed to go on at eight-thirty."

"Well, it's PAST eight-thirty!" Bob exploded. "Go find out why th'Band ain't onstage yet? Go ahead out there an' find out!"

X.

Many years later, I couldn't help but be impressed by Jonathan Taplin's success in turning himself into a very important movie producer of impeccable taste and acclaimed financial wizardry. As a very important movie producer, he also turned into someone who wasn't easy for me to reach on the telephone but then hadn't I always found it hard getting through to Jon? On the Isle of Wight, he treated me as if I was the invisible man, as if I weren't there, as if I was of no importance to him whatever. In other words, I detected a coolness and a distance between Jon and me that perhaps even crossed the border into antagonism. He always seemed to be looking down his nose at me. He made me feel as if he resented me for some inexplicable reason. Or was I just being paranoid again? Maybe I was. He'd

A Princeton man,
Taplin was a perfectionist
when it came to the sound system.

gotten the job as the Band's road manager fresh out of Princeton, which is just down Route Twenty-Seven from Rutgers, the banks of the old Raritan, where I'd been educated to look down my own nose at Princeton's ivied snobbery. At the time, however, I didn't know Jon was a Princeton man. How come he wasn't smart enough to figure out that the star of the show might rate separate, different and fancier accommodations than The Band? Obviously, Jonathan didn't consider Bob any more of a hero than Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel or Garth Hudson. Maybe that was because it was The Band, not Dylan, who was paying Jon's salary and it was to The Band, not to Dylan, that Jon owed his allegiance. As The Band's road manager, Jon had the responsibility of making sure that the sound system worked properly. Taplin may have been fresh out of Princeton, but he fancied himself an artist when it came to ensuring that the sound system made The Band sound as good as The Band was capable of sounding. What was the use of The Band playing for the people if the people couldn't hear The Band sounding its best? The Band's ultimate product, after all, was The Band's sound. The Band wasn't getting up on stage just to be looked at. When it came to music, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson were perfectionists. When it came to The Band's sound, Jonathan Taplin was a perfectionist, too.

In the wings, I searched out Robbie Robertson, whom I found with his guitar already on his shoulder.

"What's the hangup?" I asked. "You were supposed to go on at eight-thirty."

"Oh," he said, "There's something wrong with the sound system. Jon says it's not ready yet. He's working on it."

He motioned toward Taplin, who was engrossed with checking the microphone connections on the stage. I had been trying to avoid Jon since our tug-o'-war over Bob's luggage when we'd first landed on the island but now I approached him.

"What's wrong with the sound system?" I asked.

"I'm trying to find out," he answered curtly.

"But the sound system seemed to be working all right when Tom Paxton and Richie Havens were on" I said. "What happened to it since then? How can= you tell there's something wrong with it?"

He looked at me with contempt and disbelief. Was I really asking that question? Without another word, he turned back to what he was doing. I can say this much for Jon: when there's a job to do, he gets it done, no matter what and no matter whom.

XI.

Back in the dressing trailer, Bob demanded to know what was wrong with the sound system.

"Wasn't it working when Richie Havens was on?" Bob asked. "Hasn't it been working until now? What's wrong with the sound system?"

Bob knew he had me. I didn't have the first clue. He had to be satisfied with chopping the head off the messenger.

"What the fuck's wrong with the fuckin' sound system?" he erupted. "What's takin' so fuckin' long?"

I'd walked the fifth batter! Whatever kind of hot water I was in, Sara played lifeguard. Sara always went out of her way to be kind to me. She treated me as if I was a close relative. Whatever predicament we happened to be in, she always knew what to say to turn it into a joke. Before long, she and Bob were flirting with each other. I worshipped Sara as a goddess who not only could calm the storm but who also could turn Bob into a human being. Bob was never a nicer guy than when he was with Sara. On the Isle of Wight, they acted like a pair of lovebirds. At Forelands Farm, they'd hold hands or put their arms around each other and go for long walks along the chalk cliffs, where there were signs warning strollers not to get too close to the edge. Once, I went with them on a cruise out of Woodside Bay aboard a craft captained by a handsome and charming young local and Sara, always radiant, glowed more than ever. When Sara glowed, she glowed like a summer's day. With her eyes bright, with her lashes dark, with her cheeks lightly rouged and with her face embellished with her Mona Lisa smile, part of her sad-eyed-lady-of-the-lowlands look, she now sat with us in the dressing room, kidding with Bob. Otherwise, we had little to say, like passengers in a New York City subway car, impatient to get to our stop so we could get the hell out of there. Living in Byrdcliffe on his secluded Woodstock mountain-top, Bob had gotten into the habit of going to sleep early and it didn't surprise me when he started to yawn.

"It sure is takin' a long time to fix the fuckin' sound system!" Bob said, yawning again. Then he turned to me and commanded: "Go back out there an' see if you can get 'em to hurry it up! Go ahead! Get 'em to hurry it up!"

XII.

On the big stage, Jon was still sorting out cables, testing microphones and plugging in connections. He was on his haunches and he didn't want to be interrupted.

"Bob's getting impatient!" I told him.

Jon ignored me and kept working.

"Bob's getting VERY impatient," I said. "He wants The Band to get on and do its show and get it over with so he can get on and do his show."

"You know The Band can't get started till the sound system's working!" Jon said icily. Did he really have to tell me that?

"But, Bob's getting mad!" I said.

"You don't expect The Band to get up and play with a sound system that doesn't work, do you?" Jon grunted and again turned away from me.

XIII.

Back in Bob's dressing trailer, I told Bob that Jon was still working on the sound system.

"Shit!" Bob said, sleepily. "I start yawning at nine o'clock these days!"

Soon, Bob was pacing again. While Sara sat and I stood, Bob kept walking around the dressing room. A few minutes later, he groaned:

"Now, I gotta pee! Shit! Why ain't there no fuckin' toilet in this fuckin' trailer? Shit! I don't want to have to go outside t'look for someplace to pee! How come you didn't get 'em to get me a dressing room with a toilet?"

I offered to escort Bob to the communal toilet I already had visited.

"Naw, naw!" he shook his head.

I knew that Bob had lots of reasons for not wanting to leave his dressing trailer. Outside, he would have to mingle with the other performers and with the crew. They were his fans, too. Outside, they might crowd around him and start hitting on him for attention.

"C'mon, I'll lead you there," I said again.

"Shit!" he said. "I don't want to go there!"

"Why don't you pee out the window?" I suggested.

If my memory serves me right, this was one time Bob ended up doing what I suggested, even though he didn't think it was a good idea. He was getting grumpy. Soon, Bob had worked himself into a real grouchy mood. Finally, he exploded, turning toward me and commanding:

"Go out there and get them to hurry the fuck up!"

XIV.

Back on stage, Jon was still too busy to listen to anything I had to say.

"We're working on it!" he snapped.

Had I just walked the sixth batter? What could I do? I trudged back to the dressing trailer. It was getting close to 9:30.

"What kind of shit is this?" Bob exploded. "I was s'posed t'be on that stage an hour ago! I should be on that stage RIGHT NOW! Go back out there and make them get a move on! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go out there and make them get started!"

XV.

On the stage, Jon was still working on the sound system and The Band was still waiting in the wings.

"Bob's getting mad!" I told Taplin. "He says The Band's gotta go on right away."

Bob was blowing his stack,
but Taplin didn't
give a shoot

Jon simply ignored me. It was as if I was having another tug-o'-war with Taplin.

"C'mon, Jon, how soon? Tell me how much longer you're gonna be."

"Another few minutes," he said.

"Bob's blowing his stack back there!"

"Another few minutes! Another few minutes!"

XVI.

Back in the dressing room, Bob greeted me with an angry "Well?"

"Another few minutes," I said.

"ANOTHER FEW MINUTES!" he erupted. "I want The Band to go on NOW! RIGHT NOW!"

He flew into a tantrum. He was like a kid stamping his feet. Yes, I had just walked the seventh batter. What was I going to do about this? How could he go out there and put on a great show after he'd worked himself into this kind of rage? Like a teacher calming a hysterical kid, Sara put out the fire. After a while, Bob started yawning again.

"It's almost ten," he complained. "If I don't go on soon, I'm gonna fall asleep!"

The audience was getting tired, too. Both Bob and I knew that the crowd must be feeling drained and worn out. Bob started pacing again.

"I wanted to catch the crowd when it was still at the peak of its psychic energy," Bob said grimly. "Now I'm really gettin' into a bad mood! This is spoilin' ever'thin'! This is ruinin' ever'thin' that I came here t' do, ever'thin' I wanted t'accomplish!"

"Well, what did you wanna accomplish?" I asked. "Why did you come t'the Isle of Wight? What do you wanna to get out of it? Why do you wanna to go out there in front of this crowd?"

Bob turned toward me with a look of surprise. Didn't I already know? Did I really have to ask?

"I want to feel exalted!" he said.

XVII.

Soon, not even Sara could think of any more pleasant small talk with which to pacify Bob. As we waited and waited, there were long periods of silence. Bob was boiling and he soon boiled over.

"I DON'T CARE IF THE SOUND SYSTEM WORKS OR NOT!" Bob stormed. "FUCK THEIR FUCKIN' SOUND SYSTEM! TELL 'EM T'GO ON WITHOUT A SOUND SYSTEM! YOU GO OUT THERE AN' TELL TH'BAND TO START PLAYIN'! GO OUT AN' TELL TH'BAND TO START PLAYIN' AN' GET IT OVER WITH! GO OUT THERE AN' TELL TH' BAND TO GO ON RIGHT NOW! GO AHEAD! GO OUT THERE AN' TELL 'EM!"

XVIII.

On the stage, Jon was still busy with the wiring. I went up to Robbie Robertson.

"Bob wants you to start playing right now whether the sound system works or not." I told him.

Robbie looked at me like I must be crazy. Within our inner circle, Robbie had a reputation of being the most notorious perfectionist of them all. I had spent many hours hanging out with Robbie in the recording studio, where he'd keep mixing and remixing for hours and hours until the mix was absolutely perfect to his ears. Even after everybody else would say the mix was fine, Robbie wouldn't be satisfied and he'd keep mixing and remixing. Now he was trusting Jon Taplin to be as much of a perfectionist as Robbie was.

"Jon's still fixing the sound system," he calmly replied.

"Bob's having a shitfit," I explained. "He says it's gettin' too late for him. He says you've got to start playin' now, no matter if the sound system works or not!"

Robbie laughed at me. Nothing was as important to Robbie as The Band's sound. What was the use of The Band playing at all if the audience couldn't really hear The Band as well as The Band could really sound? It would be years later, after hearing the capacity for betrayal in the accusations hurled at each other by Robbie and Levon, that the idea would enter my head that someone for some reason might have been trying to deliberately sabotage Bob's performance.

"Whatever Jon says," Robbie told me. "Talk to Jon," Robbie said, and he walked away.

I went after Taplin but Jon got mean and elbowed me away.

"Not now!" he muttered over his shoulder. "Not now!"

"But Bob's back there raising hell!" I shrieked. "If The Band don't go on now, I don't know what he's gonna do!"

"The Band's not gonna play until the sound system's right!" Jon said flatly.

XIX.

Back in his dressing room, I told Bob that The Band refused to get started until Jon had the system fixed. This kind of defiance threw Bob into another fury.

"YOU GO RIGHT BACK OUT THERE AND YOU GET THEM TO START RIGHT NOW!" he ordered. "YOU DO IT! RIGHT NOW! GET THEM STARTED RIGHT NOW! TELL THEM I SAID THAT THEY SHOULD START RIGHT NOW OR I'M NOT GONNA GO ON AT ALL!"

XX.

On stage, the MC was still cursing at the crowd as he tried to sort out who belonged in the press enclosure and who didn't. The MC was Rikki Farr, son of 1930s British Heavyweight Boxing Champion Tommy Farr. I called Rikki aside.

"Look," I said, "Bob's backstage having a shitfit because The Band is so late getting started and he still has to go on after The Band. It's getting too late for him. He's working himself into a bad mood. If things get any worse, he might refuse to do the show at all. He's gotta get started soon. We gotta get The Band to start playing."

"Well, wot d'ya wan' me t'do?" Rikki asked.

"Go tell Robbie Robertson that The Band's got to get started," I said. "Insist on it!"

Rikki went over and huddled with Robbie and then wandered away. I had to chase after Rikki to corner him.

"Well, what did he say?" I asked.

"'E says they won' start playin' till the road manager tells 'em to!"

"Look," I said. "They say that the sound system doesn't work right, but you've had pretty good sound up until now. You were just talking on the mike to the crowd and they heard you, didn't they? You had amplification. The sound system works well enough. Bob's really having a shitfit back in his dressing room. He really may refuse to play if he has to wait any longer. He wants to get The Band started right now. Tell Taplin that The Band has got to start now and he can finish fixing the sound system while The Band is playing. They've got enough sound to start."

I watched Rikki approach Taplin. He returned in a moment.

"'E says 'e can't le' th'Band play until th'sound's fixed," Rikki said.

I didn't know what to do. What was wrong with the sound system? Hadn't the Foulk brothers boasted that this was the most powerful sound system ever to be heard in England? Hadn't Tom Paxton said only a few hours earlier that he had a feeling he was being listened to on distant hilltops? I was running out of ideas. Suddenly, the words blurted out of my mouth.

"I know how you can make them go on stage and get them started!" I told Rikki.

"'Ow?" he asked

"Just get up there and introduce them. Just get up there and announce, ' Ladies and gentlemen, The Band!' That'll force them to get on stage and start playing."

"Naaww!" Rikki said, shaking his head and walking away. "Naaww, that'll never work. I can' do tha'!"

XXI.

Since the Isle of Wight Festival, Jonathan Taplin has made quite a name for himself. By 1972, he was not only working for The Band but he was also working for Bob as well. He did such a good job as tour manager for Bob and The Band that George Harrison awarded him the production credit for George's Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden in 1972. By 1973, Taplin had teamed up with director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro to become the producer of Mean Streets, which won awards at both the Cannes and New York Film Festivals. Taplin also was later honored at Cannes as the producer of The Last Waltz, directed by Scorsese and starring The Band, and as the producer of Carny, starring Robbie Robertson and Jodie Foster. Since then, he has continued to produce films of great artistic quality and he has even won himself a reputation in the financial world, where he became an investment advisor to the Bass Brothers when they bought twenty-one per cent of Disney and where he also served as vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Merrill Lynch. As far as I'm concerned, however, Jonathan Taplin's performance as The Band's road manager at the Isle of Wight Festival represented his finest hour.

It was well past ten before Jon got the sound system fixed and The Band went on stage. To me, that made Jonathan Taplin one of the unsung heroes of his time. He held his position, accomplished his mission, refusing to retreat while under heavy fire. The Isle of Wight is where I learned just how much of a hero Jonathan Taplin really was. And how much of a perfectionist, too. The Isle of Wight is where I learned that once Jonathan Taplin is faced with a problem, he won't let anyone stop him from getting that problem solved. One thing I never did learn, though, is exactly what was wrong with the sound system.  ##

CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN FORTY-NINE

CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMNS

The Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
blackj@bigmagic.com
  

THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ