In 1975, Bob Dylan’s famous Rolling Thunder Revue took to the road. Dylan claimed that the purpose of his tour was to “play for the people” and he would achieve this aim by playing at smaller venues in cities that would usually be dismissed by artists of his acclaim.
The first concert was played in Plymouth, Massachusetts – the seat of the first colonial Pilgrims – and would wander across the country until it sputtered out nearly a year after its conception.
The tour was a theatrical endeavor. After meeting Jacques Levy, a well-established theatre director and the director of a successful Broadway show Oh! Calcutta!, Dylan became fascinated with The Revue as an artistic concept: one that would enable him to revel in the American musical tradition without constraint.
The Revue, as Lou Kemp explained, traveled as a “caravan” for musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers.
Along for the ride were names such as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Gordon Lightfoot, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, actress and singer Ronee Blakley, poet Allen Ginsberg, long-time friend Bob Neuwirth, as well as playwright Sam Shepard (who would later help write Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara). Invited were names such as Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, who both amicably declined.
Embed from Getty ImagesJoni Mitchell joined the tour in Connecticut, for a show on the 13th of November in Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum and traveled with the troupe for the greater part of the first leg.
In an interview with Mary Aikins in 2005, Mitchell describes her time accompanying Dylan and his followers. By her account, the tour was not a caravan or a musical cavalcade but a circus:
I went on Rolling Thunder and they asked me how I wanted to be paid, and I ran away to join the circus: Clowns used to get paid in wine — pay me in cocaine because everybody was strung out on cocaine.”
Joni Mitchell (2005).
Despite this, Mitchell appreciated the opportunity to be “an observer and a witness to an incredible spectacle” (her words, taken from an interview with Cameron Crowe in 1979). She recognized the event as a significant and formative experience that would come to influence the album she would come to release a year later, Hejira.
In 1988 journalist Timothy White talked with Joni concerning Hejira. She mentions that:
“Hejira came out of another of my sabbaticals, another time when I flipped out and quit show business for a time. This instance was in ’76. I’d been out with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which was an amazing experience, studying mysticism and ego malformation like you wouldn’t believe. Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into A.A.
Afterward, I drove back across the country by myself, and I used to stay in places like light-housekeeping units along the Gulf Coast. I gave up everything but smoking, and I’d run on the beach and hit health food stores. In New Orleans, I wore wigs and pawned myself off as someone else. Meanwhile, nobody knew where I was.
I’d do these disappearing acts. I’d pass through some seedy town with a pinball arcade, fall in with people who worked on the machines, people staying alive shoplifting, whatever. They don’t know who you are: “Why are you driving that white Mercedes? Oh, you’re driving it across the country for somebody else.” You know, make up some name, and hang out. Great experiences, almost like the prince and the pauper.
So whenever possible during these breakdowns in my career I would pawn myself off as someone else, or go to some distant clime and intentionally seek out a strata of society I was sure I would never have gotten near otherwise.”
Joni did not arrive at the decision to distance herself from the chaos of The Revue and the entertainer culture that had infiltrated the mainstream music scene alone. Her attempts to experiment with ego and surrender her vices were inspired by an acquaintance made on the tour:
It was Chögyam Trungpa who snapped me out of it just before Easter in 1976. He asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I said, “Yes, here’s my god and here is my prayer,” and I took out the cocaine and took a hit in front of him. So I was very, very rude in the presence of a spiritual master.”
Joni Mitchell
Trungpa was a spiritual teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on the non-sectarian dissemination of Buddhist teachings, particularly meditation practices. In an interview for Readers Digest, Joni later explained that for three days after the encounter she “was in awakened state”:
The thing that brought me out of the state was my first “I” thought. For three days I had no sense of self, no self-consciousness; my mind was back in Eden, the mind before the Fall. It was simple-minded, blessedly simple-minded. And then the “I” came back, and the first thought I had was, Oh, my god. He enlightened me. Boom. Back to normal — or what we call normal but they call insanity.”
Joni Mitchell
The visit was immortalised in her song ‘Refuge of the Roads’ and the editorial note that appears on the record – Hejira – reads:
I consider him one of my great teachers, even though I saw him only three times. […] [Later], at the very end of Trungpa’s life I went to visit him. I wanted to thank him. He was not well. He was green and his eyes had no spirit in them at all, which sort of stunned me, because the previous times I’d seen him he was quite merry and puckish – you know, saying “shit” a lot.
I leaned over and looked into his eyes, and I said, “How is it in there? What do you see in there? And this voice came, like, out of a void, and it said, “Nothing.” So, I want over and whispered in his ear, “I just came to tell you that when I left you that time, I had three whole days without self conscious-ness, and I wanted to thank you for the experience.” And he looked up at me, and all the light came back into his face and he goes, “Really?” And then he sank back into this black void again.
For those who are interested, the lyrics to ‘Refuge Of The Roads.’
I met a friend of spirit He drank and womanized And I sat before his sanity I was holding back from crying He saw my complications And he mirrored me back, simplified And we laughed how our perfection Would always be denied "Heart and humor and humility" He said, "will lighten up your heavy load" I left him then for the refuge of the roads I fell in with some drifters Cast upon a beach town Winn Dixie cold cuts and highway hand me downs And I wound up fixing dinner For them and Boston Jim I well up with affection Thinking back down the roads to then The nets were overflowing In the Gulf of Mexico They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads There was spring along the ditches There were good times in the cities Oh, radiant happiness It was all so light and easy 'Til I started analyzing And I brought on my old ways A thunderhead of judgment was Gathering in my gaze And it made most people nervous They just didn't want to know What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads I pulled off into a forest Crickets clicking in the ferns Like a wheel of fortune I heard my fate turn, turn, turn And I went running down a white sand road I was running like a white-assed deer Running to lose the blues To the innocence in here These are the clouds of Michelangelo Muscular with gods and sungold Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads In a highway service station Over the month of June Was a photograph of the earth Taken coming back from the moon And you couldn't see a city On that marbled bowling ball Or a forest or a highway Or me here, least of all You couldn't see these cold water restrooms Or this baggage overload Westbound and rolling, taking refuge in the roads
Written by Tom Westhead
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