The Heylin Interview
Clinton Heylin talks to Arthur Rosato and Joel Bernstein

This is the second transcript from the additional interviews I conducted for Behind the Shades: Take Two, the first appearing in ISIS some time back. Like that interview with Larry Johnson, the following interview with Arthur Rosato (and the odd snappy aside from our mutual host and coffee-maker, Joel Bernstein) was transcribed by Derek Barker (gratias, DB). However what with all those Sounes transcripts to run in ISIS and the emergence of a Dylzine with a moniker I can really relate to, I decided to take the transfer fee (two pints of shandy and a packet of mignons morceaux) and give it to Judas! the slut. When I conducted this interview, in the sunny climes of Oakland, at chez de Joel, I had already interviewed Arthur for The Recording Sessions and so I dispensed with the usual tip-toeing round tut subject and got down to le nitty gritty. Needless to say, my own comments were made to goad responses and should not be considered questions intended to require direct answers per se.

Clinton Heylin: I'd like to talk about Bob on the road. Joel's contribution here is to prompt.

Arthur Rosato: To prompt, right. Will I ever work in the business again? (Laughs).
There's no evil bad stuff [here], because Bob wasn't like that. It's just that the guy, the human being, is one thing, his music is another.

Joel Bernstein: Or as I would say, ‘never confuse the artist with the art.’

Clinton Heylin: Let's start at the beginning.

Arthur Rosato: The first time I saw Bob was when I was working with The Rolling Stones in '72. We were in New York at the end of the tour. We had an after show party… and Bob was there. He came in his red plaid shirt and Chip [Monck], who was a good friend of his, introduced us. I think the Stones tour had a big influence on him. That was the biggest thing going at the time. Bob's a major rock & roll fan; he loves the Stones thing, and he takes in everything. It was right after that we started working on Planet Waves. He came out of retirement.

Clinton Heylin: There were tour rehearsals in L.A.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah. The funniest thing was when we did pre-tour rehearsals at the Coliseum (sic) in LA. The basketball court was still down and he's trying to look like a basketball player, and he's not that tall and he's not that good. He's in his socks and he's trying to look like he knows what he's doing, but he doesn't, he's so self-conscious. I mean his whole thing is he's very self-conscious. So, he's shooting baskets, and he's wearing that sweat-shirt. I think he's had that sweat-shirt for thirty years.

Joel Bernstein: The grey one with the hood?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, he had it on then. So he's he trying to shoot and he realises that it’s a different sport. It has nothing to do with anything he's ever done. So he ends up sitting in the bleachers and watching the other guys shooting. That's when I realised Bob is human. He's a very human being. He's really no better than us. I can shoot better than him though. (laughs).

Clinton Heylin: Was Sara with him at the rehearsals?

Arthur Rosato: I can't remember. At that time it was more like an event, so we were kind of caught up in that. We were bringing in the newest technology.

Clinton Heylin: And of course Dylan hadn't played a gig in the modern rock era.

Arthur Rosato: No. Well, he did Bangladesh, but he hadn't done a tour in eight years. That was the first time he came out on tour… It was a pretty magical tour. I talked to Bob about it a few years later and ... you know being Bob, he just thought it was okay.
But on tour he was great, Bob was a real sweetheart, he always wanted to make sure everybody was taken care of… Levon was funny because he would talk in terms of, ‘I can't hear it.’ So I cranked it up more and this roar surrounded him and he still couldn't hear it. Finally it dawned on me that he couldn’t understand what he was hearing. So we put the volume down gave him one single speaker and he was happy. They would do 'Stage Fright,' which was a little poke at Bob.

Clinton Heylin: A poke at Bob? Robertson suffered with terrible stage fright didn't he?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, but that was a dig at Bob. I introduced Bob to Carlos Santana and Carlos showed Bob how to do some things and Bob said all those years he played with Robbie, he never showed [Dylan] anything. [Robbie] always turned his back [on stage], so you could never see what Robbie was playing. So Carlos was the first person to ever show him anything.

Clinton Heylin: Robbie got that whole kind of thing from Ray Buchanan, so maybe he was kind of hiding. Maybe he didn't want anyone to realise what he was doing.

Arthur Rosato: Maybe it goes back to the stage fright thing, where he didn't want to look at the audience so he kept turning his back and Bob was the other way round.

Clinton Heylin: It was because of Robertson's stage fright that they cancelled the first time they played at the Winterland. Robertson's stage fright was so bad that he couldn’t go on.

Joel Bernstein: I thought that he had a fever?

Clinton Heylin: That was a myth. Robertson seemed to have a rapport with Dylan in '66, but by the end of the '74 tour, I sensed it was disappearing.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, by the end of that tour there was a little separation, but at that time Bob was kind of figuring out what he wanted to do. Now that he's done that tour, let's get up and do something else. You see, he's not and oldies type person.

Clinton Heylin: Right, at the end of the tour it was like - now I know what I don't want to do.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, and if you listen to him singing, he was like screaming.

Joel Bernstein: Screaming, yeah. Every-body said that at the time.

Arthur Rosato: But if you listen back it's not, but in the context of the time it was because you were comparing it to the originals.

Clinton Heylin: So what was the next contact after the '74 tour.

Arthur Rosato: After the '74 tour, I was off in Europe with Carlos Santana and I got a call from Bob saying they were doing this Rolling Thunder thing. He didn't call it that then, he just said that they were going to do this tour and they were going to start rehearsals in New York [at SIR].
That was fun, because [at rehearsals] I was the only [technical] guy. It was just the film crew and me. I had never tuned a guitar before in my life. So, Bob hands me this guitar! Luckily we were recording at SIR. So I go in the next room and I go, ‘What do I do?’ and the guy goes ‘Oh it's easy, this is how you tune an acoustic guitar’ and then goes, ‘This is an electric guitar, this is what a strobe does.’ (laughs)
So I got over that and Bob would come up with these weird set lists and I'd think, ‘why is he talking to me about set lists? He's got all these musicians, he's got McGuinn, he's got everybody.’ But it's the weirdest group of people; there's Mick Ronson for instance. Anyway, I had 36 guitars to take care of and I changed the strings on each one of those every day.
Bob was great, he would just let you do whatever you wanted and everybody kept coming to me because they thought I was in with Bob.

Clinton Heylin: The impression I got was that musicians were like joining every day.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, well it was like that at the very beginning. Bob was infamous for asking people to come along. ‘Yeah, come on down and I'm doing this.’ And if there was a group of them in the bar at the same time: ‘Yeah, come on down we doing this.’ Well they were all friends with each other and it did make sense for them to all come down.
So those people just happened to be in the right place at the right time and that's how the revue turned into what it was. It didn't really grow after that. The length of the sets grew. In fact at one point Bob was saying, ‘I could go out for a movie.’ Because he would open the show and he didn't come on again for hours, so we found him a TV He would have a TV in his room. They were like four hour shows.

Clinton Heylin: That must have been quite a contrast to '74?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, '74 was different. That was pretty magical on one level, this was pretty magical on another. We had no idea what we were going to do, we didn't have itineraries, we just got on the bus and where we woke up was where we were. It was like a travelling show, but the next tour, the one that Joel was on, that was a strange one. That was very strange!

Joel Bernstein: I always got the feeling that the first one was a really original and amazing concept, but '76 seemed to me to be done in the shadow of the previous tour. I mean it wasn't new for a start, and the Bob's rapport with the players was gone. I mean at rehearsals he wasn't talking to anybody.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, I don't think I said two words to him on the whole second tour, in '76.
I don't think he really wanted to do the tour to begin with. Secondly, he didn't really want it to be called Rolling Thunder. That was Barry [Imhoff]'s thing.

Joel Bernstein: Who came up with the name in '75?

Arthur Rosato: That was Bob. He got that from the Indian Chief.
But as soon as we got to Florida you knew, this isn't it. It had a totally different vibe.

Joel Bernstein: I got the feeling that it was more uptight and less fun.

Arthur Rosato: It was way uptight.

Joel Bernstein: Do you remember those rehearsals in the ballroom, where Bob was supposed to show up at ten o'clock and he wouldn't show up, or he'd show up at like 3.30.

Arthur Rosato: Well, that was his normal mode to do that, but this was different. He was petulant, he didn't want to be there and he let everybody know it.

Joel Bernstein: But what I found amazing was that even when he was there, he wouldn't talk to the band. He would just give people these looks.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, and he would do these funny things. McGuinn was just a total gadget freak, he's just totally into that, but he also knows Bob isn't. He's the other extreme. But he wanted to show Bob these tiny MRX effects pedals, so he ganged like three of them together and instead of running them from a code to the ground and into the guitar, he stuck them right into Bob's guitar. So there were these three pedals sticking out of his guitar going right into the amp and Rodger is frantically trying to get everything together because he knows Bob has no patience for this kind of thing - and Bob's looking down at him - and he finally says to Roger, ‘Will this make me play like Buddy Guy?’ Roger looks at him, yanks the whole thing out and plugs it right back into his amp and there is never a word about it again.

Clinton Heylin: But Dylan was playing lead on that tour.

Arthur Rosato: No, Bob has a tendency to crank up no matter what and we always have to keep yanking him down. You have to kinda lean over and bring him down in the mix, because his off stage volume was tremendous sometimes.
When Ronson played with McGuinn it was just phenomenal. It was a killer. It was just so powerful, it would just take your breath away. That was his role; he was a great guitar player. But with Bob, you could see him just tweaking it in and trying to find little spaces in which to play. It's just Bobs playing style he's got this scrub-board style, he just plays through everything.

Clinton Heylin: But it was much more extreme in '76 than in '75.

Arthur Rosato: In '76 he was just pissed. He was doing something he really didn't want to do. When we went down further in the south, one place he came back raving, he came back raving out of the swamp, saying he saw all these lights and UFO type things going on. I thought okay, he's getting into it, he's relating to something he experienced.

Joel Bernstein: That was when he went to see Bobby Charles. We had some spare time after Baton Rouge.

Clinton Heylin: You had a lot of time after Baton Rouge, they cancelled the next gig.

Joel Bernstein: Well, when that tour was described to me originally, it was supposed to be a Gulf Coast tour. It was supposed to start in Clearwarter and end in Corpus Christi.

Arthur Rosato: But by the time we got to Fort Collins he was definitely into it. Remember down in Florida we threw Steve Martin off stage (laughs). He was sitting on one of our road cases.

Joel Bernstein: He opened one of the shows for us. I think it was Gainesville. He was this totally unknown comedian.

Arthur Rosato: That was the time they started doing the paintings. It started out as nothing, but we decided to make it a group thing, so everybody had a panel. So they had these big 4 x 8 panels and everybody would be working on them.

Joel Bernstein: Was one of them Bob's?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, Bob had one. Everybody had one. And then there was the thing with the scarves.
Joel Bernstein: Yeah. Obviously, Bob was serious about it. When he first showed up at rehearsals he was wearing a yarmulka. It wasn't part of a look, it definitely wasn't wardrobe, it was a religious thing. It wasn't a bandana, it was a yarmulka.

Arthur Rosato: It was a personal thing he never talked about it. And then pretty soon all of the musicians were wearing them and you thought: is this out of respect for Bob's beliefs? Bob's whole thing at that time was pretty much that magical aspect.

Clinton Heylin: He was heavily into astrology and tarot at that point. I assume that came from Sara. She was there in '75 wasn't she?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, she was there in '75, but I don't remember her so much on the next tour. She was at Fort Collins and they had the kids there. Bob told me to make sure the kids didn't get on camera. I had to keep them out of the range of the cameras.

Clinton Heylin: In '75 he was working on the film. [Renaldo and Clara].

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, it was wild. It was just like this travelling troupe. When we finished that tour we started editing the film. The first edit was eight hours long! (laughs) Really, it was eight hours.
It was at the same time they were doing the Last Waltz. That weekend Bob was still working on his film and asked me, ‘Do you think I should go up for that?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, it's Robbie and the guys, it would be nice if you went, but I know you're in the middle of this and I know it's hard if you drop off to do that and then get back into editing again.’
But yeah, the first edit was eight hours and then they got it down to four hours and later there was a two hour version.

Clinton Heylin: The two hour version is just meaningless.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, I don't get it. I don't know what's going on in that. But in the four hour one I would watch the skits and then think where's the music? I can't wait to see the music. Then the music would come on and it would be brilliant, and it would hold you for a long time, 'til the next skit. Then you'd start to flag and then more music like 'Isis' would pop up. But the music was incredible, that was the thing on that tour, the music was powerful and real. Everything was real about that tour, what we were doing and how we were travelling around, playing like Plymouth Town Hall and stuff like that. I mean we had to play the big money gigs like Hertford, Connecticut just to pay for it, but the purpose for doing it was the other gigs. Bob's a major fan of history. ‘Who's the person, who the person worked for, where that guitar came from, who's played that guitar before.’ He likes to know that and he doesn’t like new. If you look at him now he playing through Marshall stacks and that shit, but that's his rock 'n' roll part coming out.

Clinton Heylin: But there's also that competitive streak. You do get that impression that he thinks: why aren’t I as big as The Stones?

Arthur Rosato: That whole thing with Petty, I kinda had a problem with that. He wants to be a rock 'n' roll star. He doesn’t know who he is. Here is a guy and he's playing with this rock band and he thinks they are the hot thing and this is rock 'n' roll. And I say no, ‘He's rock 'n' roll, they are just copying him.’ He doesn't have to dress up, or dress down like them. That has always kind of bothered me, because he doesn't know who he is in the rock pantheon.
I had a couple of arguments with him over the years. One was, he asked me to get rid of one of the crew guys and I said, ‘Well why?’ And he said, ‘He looks too much like a hippy’ (the guy had long hair and a beard), and I go, ‘Yes, but I need him for whatever.’ And he goes, ‘Yes, I know, but can you do that for me.’ I said ‘Bob, I went through too much shit in the sixties for me to fire somebody because of what they look like!’ And he said, ‘Yes, your right. But geeze look at him.’ So I said, ‘Bob, I'll take care of it.’ So I had him hide off the side of the stage. Then just before we left for Europe Bob said, ‘You gotta get somebody else.’ So I called Europe, because we were that close to leaving. Anyway, I got somebody lined up over there, and we were playing at Merriweather Post - this is 1981 - and Bob comes off the stage and says ‘Okay, you keep him.’ It was a good show, you know.
The other argument was - He's laying on his bed in the studio down in Santa Monica. To begin with, I don't like people talking to me while they are laying down. He's talking about the sound company I had picked. It was a company that Neil Diamond used. I knew his production manager and he said, ‘If you want to check out his system come up to Seattle.’ So I flew up with Neil and his band in his private plane and I checked out the sound system. It was really nice. It was everything we needed for the venues that we were going to be playing. So I worked out how much it was going to cost. Anyway, Bob's laying in bed and he says, ‘You just picked them because you flew up in their plane.’ I just went off and I looked down at him and said, ‘Don't you ever say that!’ I said, ‘I've never done anything like that, I don't give a shit about airplanes, I go out to find the best sound for you…’ and I could see him beginning to fall back further into his pillow and he said, ‘Okay, okay.’
He was testing me. He tests people to see what they will do, just to get a reaction. But we didn't play that game too often. You see I was his only guy, he had people taking care of his personal things, but on the technical side, it was just me.

Clinton Heylin: The sound was great in '78. The band weren't good, but the sound was great.

Arthur Rosato: No that was the thing.

Clinton Heylin: Earls Court is a graveyard for sound but the sound was excellent.

Arthur Rosato: Oh yeah, he was just being a brat on that one. Bob would do things like that. We were up at the Warfield and he didn't like where the grand piano was. It was on a riser, up stage left or something. He decided he didn't like it there, but he didn't know where he wanted it. I'm sitting up in the balcony with him, so I said, ‘Bob where would you like it.’ And he goes, ‘Err, how about over there,’ pointing to stage right.
Instead of rolling it, because it was on a riser, these guys carried it over to the other side of the stage. And he's looking at it and he goes, ‘No, how about the other there?’ So they carry it over the other side and I look at him and think he's at it again, he's doing it. And I'm watching these guys carrying a grand piano around stage as though it were an accordion! So finally he says, ‘No, I like it back where it was.’ But he does that; he'll do that to a lot of people. He'll say something just to see where they go with it and on many occasions people will just run out and do it. But I'll say to myself, ‘Does he mean that, does he mean the opposite or is there a third thing I ain't thought of.’ So that was my role to interpret all these things.

Clinton Heylin: If you are in that position where people will do anything you want, you've got to test people.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, but it can be painful with 16 guys carrying a grand piano around the stage!

Clinton Heylin: When you said about the Neil Diamond sound system, that was the Weintraub period? I thought he was totally into Neil's show. I thought that's what he was trying to reproduce?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, but at what cost? I mean Bob's ears are, well, if all the sound in the world came through a transistor radio, he would be happy. So what he had us do was disconnect some of the speakers in the floor monitors and replace them with four-inch speakers! So you have this little radio sound coming out and that was his monitor. In your own home it would sound fine, but when you're on stage with all these amps you just hear hisssss. So you just end up tuning down the amp, but he wanted to see those little speakers. So he'd have us tearing these thousand dollar speakers apart and have us put these little $2 Radio Shack speakers in there! He would do that to at recording, especially in Santa Monica, at Rundown. That wasn't the official name for the place. That was another Bob thing, calling it Rundown Studio. He just threw that out one day and next it became the official thing. That was never the name, people just picked up on what Bob said. It was another Bobism, they'd hear something and they run with it.

Clinton Heylin: The song ‘Shot Of Love’, which was recorded at Rundown, is credited to Peacock Studios.

Arthur Rosato: Oh right, I didn't pick up on that. But he would just make up things. He asked me what Street Legal meant. He'd heard the world, but he wasn't sure what it meant. So I explained to him about cars and things like that and he was happy. We would recorded something and put it on cassette, and he would go sit out in his car and listen to it and then say, ‘Okay, yeah, that's a take.’ Or he would listen to it in the pool room [at Rundown], there was a tiny little boom box and he'd listen on that. That's the way we did it. We'd never listen to it on playback through the studio speakers.
Invariably what would happen, is we would set a noon time to start recording and Bob would show up at six. The next day he would show up at four, and as it gets closer he would get more into it. Meanwhile, the band is getting worse, in fact they don't even want to see Bob. So by the time we're done, Bob's going, ‘Isn't this great?’ And they all want to kill him; so that's a typical recording session. To begin with, we would do like fifteen takes of a song, because he would be so miserable. And as he got into the sessions there would be three or four takes. And most of the time we would get down to just one take and that would be it, because that was the take. And if you go back and listen to the fifteen takes, more often than not the first or second would be the take. That's the way it always worked with Bob. I told Bob I wanted to do 'Caribbean Wind' and he drove everybody crazy on that one.

Clinton Heylin: Was he actually re-writing 'Caribbean Wind' in the studio?

Arthur Rosato: No, no. When Bob came in, he has it here (in his head).

Joel Bernstein: I don't think I've ever seen Bob refer to lyrics.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah. It's his old songs he has the problems with… We carried the books and sometimes he'd just glance at them. If he was gonna do something, he'd just glance at it real quick.

Joel Bernstein: For instance, I remember in '76, when he and Joan did 'Lilly Rosemary…' in Salt Lake City, he just wrote down the first word of each verse, 'cause it's like sixteen verses or something. All he would need was that first word as a prompt.

Clinton Heylin: He still has a problem with the order of verses today. Did you notice a significant change in his manor when he started doing Christian material?

Arthur Rosato: He started working in the studio with different people, not calling that same group of people. He had a different thought on what he wanted to do.

Clinton Heylin: I meant really his manner.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, I know what you mean. Actually, I thought it was a little easier, like a weight had been lifted off. He always wanted to do something different, but sometimes the momentum would carry over and force him to do stuff. But now he didn't want to be responsible for this big organisation.

Clinton Heylin: Having only previously ever heard the shows, it's interesting to watch the video of Toronto '80, and then to see him laughing. You get the impression during this period that he had lost his sense of humour, but it's obvious from the video that that isn't the case.

Arthur Rosato: That was the thing, his sense of humour kind of went away and you didn't realise it at the time. Then when he was doing the born again stuff…during that period you could see he was listening to things differently. I played 'Sultans Of Swing' for him. The first time I heard it I thought this sound like Bob! So I turned Bob onto that and after that they came in and did ‘Slow Train.’

Clinton Heylin: It's interesting that he picked Pick Withers.

Arthur Rosato: Well, Bob's a big fan of backbeat. We had discussions on that too. (laughs)

Clinton Heylin: You mean disagreements?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah. On the '78 tour we went through so many drummers. Keltner came down and he was obviously perfect, but he didn't want to go out. He's such a sweet man he came down just out of courtesy. One drummer came in, a black guy, he had a really strong backbeat, but he played it on every song, the same thing. Bob loved that. I said, ‘Bob he's playing the same on everything. He's not playing the song. That's not where you want to be.’

Clinton Heylin: But of course he later went out on the road with Keltner.

Arthur Rosato: That was something Jim could do, he felt spiritually like he wanted to do that one.

Clinton Heylin: Dylan has this tradition of using bass players as bandleaders rather than guitarists.

Joel Bernstein: I think it's interesting about having bass players as bandleaders, in the sense of them having to telegraph Bob's changes to the rest of the band.
My feeling is that there are two ways you can be in a band with Bob. You can either say, ‘We know the song, we know the arrangement. We are going to go to the chorus now, are you with us Bob?’ Or the other way is the Rolling Thunder way. Where someone watches Bob's weird, quirky, idiosyncratic sense of time, (which you can hear in his own acoustic solo playing very well, but which crops up also in the band stuff), and I thought Stoner could do that. He could telegraph Bob's changes to the rest of the band instantaneously. Everybody would take their cue, not from Bob, but from Stoner. Because you could never follow Bob.

Clinton Heylin: Dylan is clearly a far better guitarist than he allows himself to be on stage, at least acoustic guitar.

Arthur Rosato: That's the weird thing about it; he's really a great acoustic guitar player.

Joel Bernstein: A great acoustic guitar player.

Arthur Rosato: … but if you listen to his electric guitar from '65 and listen to it now, it's exactly the same. There's no improvement.

Clinton Heylin: Do you remember the gospel tour, 'Saving Grace that's Over Me,'? Dylan plays lead and he clearly worked it out in advance and it’s a proper lead break. And it’s the only proper electric guitar break that I can think of. It's not just a little eight-note thing. To me it's clear that on those shows he was focused on the idea, he had to get the thing across.

Arthur Rosato: [to Joel] Did you ever see him pick up an electric guitar and practice something?

Joel Bernstein: No. You would see him often with a writing guitar. He would have that acoustic guitar with him all the time. It wasn't one of the stage guitars. You had the sense that he was playing that a lot, but I never saw him with an electric guitar.

Arthur Rosato: No, the only time he would work out what the lead was, was when that break came around (laughs), that's when he would work it out.

Joel Bernstein: Sometimes he has ideas and if he could just place his fingers in the right spot to get the idea out he'd be fine, but he often just misses the fret. He will go to the eight fret when he should be on the seventh, and the whole figure is one fret off and it sounds horrific. It's a very odd thing.

Arthur Rosato: Sometimes he would pick up the wrong harp and he would go with it. If he played the wrong key it didn't matter.

Joel Bernstein: We started putting big stickers on the harps. Arthur started that. I have some from '78.

Arthur Rosato: Any band that plays with Bob sounds like Bob. No matter who it is or how long you've been playing, when you play with Bob, you sound like Bob.

Clinton Heylin: He went from a completely gospel show to playing a lot of his old hits. Did you get a sense of why that was?

Arthur Rosato: He wants to play what he wants to play. He doesn't want to be a performer on command. So when we were doing the gospel thing he didn't want to be distracted by performing a show. He really wanted the audience to listen. That was the main thing. He figured the audience needed to listen.

Clinton Heylin: But six months later…

Arthur Rosato: Well you know he was getting yelled at the whole time. And it's a year later and he's still doing the same show. He was softening a bit. Also, at the Warfield shows he would have these famous musicians sitting in and they would want to play on something they knew… So that's when those songs kinda snook in, and he saw that it wasn't so bad. He could play those songs now and it wasn't that evil thing.

Clinton Heylin: There were some nice arrangements of some of the old material at that point.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah. He wants to make you understand what he's talking about. He wants you to listen. That's why he doesn't do lyrics sheets and stuff like that. He always was one for, ‘If they can't hear it on the record then why should I put it on a lyric sheet.’ That's what he used to say.
…Even in rehearsal when he's singing a song, whether it's an old song or whatever, he's singing it with as much conviction as when he wrote it… Bob's as serious as you can get as an artist.

Clinton Heylin: What about the whole stage fright thing? He certainly didn't have a drink before the Gospel shows. He was forcing himself to do those shows and to be completely clear headed when he did them. Every night he's going up on stage and he's having to force himself physically. That must have been hard trying to force this down someone's throat?

Arthur Rosato: No, because with Bob it's … ‘You will listen, I'm taking control of this stage.’ Even if he's doing 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' he's thinking about the version… he's in control, ‘I'm playing this song for you now and your gonna listen.’ He was real strong about that.

Clinton Heylin: So when the Rundown thing came to an end… Howard's death obviously shook up Dylan? (Howard Alk was found dead at Rundown Studios having apparently taken his own life).

Arthur Rosato: I think that was the major reason we stopped. The last conversation I had with Bob during that period, he said he was gonna close the studio down and he wasn't gonna go out on the road 'til 1984. I mean he knew back then that he wasn't going to go back out until '84.
We were all looking at each other and we just didn't want to be in that place anymore. Like I said, Bob's really into history and that's not a piece of history he wanted to be around. We had worked that place, we made into what it was. It came to a point where it had become something else. It wasn't what it started out to be. Even before Howard's death Bob was trying to make [Rundown] into a commercial venture by renting it out. He said, ‘We have all this gear, so why not let somebody come in and they can record here?’

Clinton Heylin: Were they working on a film of Dylan's life or something when Howard died?

Arthur Rosato: No, but we had been shooting every night on that tour (1981).

Clinton Heylin: Renaldo and Clara style?

Arthur Rosato: No. It was less involved. We were doing skits, but Bob would write them after the fact, or he would just give someone some lines to say. There was this one French guy, I can't remember his name [Roland Grivelle]. I think he became Bob in the film. We were shooting him a lot and then when we got back to Santa Monica with all this footage (16mm film shot on one camera) and we started editing and we said, "What are we trying to say? What is the movie?" We had no idea because there wasn't any movie; there were just all these parts and we put it together and then the holidays came up.
I know that Bob was pulling the plug on the project. I think he was doing it more or less as favour to Howard. Bob wasn't really interested; it was a home movie…

Clinton Heylin: He'd known Howard for twenty years at that point.

Arthur Rosato: He'd know him forever, but I think he was trying to let Howard go. I think Howard came on the tour as a favour. He was a still photographer, then he wound up doing a film. I think we were all on that tour for the same reason. I told Bob I didn't want to do that tour and he said, ‘Oaky, you can play drums.’

Clinton Heylin: That was a very odd tour, because although they were large places it wasn't an American tour. By which I mean he didn't cover America. It was about twenty-five shows and he missed a lot of places.

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, we were up in Milwaukee. That's where we started. The hotel we stayed in had a front desk that was in a big iron cage. It was one of those kind of places. You see Bob likes those hotels. No air conditioning and a place with lots of history. So we go there and Drummond checks out and goes some place else. (laughs) But yeah, that tour was strange and we didn't want to be on that tour. He kinda made reasons for us to be out there.

Clinton Heylin: So staying at the funky hotels was part of it?

Arthur Rosato: Yeah, Yeah. Bob's always been like that. One of the things he needs is to have a room with windows that open. I mean there's nothing odd about this stuff.
When we got back to Santa Monica we had no idea what we had. We had notes and pages of scripts that we had to type up. We started editing, but Bob wasn't really involved it in. Nobody got that involved and when the holidays came I went home. I heard Bob wasn't going to go on with it. He was doing it as a favour to Howard, because he loved Howard, but I think he was puling the plug on it and I think between Howard's personal family problems and stuff and living alone in this studio. Anyway, I came back down again and talked to Bob, Bob was great, he's a real sympathetic human being, but he realised that it was an end of an era…
So we all packed up and said goodbye, and I went off and became Springsteen's video director. I called Bob at his house and he wasn't home, but about an hour later he called back, just checking in to see how I'm doing. So he was concerned. He's had so many people around him all these years they kinda come and go, and I would like to think that I was more of a friend than that.

Clinton Heylin: Have you ever been asked to go back?

Arthur Rosato: No, not by him, not that I know of. With Bob I had done everything I could possibly have done. That's why I was leaving [after] that tour.
He's got different people around him now and different management and they insulate him so much. Everybody thinks they look after Bob's best interests, but Bob knows who his best interests are. Too many people are not protecting him they are protecting themselves. I don't like to play that game.

© Clinton Heylin, 2001