Dylan, Sam, Joni and My Old Hometown
Behind the scenes at Rolling Thunder in Niagara Falls, plus Joni stares "Coyote" right in the face.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films, including this one coming to PBS stations in May. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.
Came upon a couple of pieces last night, no big deal but oddly linked to my famous hometown, Niagara Falls, which has also served as the site for one of my most popular pieces here on driving there with Bruce Springsteen back in 1973. Now we return there in 1975 for a couple of early Bob Dylan/Rolling Thunder gigs.
The first piece offers an excerpt from a new biography of Sam Shepard by Robert Greenfield. Much of it revolves around Sam being hired by Dylan to write a script for what Bob hoped would be a fictional film masterpiece documenting the tour. But instead what happened was Renaldo and Clara. Sam (then emerging as one of America’s most interesting playwrights and about to win an Oscar as an actor) ended up contributing little and hating the experience. He did get a slim book out of it, also too much of nothing. I recall receiving the galleys at Crawdaddy with the purpose of buying rights to a chapter and finding almost nothing of interest worth the effort.
Anyway, in the new bio excerpt, I did learn a few things about the Rolling Thunder arrival in Niagara Falls. With friend and Crawdaddy editor Peter Knobler, I had attended the tour kickoff in Plymouth, Mass., and shortly after was tipped off to day and night concerts in Niagara Falls. We flew up and I enjoyed showing Peter the wondrous cataracts and local dining specialties such as “beef-on-weck.” The concerts in the new convention hall were far from sold out but the music was fantastic. And there was the welcome surprise of Joni Mitchell joining the tour.
The next day we had a brunch date with poet Anne Waldman, who had contributed a couple of pieces for Crawdaddy. I brought along my daughter, age four. Anne arrived with Allen Ginsberg. Dylan went to see the Falls and was photographed and filmed at the Cave of the Winds down below.
Behind the scenes, we now learn more about the story behind one of the more famous song lyrics of the era in the book excerpt and at this site, which chronicles each stop on the tour. Decades ago it became known that the “coyote” in one of Joni’s greatest songs was Sam Shepard, with whom she had an affair on the Rolling Thunder tour. Sam was married, of course. (He had earlier lived with prime Dylan acolyte Patti Smith.) Joni would write:
Now he's got a woman at home
He's got another woman down the hall
He seems to want me anyway
The “woman down the hall” we now discover was press officer and tour wrangler Chris O’Dell, who had performed the same duties while conducting affairs with various Beatles and Stones and Clapton etc. It was in Niagara Falls—at the red brick Hilton across from the convention hall (now a casino)—where Sam switched from Chris to Joni, leading to a classic woman-hiding-in-bathroom drama, but that didn’t last long either, as the song brilliantly reflects. Sam soon split the tour only to find Dylan heckling his new play at its press preview back in New York City.
Less than halfway into the second act, Shepard saw that two of the most important newspaper critics in the city were now fast asleep. At the point in the play when Cody was about to be injected with a syringe so his “dreamer bone” could be removed, Dylan suddenly jumped to his feet and shouted, “Wait a minute! . . . Wait a second! Why’s he get the shot? He shouldn’t get the shot! The other guy should get it! Give it to the other guy!”
Well, enjoy a few related songs below, plus the usual political cartoons. And please subscribe, it’s still free!
This just surfaced not long ago in the disappointing Scorsese film about Rolling Thunder: Joni, Bob and Roger McGuinn at Gordon Lightfoot’s house in Toronto, as she debuts “Coyote.”
Rarely seen view of Joni singing “Coyote” for The Last Waltz—a black and white view shot by Scorsese’s crew from the floor.
Bob crooning “Sara” that 1975 day in Niagara Falls. Pictured below beneath the Falls.
Cartoons of the Day
I have four bootleg recordings of Joni’s evolution of “Coyote” from her first performance in Augusta, Maine, on November 28, 1975, to the nearly finished version performed in NYC on December 8, 1975. It’s an interesting trek of an artist at work.
In that recording of “Coyote” in Gordon Lightfoot’s house, you can hear an uncredited violin, which I imagine must be Scarlet Rivera, who was Bob Dylan’s “Queen of Swords” on the tour in his own coyote story.