it was 40 years ago today

(l.)  Empire Pool, Wembley, May 1, 1966

(r.)  Royal Albert Hall, May 27, 1966

The London morning is cold, the light white and blinding. Tom, an Englishman, chauffeurs a limousine along a circuitous path from John Lennon’s suburban Surrey home to Bob Dylan’s suite at the Mayfair Hotel on Stratton Street. The camera is wielded by documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who is covering Dylan’s European tour for a projected ABC-TV special; sound is being recorded by Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s road manager and flunky. History does not record what Dylan and Lennon have been up to all night, nor what human wisdoms they’ve exchanged. But this small space is where the camera finds them at 7 o’clock on the morning of May 27, 1966, the very day of Dylan’s final performance at the Royal Albert Hall, which performance will also be the last of his current English tour. In the audience tonight, snug and shadowed in their VIP boxes, will be Lennon and George Harrison.

The limousine exchange is true Rashomon material: many writers have referenced the encounter over the years, and none have quite agreed on what is being shown. Bob Spitz, in Bob Dylan: A Biography, interprets Dylan’s description of Johnny Cash as a put-down, reads Lennon’s bemused regard as traumatized disgust, and describes a graphic vomiting climax to which only he, apparently, has been privy. Spitz also claims that Dylan is heavy into psychedelics by this point (doubtful—this is all booze) and that Lennon is still a year away from trying LSD for the first time. (Even though he’s in the midst of the Revolver sessions – had Spitz ever heard those songs?) All of which dubious claims are par for a biography whose acknowledgments thank Albert Goldman.

In a far-gone edition of Mystery Train, Greil Marcus said the scene showed Dylan and Lennon “fencing brutally,” which seems a bit strong. Michael Gray, in the upcoming Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, says it shows “Dylan so stoned that he’s about to throw up and Lennon, nervous as a racehorse and compensating for his nerves and the moment’s futility by keeping up a frenetic overly perky commentary.”

Jon Dolan, in Minneapolis’s City Pages writes of the “excruciatingly long car ride” which “ends with Dylan hunched over, head in hands in a fit of sheer, beleaguered embarrassment, and Lennon over him yelling, ‘Pull yourself together, man! Chop chop money money!’ We’re supposed to think this is ironic . . . But there’s nothing ironic about Lennon’s frustration; you wait for him to lean in and say, Listen, you little twerp, I gotta be in this thing too, so sit up and start making some Donovan jokes before these chumps run out of film.”

Under his nom de paranoid of The Blacklisted Journalist, the late Al Aronowitz – former New York Post reporter and pop-culture gadfly who introduced Dylan to the Beatles—contributes a hyperbolic report on the limo session, based on the bootleg film. Includes a unique paragraph on the vomiting controversy; valuable for personal insight into Dylan’s continual readiness to hurl.

Mark Lewisohn’s description, in The Complete Beatles Chronicle, goes like this, dodgy syntax and all: “Without a script and no apparent direction other than to be themselves, the piece was long, incoherent and incomprehensible, made worse by the fact that Dylan (and possibly John, too, though not as much) was clearly well under the influence of drugs. After muttering a lot of stoned gibberish Dylan suddenly announced that he felt ill and needed to puke. The car had reached Park Lane by this time and, presumably, he was able to perform this function in the privacy of his hotel suite.”

Asked by Jann Wenner in 1970 to describe the encounter, Lennon remembered mainly that he was “Frightened as hell.” It was his perception that the camera had caught him “blabbing off . . . commenting all the time, like you do when you’re very high and stoned.” I’m not aware that Dylan has ever commented publicly on the meeting.

The limousine exchange was cut to just a few seconds for inclusion in Eat the Document (1971), Dylan’s violently anti-linear hour-long record of the UK tour that ended in London that very night in May. Both Document and the uncut scene (about twenty minutes long) circulate on bootleg tapes. Here is my version of the encounter, based on intensive and repeated viewings of the uncut footage, and verbatim transcription of the most interesting dialogue.

Bob Dylan is all black and white. Eyes hidden behind black shades, he wears a black suitcoat over a white shirt buttoned to the throat; his face is strikingly pale under an unholy thicket of dark hair. His starkness stylizes him. The camera is close to his face – very close: Dylan looms upon it like a large gaunt spook. Visibly exhausted, palpably uncomfortable, he takes compulsive shallow puffs on a cigarette. One notices that the nails on his right hand are long and sharp. Occasionally he takes a slug from a bottle of Jack Daniels. That he is brutally stoned could not be more apparent.

Beside him, wedged into a corner of the limousine, is John Lennon, who wears blue-tinted glasses with matching blue suit and turtleneck. Next to Dylan’s pointy edges and raw bones he is serenity itself: skin a healthy shade, cheeks as round as the rims of his glasses, hair clean and lustrous. He consumes his cigarette in smooth motions, and stares at the camera through the smoke.

So Dylan muses out the window. “There’s the mighty Thames,” he says, pointing. “That’s what held Hitler back.”

“What?” Neuwirth laughs.

“The mighty Thames – yes. Winston Churchill said that. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

The chauffeur responds affirmatively but dispassionately.

“Ain’t that right, Tom!” Dylan warns.

“Yes, definitely,” Tom replies, more briskly. “Definitely right.”

But Dylan, smelling blood, wants a taste. “Tom,” he says, “I think I’m gonna turn you into Tyrone Power.”

It means nothing, this reference, and that’s all right; but to Lennon, “Tyrone Power” doesn’t quite make it. As a non-sequitur it doesn’t yield the secret sense that any good non-sequitur must. He gives Dylan a prompt. “Say that again, will you, Bob?”

“Tom?”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m gonna turn you into Ronald Colman.”

Ah – that nails it. Ronald Colman! “Much better,” Pennebaker agrees, from behind his camera. “Much better.”

On a free-associative roll, Dylan throws out a welter of names: Peetie Wheatstraw, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Johnson, J. Carroll Naish. Three country blues singers and an English character actor. Lennon, playing along, mentions Johnny Cash.

Dylan rises at the name. “I have Johnny Cash in my film.” He is excited. “You’ll shit, man.”

“Oh, really?”

“You’re gonna shit when you see it. You won’t believe this.”

“Hear that, kids,” Lennon cries at the camera, “John’s gonna shit again!”

“Ha. You know what he looks like, right, Johnny Cash? You spent much time around him?”

“No.”

“He moves great. He moves very – like that, man.” Dylan’s torso jerks forward as if seizing with mild epilepsy. He smiles and waves a hand at Pennebaker. “Hey, you gotta cut that part outta the film, man, ‘cause I really like him, he’s a nice cat. I mean like he moves like that, like all the good – all the good people, man, move like that – “ Dylan aborts his obscure explication of how Cash moves, and settles for a wave and greeting.

Lennon gives a thumbs-up, and sings the title line from Cash’s 1958 song “Big River.”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, “he’s all right, he’s in our film, he’s quite a . . .”

“He’s quite a guy, huh.”

“Quite a guy, John, really. Oh, man, how . . .” Dylan’s eyebrows work behind the impenetrable shades, trying to retrieve a memory, an image. “Oh, you should’ve been around last night, John, you should’ve – you should’ve been around last night. And tonight is – and tonight is a drag, man – “

“Really, Bob?” Lennon’s flat voice, against Dylan’s grueling struggle to express, makes the others laugh.

“Yeah,” Dylan says, “tonight is a drag.” He relents, laughs too. “I wish I could talk English, man.”

“Me too, Bobby.”

Lennon’s prompt agreement, not to mention his gratuitous use of the diminutive, is almost a put-down. But surprisingly, Dylan is a sport about it. He even creeps up on a compliment, before it slips away. “He can talk American, he can . . . talk . . . Hey, Tom.” The chauffer thought he was forgotten, safe. “You’ve heard me talk English, haven’t you now.”

“Yes.”

“Huh? I can’t never do it around John, though, ‘cause John’s such . . .”

A pause: what is it he wants to say? What is the finest encomium he can offer, and the subtlest challenge? Dylan leans in even closer to the camera, hides his mouth behind his hand, and says in a stage whisper:

“John’s such a great actor, man.”

Turning in his seat, away from the camera and toward Lennon, Dylan speaks secretively, conspiratorially, one professional to another.

“You said – you said – do you remember what you said to me when I played you those tapes?” Lennon mumbles; he can’t recall. “When I played you those tapes? I’ll tell you this – I’ll – I’ll tell you this later. I – I was just, I was just gonna say – “

“Say it now,” Lennon presses, curious.

“Oh. Remember you said to me, I played you this song and you said something about it’s gotta be in . . . I didn’t realize it at the time, Robbie told me. You said it’s gotta be in – in your – your song publishing company. What’s the name of it? What’s your, you know, your song publishing company – “

“Oh, the song pooblishin’ company – “

“What – yeah, what is the name of it.”

“Dick James?”

“No, no – is that it?”

“Mmm.”

“Dick James. That wasn’t the name I heard.”

“Northern Songs?”

“Right, that was it. Right, right, right, right. That I’d be on Northern Songs and I said what – I said, what’s Northern Songs. And then I was never told, man. I had to go out and find out.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Lennon asks.

“No, man, you didn’t tell me.” Suddenly Dylan’s tone is hostile. Almost a cartoon of hurt feelings. It’s a put-on, another challenge. A new ball of absurdity is rolling. “You said this’d be on Northern Songs and it was, everybody, you know, told – you laughed, and Paul McCartney looked the other way, and Ringo – ”

Lennon senses what is afoot. He knows the game.

He breaks in: “Now, Mick Jagger looked down and this – ”

Dylan responds, picks up energy: “And Mick Jagger did something – ”

“ – balloon dropped out of his face – ”

“ – and shit through his nose – ”

“ – and Rob Roy leapt into the room with a big kilt on and said, ‘Hey Bobby, have you heard this one?!”

The whole car breaks up; Dylan too. By the universal rules of the put-on, the most unanswerable absurdity takes the prize. Lennon has sniffed the challenge and taken the round. He smiles.

Things are only warming up. Excitement prickles in confined air.

“Tell me,” Lennon says, “about the Mamas and Papas, Bob, I believe you’re backing them very bigly. I hear they’re great – ”

“I knew it would get to that. I knew it would get to that.” Dylan smiles, bares those feral teeth. He sees a small opening here.

“I believe you’re backing them.”

“Nah, you’re just interested in the big one – the big chick, right?” Dylan taunts, referring to Cass Elliot. Perhaps his spies have dispatched rumors of a crypto-fascination between Cass and Lennon which he can exploit.

Note: Three months later, at an August 28 press conference in Hollywood, Lennon is asked if he has ever met Cass. “Yes,” he says, “she’s great, and I’m seein’ her tonight.” At the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967, the Mamas and Papas include the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” in their closing-night set; Cass introduces it by saying, “There are a lot of rumors that my ex-amore, John Lennon, would be here tonight. I say ‘ex’ because I’ve never made it a practice to associate with men with hair on their faces.”

“You’re just interested in the big chick,” Dylan persists. “She’s got a hold of you too.” There is laughter from Neuwirth and Pennebaker; Lennon grins into the upholstery, uncertain. Dylan pushes his advantage. “She’s got a hold of you too. She’s got a hold of everybody I know, every – everybody asks me the same thing and I know what they mean – ”

Lennon attempts a feeble diversion. “Do you know, uh – do you know, uh – do you know, uh – ”

“They’re terrible, man,” Dylan spits. “They’re no good.” You can taste the contempt as his guttural Midwestern drawl deforms good into something like Goethe.

John offers another name. Garbled, it sounds like Ral Donner, obscure Elvis disciple and one-hit wonder of years past (“You Don’t Know What You’ve Got [Until You Lose It],” number four in 1961 – pretty much the same title phrase Lennon would use on a song of his own, from the 1974 Walls and Bridges LP.)

“Who?” Dylan asks. “No. I only know the lesser-knowns.”

“Mmm.”

“No, sir.”

The briefest of lulls as both fall quiet. But the gloves remain up.

“Barry McGuire’s a great war hero,” Lennon says, apparently confusing the man who a year before had growled the million-selling pop polemic “Eve of Destruction” with Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, recent owner of a freak number-one American hit, “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”

Dylan throws this tepid potato right back. “Barry McGuire, he’s a great friend of yours, I understand.”

“He, I – he met me through you, Bob, remember?” Dylan laughs: Lennon is no readier than he to claim McGuire’s suspect intimacy. “He’s your great buddy, Sergeant Barry.”

Back and forth it goes.

“So tell me about The Silkies.” There is a hint of smug behind Dylan’s smile. Probably he feels “The Silkies” are about as good as the Mamas and the Papas.

Note: The Silkie – no plural – a Seekers-like folk unit from the English university town of Hull, had had their sole chart success in September 1965 covering “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a record produced by Lennon and McCartney, with an instrumental assist from Harrison. Their lovely, melancholy first album, though anchored by the hit, was composed almost entirely of Dylan songs.

Ha, ha – but Lennon is not biting. He grins enigmatically. “No,” he says, “I’m not telling ya about that.”

“Yeah, tell me about – ooh, I have a pain in my side. Tell me about this pain in my side.”

Suddenly Dylan is flagging. Everything seems to be catching up with him – the long night before, the too-bright light of the cold morning, the cigarettes and drink, this limousine ride with no end; all the amphetamines, all the racing, all the effort and tension of competing, of getting it up and keeping it up here in the hot whirling center of the pop universe. Retreating to his corner, he quizzes Pennebaker on technical matters relating to the documentary.

After this break between rounds he snaps his fingers, trying to remember where things left off.

“Barry McGuire, Bob – ”

“Barry McGuire, right.”

“You come in with that.”

“All right. Uh, Barry McGuire, uh . . . tells me he’s a good friend of yours.”

Lennon leans in close. “Well, I – I hate to say this about Barry, Bob – or, Bobby.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I hate to, but I don’t know him at all, personally at all. But he – I did have a letter from his manager saying he was very, very close to you, being on the sort of buzzum of the current, uh . . . folka-rocka boom. You know – ”

“Ha. Yes, yes, I know that – ”

“So that’s the first thing I did hear about Barry myself.”

“Yeah. But, uh, you, you’ve never really exchanged correspondence – you never – oh, oh, get those two lovers over there.”

The camera follows Dylan’s thumb out the window; it fails to catch the objects of his attention.

“You never, you never did, uh . . . as, you know, as somebody would ask you, right. You know, as one of your friends would ask you, you never did meet the chap.”

Lennon, a sphinx, stares at the camera.

With that, the encounter passes its peak. From there the film will roll on, there will be further jokes and talk and jibes, but it will all be unfocused, frictionless. Everyone is tired. Dylan, greasy-skinned and sick, opts out.

“Damn,” he groans, “I wanna go back home.”

Which is where this brief engagement between the two major rock and roll heads of the time pretty much ends: in a draw, with nothing resolved. No great consummation – just an ironic Liverpudlian crossing paths with a surly Minnesotan, the Scouse bog-dweller and the angel-headed hipster joking, cussing, jabbing, exchanging the small talk of weary travelers who have seen some of the same places.

Soon Neuwirth’s tape will expire, and the image will continue without sound to explain it. Dylan will remove his shades and squeeze his eyes as if seeking to drive them back into his skull; his lips will stop moving, and he will detach himself from conversation. Lennon will continue laughing and chatting with the others in the car.

These final postures are not accidental: each will stay this way for the rest of the decade. Dylan will retreat into himself, into privacy and his prerogatives as a youth-culture hero, following knotty paths up the country and into quasi-conservatism, growing patchy little weeds of playfulness and funk amid an overgrowth of artistic complacency and confusion. Lennon, for his part, will continue to engage; in fact he will pursue his obsession with engagement to new and far reaches of megalomaniac idealism and craven holy-foolishness. Dylan will go to sleep; Lennon will refuse to shut up.

But that’s the future. This is the morning of May 27, 1966. Tonight Dylan, backed by The Hawks, will play a typically magnificent show at the Albert Hall, and John and George will cheer him on, combating those few remaining hecklers and hard-line Marxists, those vanishing ghosts of anti-electricity.

Soon Dylan will return home to Woodstock, there to crash his cycle and begin a hibernation that will last a year and a half and from which he will emerge all but unrecognizable, still a wraith in black and white, but the black and white of an Old Western hermit.

Lennon will board a plane with the other Beatles, and descend once more into the maelstrom. Germany awaits; as do Japan and the Phillippines; as do the United States. Marcos, terror, Christ and the Klan.

The year of Dylan’s life is almost over. The year of Lennon’s has barely begun.