Rolling Thunder Review Gets Us to Dylan and Ginsberg Talking Shakespeare...

The New Yorker's David Remnick reviews Martin Scorcese's new documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue, which chronicles the heyday of Bob Dylan's 1975 "Rolling Thunder" tour. "Dylan cooked up the idea of putting together a kind of roving carnival, in which he would be the central, but hardly the only, act under the tent." Other acts included Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and playwright Sam Shepard, who was enlisted to write a script for a movie Dylan hoped to make along the way. More:

“Baez looks perfect,” Shepard wrote in his logbook. “She seems completely with Dylan in a way that no one else who sings with him can ever be. It’s as though she knows his every move just from having been there before. She doesn’t have to stare at his mouth in order not to be caught off guard by his changes in phrasing. She knows it in the bones somewhere.”

Their second duet was usually a standard, “The Water Is Wide” or “Dark as a Dungeon.” And Shepard is right: even as Dylan roams the lyrics, shifting emphases, playing with the line, Baez is always right there with him. In Scorsese’s new film, Dylan remarks on the naturalness of their collaboration. He says they could have sung together “in our sleep.”

The Scorsese film, of course, gets to where even the most fortunate ticket-holders for the Rolling Thunder Revue could not. Joni Mitchell playing with Dylan and McGuinn in Gordon Lightfoot’s house as they try to keep up with her unique guitar tunings and chord changes. Rehearsals. Frantic business calls. Dylan and Ginsberg talking about Shakespeare’s sonnets at Jack Kerouac’s grave, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Scorsese plays with the real-or-unreal flavor of the tour, inserting mockumentary elements amid the period footage.

Read it all at the New Yorker.