What did Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue make-up represent?
Not only is he one of the most important, groundbreaking and revolutionary artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, but Bob Dylan has also got one of the most iconic looks in music. What’s more is that he has had several of the most iconic looks in music over the course of his sprawling, seven-decade career.
Whether you think of the work-man jeans and jacket look from the cover of 1962’s ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ (which recently inspired the “Bob Dylan-core TikTok trend), his mid-decade cooler-than cool in pencil suits, with big bushy hair and pitch-black Ray Bans era or his more recent Old-West gunfighter get up, Bob Dylan is one of the coolest characters in popular culture.
One of his most iconic costumes could be seen night after night on his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the mid-70s. The idea for the tour was to get a group of musicians together and cross the country together, turning up in cities unannounced and finding a place to put on a show. With Dylan himself often taking charge of driving duties, they’d pack up and head out on the road before pulling into town and putting on marathon three-and-a-half-hour shows.
With the likes of Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blakely, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Allen Ginsberg and even Dennis Hopper along for the ride, the grand Revue needed a grand look, and Dylan duly delivered.
Taking to the stage each night wearing cowboy boots, wide-flare jeans, various scarfs, and always a wide-brimmed hat adorned with an assortment of flowers, Dylan alternately wore frightening opaque masks on tour or else painted his face a bright white, accentuating his robin’s egg blue eyes in the process. Dylan looked to all the world like a travelling shaman at these shows and accordingly performed like a man possessed.
In general, perhaps owing to the travelling carnival feel of the tour, Scarlet Riviera’s violin was something more intangible (perhaps the huge amounts of cocaine which were reportedly ingested on the tour). There was a mystical, other-worldly quality to the show’s look and the music the group performed.
Just like his outfits were a huge departure from the slick suits he wore on the comeback Tour ’74, Dylan’s performances on this tour were a marked departure from the arena shows he had been performing a year before with The Band, as well. He stalked the stage, sang with a voice he had never conjured up before and performed his songs in ways that they had never been heard. In short, he utterly transformed himself and his music on the Rolling Thunder Revue.
So why did Bob Dylan wear make up during the Rolling Thunder Revue?
Alongside all the great travelling talent on the tour, Dylan arranged for a camera crew around headed by filmmaker Howard Alk to capture the shows and also recorded a lot of semi-improvised scenes backstage, which would later make up the four-and-a-half-hour-long 1978 movie Renaldo & Clara.
A lifelong movie lover, Dylan’s great influence for his own film was Marcel Carné’s 1945 poetic-realism picture Les Enfants du Paradis, which contains an account of the 19th-century French-Bohemian mime Baptiste. Not only does Baptiste wear similar face paint in the film to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder look, but he also wears a hat decked with flowers.
In real life, Baptiste was a character played by Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who was most famous for his creation, the clown Pierrot. With roots in the travelling theatre group of the Italian commedia dell’arte, here we find another inspiration on Dylan’s travelling circus of performers, as well as his look for the tour.
Dylan had been introduced to Les Enfants du Paradis by his art teacher Norman Raeben, who also inspired the singer to play around with the essence of time and tenses in not only his visual art, but also in songs like ‘Tangled Up in Blue‘ from the seminal 1975 release Blood on the Tracks. The story in the song jumps around without warning from one place in time to the next, something that Dylan had learned from Raeben and related in a radio interview that year with Mary Travers, “I mean, you live in the present, you know, but it’s more complicated than meets the eye really, meets the ear… but it’s all the same, the past, the present, the future”.
When discussing Renaldo & Clara with Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone in 1978, Dylan said that “In the film, the mask is more important than the face”, an idea that he came back to in Netflix’s 2019 film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth”, he says in the documentary. “When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” Dylan is not wearing a mask when he delivers this line.
Nor is Sharon Stone wearing a mask in the film when suggests that Dylan told her he was inspired to wear the face paint after seeing the band Kiss, who themselves famously wore face paint inspired by the ancient Japanese Kabuki theatre group and their kumadori style makeup, in concert.
Dylan has spent his career messing with the minds of his fans, his contemporaries and the media (as he wrote in his 2004 memoir ‘Chronicles Volume 1’, “The press? I figured you lie to it.”), but perhaps, when he was donning masks and face-paint on the Rolling Thunder Revue, giving some of the most powerful, visceral and earth-shattering performances of his career, that was when he was telling us the truth.
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