What life on the road was really like with Bob Dylan
When Bob Dylan toured Britain in 1965 he brought with him a spoon collector, a giant lightbulb and a man dressed as a monk. But surely even Dylan couldn't have imagined that, 40 years on, a woman could win an Oscar for playing him.
Cate Blanchett is the surprise hot favourite to win an Oscar for best supporting actress at Sunday's Academy Awards for her highly acclaimed portrayal of folk singer Bob Dylan in the quirky biopic I'm Not There.
Ladbroke's are offering odds of 11-10, putting her way ahead of the other nominees, who are up for their performances in more mainstream films.
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Likeness: Cate Blanchett is up for an Oscar for her portrayal of DylanCate also has a best actress nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but at 33-1 she is an outsider against the favourite, Julie Christie, whose odds are 4-9 for her role as an Alzheimer's victim in Away From Her.
However, Miss Blanchett won't be in the star-studded audience at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre when the Oscars are handed out.
She is due to give birth to her third child next month and is unable to travel from her home in Sydney.
"If I win," she said last week, "the most surprised person in the world will be me. And after me will come a long list of everyone who told me that I'd be mad to play Bob Dylan.
"They pointed out the obvious - that he's a man and I'm a woman, so there's a huge credibility gap for audiences to overcome.
"But they also said Dylan was too off-beat a subject, too anti-establishment and too old to fill cinemas.
"I said they were wrong then, and I've been proved right. But I knew I was taking a chance."
She is one of six actors in the film who portray the singer at different times in his life - the others are Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Whishaw.
But it is an unrecognisable Blanchett who steals the show as Dylan in the mid-1960s when his reputation as an adored poet and folk hero began to unravel during an uncomfortable tour of Britain.
I watched it happen because I was at his side - much to his irritation - during his 1965 tour.
I had been assigned by my newspaper, the Daily Sketch, to cover his every waking moment, and I saw Dylan's inherent cockiness slide first into puzzlement and then into babbling insecurity and paranoia.
His music came under scrutiny by cynical British audiences and his Messiah-like status was challenged by interviewers.
Dylan blamed me for this severe blow to his self-esteem.
In I'm Not There, Blanchett captures this perfectly, playing him as a frail, vulnerable figure, apparently bewildered by his success, but arrogant, evasive and confused when he is met with a barrage of questions and criticism for the first time in his life.
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Paranoid: Bob Dylan thought the British press were against himBut he misjudged the mood of a self-confident Britain that was producing plenty of its own rockers, while American stars were struggling to make an impression here.
Those who splashed out a then record £1 for a ticket were expecting American folk with a strong protest message - not the unwelcome rock 'n' roll he was delivering in his trademark nasal twang.
"What the hell," he muttered to me after being barracked by a disappointed audience in Leeds. "The words rhyme, don't they?" I couldn't resist pointing out to him that actually they didn't.
The music charts were dominated by British artists - The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, The Kinks, Sandie Shaw and The Hollies were all riding high.
And as we had begun to dominate the world with our music, so had our fashions. Mary Quant had invented the mini-skirt, Barbara Hulanicki had just opened her Biba boutique and Carnaby Street was home to the planet's coolest clothes shops.
So when Dylan arrived thinking he could turn his back on the songs that made him famous and switch music genres overnight - only to find that we were interested only in the old-style Dylan - he was sadly mistaken.
He regarded me as his chief tormentor, and the architect of his fractured relationship with the media, because I was the first to ask him what his much-hyped "message" was actually about.
Indeed, I became known to his entourage as The Man Who Dared To Ask The Question.
Few people would admit it at the time, but many of Dylan's early songs were incomprehensible. It wasn't just the tortured delivery of his lyrics, the disjointed phrases and the mystifying imagery; even if you could decipher the songs, they just didn't make sense.
Everyone knew he was protesting about government, racism, poverty, war, slavery, nuclear weapons etc - but what was he actually saying? Perhaps the answer was Blowin' In The Wind (another Dylan hit).
Dylan would loftily tell his audiences that "my message for the world is in my verse", and so far the pre-eminent singing poet of his time had never been pressed by his deferential followers to explain exactly what that message was.
That was until the spring evening in 1965 when, at the age of 23 and a major world star, he flew into Heathrow to be met by a crowd of screaming fans, jostling photographers - and me.
I would travel the country with him, squeezed into a limousine beside him and folk singer Joan Baez, who was his lover at the time, and an entourage of assorted weirdos.
These ranged from a cameraman in a monk's habit who was making a documentary about the tour, to a character called Spoons, whose function was to collect a spoon from everywhere we stopped - whether grand hotels or roadside cafes.
Dylan liked to carry a light bulb, the size of a small balloon, with him everywhere he went - the reason, he said, was that "one day, man, I'm gonna meet a guy who can light one of these with just the power of his brain, and then the world will be a different place".
That first night, on the journey from Heathrow to London's Savoy Hotel, with him clutching the bulb, I innocently put the question that would define our relationship - as well as shaping how others would see him in the future.
"What exactly is the message you are trying to put across in your songs?" I asked him. Dylan looked me up and down for a very long minute.
There was a sharp intake of breath from his manager Albert Grossman. I could feel the tension rising and when Dylan finally deigned to reply, it was clear he had taken it personally.
"That's something only the ignorant and the morally bankrupt would ask," he sneered. "If you have to look for the message, you just ain't getting it, man."
"Well, Mr Dylan," I said, "perhaps if the message was explained in clearer terms, more people would understand it."
He replied: "If there's anyone out there who doesn't get it, apart from you, which I doubt, then I'll tell 'em to get in their grave. I don't need people like that. Or you."
A long, awkward silence followed until Dylan dozed off. "You must never challenge him about his work," whispered Grossman. "He is too big a star to have to justify himself. You've made an enemy for life."
Next day, Dylan was due to meet the rest of the British press. My newspaper that morning had reported our exchange of the night before, but far from being furious about it, Dylan was relaxed - and friendly.
Mr Monk's Habit was in attendance, along with his fawning entourage. Nobody would speak to me until Dylan signalled that all was almost forgiven.
"You made a fool of yourself in the paper," he told me before the press conference started. "You've just shown yourself up to be ignorant and out of touch with my music. You'll see, none of the other reporters will be so crass."
He soon found he was wrong. "Mr Dylan," said a girl reporter sweetly. "What is your real message?" Dylan shot me a glance of pure hatred. "Er, my message is keep a good head and always carry a light bulb," he said.
She tried again. "Do you think young people understand what on earth you are singing about?"
Dylan flinched, by now convinced there was a conspiracy.
"Sure," he drawled. "Sure they understand." I couldn't help pitching in. "But how can you be so sure?"
I asked. Dylan looked around the room, desperately hoping for some support. "Er, any of you guys got any questions about my music? I ain't got time for distractions."
So I asked him again and again what he stood for. Still the messenger refused to reveal the message. "The truth is a rat vomiting in a sewer," he said enigmatically.
I never discovered what that meant, or its relevance, but Dylan said it a lot on that tour.
Afterwards, Dylan shut himself away in his suite. "He believes you have stirred everyone up against him," growled Grossman.
"You treat the great Bob Dylan like he's some phoney. You gotta understand, everywhere he goes he's like Jesus, until you came along with your darn fool question."
By next morning, when my account of the evasive press conference was published, Dylan lodged a formal complaint with my editor.
"Just tell our reporter what your message is," he was advised. "It's a reasonable question."
"There ain't no great message," said Dylan. "Time is the message. There ain't a lot of it left."
When he was asked to elaborate, he replied: "Listen to my songs". It seemed a Catch-22 situation.
On tour, Dylan became increasingly grumpy because The Big Question cropped up time and again.
"Can't you tell your fellow reporters to ask me something else?" snarled Dylan, convinced we were all in cahoots.
Allen Ginsberg, the American poet, who had joined Dylan's entourage, tried to come to the rescue.
"The curse of the poet is never to be understood in his lifetime," Ginsberg said solemnly. "Everyone knows that except, apparently, you."
On the road, in spite of his shows being sell-outs, Dylan was becoming increasingly paranoid "because certain people" - with a meaningful glare at me - "are making me a laughing stock".
Mr Monk's Habit, real name D.A. Pennebaker, made a fly-on-the-wall documentary of that tour, called Don't Look Back, which records every bizarre moment.
It spares Dylan none of his difficult questioning by myself and others. It has been shown on TV many times, and Cate Blanchett took her inspiration from it for the way she played Dylan.
One interviewer's description of Dylan sent him into overdrive.
"He has hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo."
Waving the article at me, Dylan raged: "You wrote this for him, didn't you." I truthfully pleaded not guilty.
Then there was the own goal he scored when he tried to put down an interviewer who called him a folk singer.
"I'm just as good a singer as Enrico Caruso [the world-famous Italian tenor who died in 1921]," he protested. "And I'm not a folk singer. I'm a pop singer."
This puzzled everyone around him, as Dylan was always insisting that the term "pop singer" was a grave insult.
"I am an artiste," he would say grandly, and with more than a hint of pomposity.
However, it was the comparison with the singer known as The Great Caruso that got him a public scoffing. He heard a presenter mocking his remarks on the radio, which was bad enough, but at his show in Newcastle the next night somebody in the audience jeered: "Sing O Sole Mio, Bob."
His paranoia was further fed by mentions of his British counterpart, Donovan. When he had flown in, one or two newspapers had compared him to Donovan - who in truth had found his own fame as a Dylan copyist - and this hadn't gone down well.
"Who is this Donovan anyway?" he raged at the Animals' Alan Price. "A young Scottish bloke," said Price drily. "A very good guitarist. Better than you."
Dylan - who had little sense of humour - didn't realise it was a send-up and lapsed into a sulk.
By modern star standards, Dylan's behaviour was exemplary. He didn't drink, do drugs (at least in front of me) or trash hotel rooms.
He spent his free time writing and polishing up his songs, he ignored the attentions of groupies (even when Miss Baez wasn't with him), and was unfailingly polite, even, mostly, to me.
"What's the wildest thing you've ever done?" I asked, having long given up taunting him about the missing message. "Well - now this was really fun, really something man. You'll just crack up, I promise.
"I tore up a piece of paper into strips. Must have been 40 or 50 by the time I'd finished. Then I wrote a different word on every piece. Then I put them all in a hat, mixed them up and pulled them out one by one.
"Then - and this is where it gets really crazy, man - I wrote them all down in the order they came out, put everything to music and recorded it."
"And that was fun, was it, Bob?" I inquired.
"Man, I had a ball." Poor Bob. No wonder we couldn't understand his songs. No wonder he was convinced people in Britain weren't taking him seriously.
Unlike in America, where his every utterance was treated like a sermon from the Mount.
But that tour, as Dylan later admitted to me, was an experience that changed his life. A huge box office success, but a disaster for his considerable ego. And when he returned to America, he discovered that attitudes to him were beginning to change.
He was booed off the stage at Woodstock because he had forsaken his folksy wooden acoustic guitar for a shiny plastic electric model as used - heaven forbid - by vulgar, commercially-orientated pop singers.
"Dylan sells out to pop," reported Rolling Stone magazine, which was the ultimate insult. Not that it did him any lasting damage - more than 40 years on, he's still a world star.
In 1969, I ran into Dylan again in a club in New York. I was with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and he was with John Lennon. Jones mischievously reminded him of the last time we met.
Dylan spluttered in his Coca Cola. "You and your questions," he said. "You turned everyone against me. What was it you kept asking me?"
"What are you saying in your songs, Bob? What's the message?"
Dylan drew himself up to his full 5ft 6in. "The message," he growled "is just for you. It always was. It's Get Lost."
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