The other night I was pootling about on the
internet when I discovered that for a few months at the beginning of this year
the legendary Renaldo and Clara – all four hours of it – had been available on
YouTube. Before the Dylan police had it
removed. I wish I had known. Although I am a fine upstanding citizen and
cannot, and will not condone bootlegging (Ha!) I would sell my left foot for a
copy of it. The only person whom I have ever met who apparently owned a copy is
my mate Kenn Thomas, editor of the renowned (and very peculiar) conspiracy
theory journal Steamshovel Press. I
remember having a long convoluted discussion with him in a hotel room in
But I digress.
After reading that this legendary Bob Dylan movie,
formed largely during the first leg of 1975’s Rolling Thunder Review, and
featuring Dylan, his then wife, his ex-girlfriend, and various other
luminaries, and apparently totally unwatchable. However, one man’s unwatchable
is another man’s (usually mine) intellectual nirvana, and I would dearly love
to see it. So, after having read that it
had been available for a few tantalising weeks, I started to poke about some of
the dodgier places on the seamy white underbelly of the internet looking to see
if I could purchase a copy, which is something I haven’t done for an awful long
time.
And could I?
Could I heck! I found countless Bob Dylan bootlegs, both
audio and video, but narry a sign of the elusive R&C. But I did find several websites with
differing dates claiming that the elusive film was just about to receive an
official release. These claims were made
in 1998, 2001, 2003, 2008, and again this year.
As far as I can tell, all of these claims are equally spurious.
I used to know a dude called Colin. I won’t reveal his real name. In fact I have written of him before, in my
fairly scurrilous autobiography Monster Hunter (2004). Then I gave him a completely spurious surname
which I can’t remember, and can’t be bothered to look up. However, Colin was a very dodgy rock and pop
memorabilia dealer who lived in a very squalid council flat in Wandsworth, which was
filled with demo tapes, and memorabilia which looked to me as if they were
probably worth millions. He had stolen them all from skips outside recording
studios, and played me some of the excerpts.
Through him I heard the early versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the
Moon which I believe have now been officially released on the multi CD/DVD
immersion edition of the album. I also
heard amazing rarities from many other artists whom I have admired for years. But the trouble with Colin is that he was
a complete fantasist who was obsessed with the occult.
Back in 1969 apparently Led Zeppelin, The Jeff Beck
Group and Jethro Tull were all together in some small American town and members
of the first two bands joined Jethro Tull on stage for what became known as the
Nine Man Jam. I had read about this and how a version of
Jailhouse Rock had been played by a line-up including Rod Stewart on vocals,
and Jimmy Page on guitar. I dearly wanted to hear this and mentioned it to
Colin. His yes lit up and he went into
the most extraordinary farrago of nonsense about how this had been some occult
ritual that the participants had carefully planned in order to wreak arcane
consequences on the world of man.
‘Bollocks,’ said I. ‘It was a
bunch of stoned rockers playing an Elvis Presley song’. He looked daggers at me and started to
describe a session that he had been at a few days earlier where Peter Green of
Fleetwood Mac and Syd Barrett had been recorded together a new concept album based
upon the Rituals of Abra-Melin the Mage.
I made my excuses and left, and never saw the mad bastard again.
I remembered Colin for the first time in years the
other night. The idea of fantasising that this legendary four-hour film by Bob
Dylan, which everyone who has seen it says is complete tosh, is still somehow
going to see the light of the day has his fingerprints all over it. Does an acceptable print of it still
exist? Will it ever be released
officially? Probably not, to both
questions. However, it is this arcane legendary aspect to pop music that is one
of the things that keeps me going. For
pop music is magickal in the truest sense of the word; music can and does
totally alter the headspace of those who listen to it. It can be, and sometimes
actually is, a truly alchemical process, and I suppose that every other branch
of the Great Mysteries legends have built up around it. And as a
cryptozoologist, I can assure you that, whilst legends often have a germ of
truth behind them, and occasionally are even unequivocally true, other times
they are complete nonsense dreamt up by funny little men in council flats in
Wandsworth.
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