Ratso's Favorite Rolling Thunder Show

1975-11-11, Palace Theater, Waterbury, CT

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I’m not sure a single one of my Rolling Thunder newsletters hasn’t at some point cited Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s book On the Road with Bob Dylan. Chronicling Ratso’s time following this tour, the book is essential reading about the life of a gonzo journalist trying to ingratiate himself with the touring party and getting dissed at every turn (Joan Baez first nicknamed him “Ratso” after he hadn’t showered in a few days).

The man saw almost every show of the tour - “almost” for reasons that will become clear - and gives his impressions on each show in the book. But I wanted to find out what still jumped out at him 45 years later. Of the several dozen shows he saw, does he have a personal favorite?

He does: Today’s show at the Palace Theater in Waterbury, Connecticut. So we hopped on Zoom last week to talk about it. Ratso’s a hell of a raconteur, so I’ll turn it over to him from here. His remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.

I have to give you a little bit of history before we get to Waterbury. The reason I was even on the tour was that I had done a preview of Blood on the Tracks for Rolling Stone. I was a freelancer, so I would go up to the offices of all the record companies to see, you know, any interesting stories. And Columbia wouldn't say anything to me. Then [once] the publicist left the desk and I looked up on a bulletin board and I saw a sheet that said, "Dylan in the studio," which would be Blood on the Tracks.

[Soon after] I was walking on Fifth Avenue to the Rolling Stone offices. I look to my left and there was a car parked. Dylan was behind the wheel. So I go up to him and say, "Hi I'm Larry Sloman with Rolling Stone magazine. I hear you're doing an album." And he goes, "how'd you hear that?" Immediately I figured, I better change the subject. I said, "By the way, I live in Soho, and my roommate's Phil Ochs," which was true. I inherited the apartment that Phil Ochs and Jerry Rubin had when Jerry Rubin moved to California. Phil had nowhere to go, so my roommate and I said Phil could crash on the living room couch as long as he needed. When I told Dylan that Phil was my roommate, he just melted. "Aw man, how's Phil doing?" So we did the article, and he loved it.

Fast forward about eight months. I hear that Dylan's in the Village recording again. Each night he was hanging out at the Other End, because Jacques Levy lived around the corner on LaGuardia Place. They would write a song, then Dylan would be so excited that he'd run down to the Other End.

McGuinn was in town. He said, meet me at Gerde's Folk City, because this guy Sammy Walker, who was one of the “New Dylans,” was playing. We went to that show, then we went to Chinatown to eat. It was about two in the morning, and I said, "Hey, before you go back to the hotel, let's stop in the Other End. Maybe Bob's there with Jacques." McGuinn had collaborated with Jacques Levy before Bob did. So we walk in, we don't see anybody. We walk to the back and around the corner there's a big long table, and there's Dylan and Neuwirth and a bunch of other people.

Dylan yells out, "Hey, Roger. Where you been? We've been waiting for you all night!" We walk over to the table and hang out. When McGuinn introduced me as the guy who wrote the Rolling Stone piece, Bob said, "Why don't you come on a tour? I'd rather have you cover this than anybody else." So I got the assignment from Rolling Stone.

[Before the tour began], I had total access to Bob. But once we got on the road, I go to try to check into the hotel we're all staying at in Plymouth, Louie Kemp comes and says, "You can't stay here."

Louie Kemp was an old childhood friend of Bob's. Somehow him and the other guy that was working on the tour, Bill Graham's protégé Barry Imhoff, decided that I was press, so I had to be segregated from the people on the tour. That was ridiculous, because Dylan invited me, I was friends for years with McGuinn, I knew the whole band - Stoner and Wyeth, all the New York-based musicians were friends of mine.

I had that famous scene that's at the beginning of Renaldo and Clara, where I'm two feet away from Dylan screaming “I need access! I need access! I need a room to stay in. I need per diem.” When I first said I need the room, Bob says “get him a room” to Imhoff. “And I need per diem!” “Okay, yeah, we'll take care of expenses. What else?” I said, “I need access!” And he goes, “You need Ex-Lax? What have you been eating?” Howard Alk, who filmed that, told me years later that if they weren't going to call the movie Renaldo and Clara, they were gonna call it Access.