Billy Cross Talks Playing 100 Shows with (and Getting His Hair Pulled By) Bob Dylan

1978-06-26, Westfalenhalle, Dortmund, West Germany

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Courtesy Billy Cross

Update June 2023: This interview is included along with 40+ others in my new book ‘Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members.’ Buy it in hardcover, paperback, or ebook now!

1978 was, to that point, the busiest touring year of Bob Dylan’s career. By far. At Budokan remains the tour’s best-known document, but the live album was recorded at some of the very first shows. The tour continued all year, a total of 115 concerts in 10 different countries with one of the biggest bands of Bob’s career. I talked to one band member, pianist Alan Pasqua, a few months back, and today we hear from lead guitarist Billy Cross.

Billy had a busy career before Dylan called, playing with Sha Na Na and Jobriath as well as a variety of Broadway musicals, including Hair (I wonder if his long golden locks helped him land that gig) before moving to Denmark in the ‘70s. He’d also played with Link Wray and Robert Gordon alongside Dylan’s Rolling Thunder bassist Rob Stoner, which would lead him to Bob. But I’ll let Billy tell that tale…

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Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get involved in the tour and in Bob Dylan's musical world?

I went to Columbia University with Robbie Stoner and we played music together. We had this band called Topaz which was an embarrassment, but nonetheless it existed. When I was back in Copenhagen, Robbie had been playing with Bob on the Rolling Thunder tour, and he had played on the Desire record. Then, when Topaz broke up, Bob had contacted Rob again and said, "Come out to LA, I'm putting a new band together, I'm going to do another tour." They had auditioned about 34 guitar players as far as I know, and Bob simply wasn't satisfied. I don't know why.

Finally, Robbie said, "Well, I got this friend who lives in Copenhagen. It's far away but he's a good player." They called me up, Bob and Rob, and they said, "I'm going to give you an airplane ticket and you're going to come over and you're going to audition.” and I did.

Arthur Rosato was the main person in the road crew, in charge of putting everything together. I came into the rehearsal place down in Santa Monica and he took me aside and he said, "Look, all the guitar players who have auditioned have been intimidated. What you've got to do is you've got to play loud." I just turned up and played loud.

After the audition Bob walked over to me and said, "What are you doing the next year?" I said, "Well, I hope I'm going to be playing with you." He said, "Yes," and that was that.

Were you surprised at the size and scale of the band? At the time, he wasn't thought of as having these giant bands with backing singers and stuff.

When you're presented with a reality like that, you just accept it for what it is, like kids who accept their parents even if they're weird.

Was it a challenge to make your mark in that environment musically when there's so much else happening?

Well, I wasn't really interested in making my mark. I was interested in doing whatever I could to make the music sound right. I didn't feel that I needed to manifest myself stylistically or personally. I was just so happy to be there.

What's the next thing that happens?

We rehearsed like crazy, just day after day after day after day, in an old gun factory on Ocean Avenue. We would eat really good lunches, great soups. and hung out in this place in Santa Monica.

What would a typical day of rehearsal look like?

We all show up I guess in the first part of the day, and then we get tuned, make some noise, smoke some cigarettes. Then Bob would show up and we just start playing. And then we'd quit!

We still had to audition some people. We had to get a drummer. The keyboards, and drummers, and some of the girls had not been sorted out yet. We went through a bunch of different drummers to play with.

One thing I'm always curious about, and especially with this tour, are where the arrangements come from. You got a reggae “Don't Think Twice,” that cool “Maggie’s Farm.” Is Bob or someone dictating the arrangements, or you were just jamming until something comes out?

They basically all came from Bob. Bob had a distinct idea of every single song on what he wanted to do. Each song had a direction, each song had a genre identity, each song had a presentation that was his.

[I came up with] some small details, like the intro of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He said to me, "Come up with a guitar intro." I thought, "Oh, Jesus Christ. What am I going to do?" I came up with that. That's about the only thing that I remember that I did specifically that was recognizably significant.

Let's go to Japan. That's probably the most famous part of the tour, because they made a live album out of it. What do you remember from that run?

Musically, we were pretty green. I think we all would've preferred to have recorded shows later in the tour. We were professionals, but bands tend to get better as they play, and we definitely got better.

The shows at the Budokan were interesting because they had guards who stood in the aisles and prevented people from standing up in their seats or getting overly excited. It was a strange feeling. I played in the Soviet Union and there was a similar feeling there. The authorities didn't want the people to emotionally react too strongly, and have that emotion carried into physical behavior. There was a feeling of repression, but it wasn't bad. In America, people will drink as much as they can, and smoke as much as they can, let it all hang out. That was very much not what was happening in Japan.

Is that difficult as a musician, you want a back and forth with the audience, and not really getting it?

Audience communication with the band, it's fun to a certain degree, [but] when I'm on stage playing, I'm really thinking about the music. What's happening, how can I make it sound better, am I doing a good job, is the groove right, is Bob happy, not throwing me any weird looks or anything? Maybe I'll be thinking about a couple of girls in the first row. [Mostly], I'll be thinking about the music.      

Are you getting feedback from Bob? “This song needs work,” etc.

For a person who is as [musically] articulate as he has proven to be over his career, which is on a level with Shakespeare, his communication verbally with people wasn't of the same character as his abilities as a songwriter. He's a very instinctively reactive person. There wasn't a lot of talk about stuff. We kind of did it, and if he felt something wasn't going the right way, we would do something else. He wasn't verbally expressive in terms of negotiating the music.

It's not a thing where you would get notes after - "hey, the guitar solo sounded wrong" or something?

“On bar 54 of Just Like a Woman, you played an E flat, that's an E natural” - no. It's not like rehearsing for a Broadway show. He was very friendly and very warm. He was lovely, absolutely lovely, considering what he's been subjected through his life at that point. Everywhere he goes, somebody thinks he's got the answer that's blowin' in the wind. I thought it was unbelievable that he could be as normal and personal and pleasant as he was.

I was looking up some photos of you two and I found a few where he seems to be pulling your hair on stage. He’s not someone who’s known for goofing around like that. Was that typical?

No, I don't think he's done it before or after. I must've inspired some sort of ironic distance. Over the years, people have sent me photos of me and Dylan dueling guitars on stage, or him messing up my hair, or pulling up my leather pants, which he did one night. As I said, I found him in relationship to me to be very warm, very loving, very friendly, very understanding, very generous.

I can tell you one specific example, even before he knew me well. I had been away from my wife for quite a while. She's Danish and she had gone back to Copenhagen to start up the beginning of her master's degree. I've been on the road with Topaz with Rob and I hadn't seen her in quite a while. When I got the [Dylan] gig, I flew her out to be with me in LA while we were rehearsing. I asked management if I could be allowed to bring her on the road on this tour, because it really was amounting to an awful long time away. We had been together for four years at that point and those things are tricky with relationships. I was frightened that all the experiences I would have as opposed to the experiences she didn't have would bring us further away from one another than was healthy. Management said, "No way, you can't do that."

I had to think, "Do I want to sacrifice my marriage for this gig?" I was very much in doubt. I was tormented by it. I went to Bob and I said, "Bob I really have a situation here I need to ask you. Lise and I have not been together in about five months and this would mean another three months that we would be separated. Do you think I could bring her?" He looked at me and he said, "Of course you can bring her. I'll make sure that when you pay for a ticket, we take it out of your bulk salary not after your salary after taxes. We'll get her on the insurance program for the tour. Everything will be set up. Don't worry."

In my book, that's big stuff. It was an understanding and a warmth and a generosity of spirit that I don't think I've encountered from other people in the business,

Another thing was we both had back difficulties. He had the injuries that he got from the motorcycle accident. I had a gymnastics accident when I was 17 that gave me a disc that would come out every now and then. We used to go swimming together when we were on the road. [Tour manager] Gary would find somebody who had a swimming pool or some public pool and we would be driven over there so we could swim laps to train our backs up. So we spent a good deal more time together than he would have spent with a lot of the other people because of that.

In terms of the concerts themselves, did you have any particular favorite songs to play live?

I think my favorite song is one I didn't play on [laughs]. It was the way they did “Tangled Up in Blue,” I thought that was unbelievable. I had goosebumps every time he did it. It was just Bob and Steve [Douglas] and Alan [Pasqua] and it was remarkable. He always sounds best when there's the least amount of music behind him. He's such an unbelievably great singer that I don't need a lot to listen to Bob. Hearing him by himself sometimes is even more powerful than hearing him with a band.

I'm a big ‘78 fan, but one of the criticisms you see is what you're saying: That there's so many people on stage, that Bob is getting overwhelmed. Did you ever feel, in terms of what you're saying about him being great when it's stripped-down, that sometimes there was almost too much?