The verb “conjure” means to “call upon (a spirit or ghost) to appear, by means of a magic ritual.” The film tracks the first part of a two-part Bob Dylan tour, which covered New England and parts of Canada in the final months of 1975. After Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966, he withdrew from touring for eight years, reappearing in public in 1974 on a tour with the Band. The Rolling Thunder Revue was his next venture as a touring artist, and he has regularly toured the world ever since.
The means of transportation for the Rolling Thunder musicians (other performers included Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and, later, Joni Mitchell) was a medium-size bus that Dylan apparently often drove himself. As the bus rolls past a visibly decaying mill town, a voice-over—which turns out to be Sam Shepard, who tagged along on the tour and wrote a book about it—explains that New England was “just experiencing the bane of economic fallout way back then.… Desolate, really difficult economic times … People suffering behind that, you know. Rock and roll was, I don’t know, some kind of medicine or something. They certainly weren’t celebrating the birth of America.” It seems that Dylan and his entourage were providing a kind of tonic for despondent audiences. Here is what the chauffeur driving Dylan’s violinist, Scarlet Rivera, observed: “I never paid attention to the response between the audience and the people on the stage.… That to me was like a show all by itself.… It was like one battery charging another.”
This was why Dylan thought it made sense to visit and play at the Tuscarora Reservation after he and his entourage performed at Niagara Falls. Ramblin’ Jack recounts: “Bob was seated across the table from me and said, ‘Do you remember Peter [La Farge]’s song about Ira Hayes?’” The film then shows Dylan singing the song from memory for his Iroquois audience. (Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian and U.S. Marine who helped hoist the American flag at Iwo Jima. After the war he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and died from hypothermia and alcohol abuse near his home in Arizona.) Mad Bear from the Tuscarora Reservation presents Dylan with a necklace whose beads, he suggests, might just be the same ones Peter Minuit is said to have used to purchase Manhattan Island from the Lenape. But he closes with the following words: “Somewhere along the line, something has failed, and we hope this country can straighten out before too long, because there’s many things that’s going to happen to shape not only this country but the whole world.”
Dylan’s official Instagram account quoted Scarlet Rivera, who asserted the following: “It was confirmed for me that I was with a living genius, on the level of Shakespeare of our time.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined Shakespeare, on his deathbed, pleading with God, “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” Dylan, like Shakespeare, has adopted many guises, which in his case have taken musical forms with theatrical aspects, some of them very painful for him. Perhaps, as the end nears, Dylan will finally achieve a whole and integrated self. We should hope. God bless.
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