Yeah, but largely by my own devices. I had Covid in March, early on. When I was under house arrest, I just started practicing classical violin and enjoying the isolation. When that was over, I started a live concert series streaming from my house. That was in the summer. I’ve probably done 15 of them. It became a lifeline for me and my friends, mostly musicians who live nearby like Richard Thompson, who lives in the next town over, and lots of people that are local to New York and New Jersey.
I got involved with the Dylan thing totally on a fluke. Really, the Rolling Thunder Revue was honestly the brainchild of Bobby Neuwirth. Bobby was doing a Bitter End gig. At the time, they couldn’t call it the Bitter End. They had a dispute over the owning of the name and had to call it the Other End for a few years. But Bobby Neuwirth was playing for four or five nights at the Other End and all these people were sitting in.
And so it became the Rolling Thunder Revue. I was ostensibly hired to be in Neuwirth’s band. But when we actually started rehearsals, everything was everything. Neuwirth’s “band” became more like the house band.It had to be at our first rehearsal at SIR. I had been around famous people before and so I knew the main thing was to play it very cool. I probably tried not to notice. But also, it was kind of chaotic.
Were you overwhelmed to suddenly be around these icons like Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and Mick Ronson? You were a kid just thrown into this world. Yeah. I know some people that have played with him have complained about that, like [bassist] Rob [Stoner]. But I found it an exciting challenge. The other thing is, he was doing something like Jack Elliott always did where his phrase lengths were really unpredictable. It’s an old folk song where sometimes you’re playing a 4/4 and there might be a bar of five or a bar of three. Instead of a phrase length of eight bars, it might be seven or seven and a half.
Well, it was all great for me. But I knew that Bob kind of had a black cloud over his head during that [1976] tour and that infected everything. By that time, there was a large entourage and a lot of us were close friends. It wasn’t dependent on Bob being in a good mood all the time. I’ve had lots of other friends that worked with him later and he didn’t throw temper tantrums or anything like that.I assume so.
Yeah. It also was something where we rehearsed endlessly. There was something that was akin to an audition process at this place called Rundown Studios. It was in an old gun factory on Main Street in Santa Monica. I think we played for months there. We recordedWe tried all the greatest drummers. Jim Gordon [of Derek and the Dominos] came down and played with us. Denny Seiwell from Wings came.
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