Bob Neuwirth, Remixed and Revisited

His 1974 Debut Album, Uncluttered and Reissued

Bob Neuwirth's reputation as a scene-maker, people-connector, party dude and master of the acid-laced put down,  was sealed nearly 60 years ago, when he appeared as Bob Dylan's wise-cracking sidekick in the 1967 D.A. Pennebaker documentary Dont Look Back. [Officially, there is no apostrophe in the original title, though no one complains if you add it.]

Part of his notoriety came from appearing to insult Joan Baez on the the 1965 tour of England and Europe depicted in the film, and keeping her away from Dylan on stage.

Yet Baez held no grudges. When Neuwirth died in 2022 at age 82, Baez posted a picture of her applying makeup to Neuwirth's eyebrows on her Instagram account, and wrote: "Bob Neuwirth. One of the funniest - and kindest - people I’ve ever known. Rest well, my friend. It’s been wonderful having you in my life."

Others felt that way as well. "Bobby was a guardian angel of sorts during a magical time of my life," the late Kris Kristofferson wrote in an undated journal entry shared last week by Lisa Kristofferson, Kris' wife of 41 years. "Before I met him, he was the dark shadow beside Dylan [in Dont Look Back]. Hip, cynical, funny, infuriating."

Patti Smith, who appeared to have had a crush on him, wrote a poem, “For Bob Neuwirth” published in Creem magazine’s September, 1971 issue. “Your voice is very loud/do you think there’s no one/who will speak to you.” I imagine if Neuwirth was loud then, it was probably from a whole lotta drinking and insecurity.

But two years after his death, Neuwirth's own musical career and personal life is undergoing a period of rediscovery, his once scathing put-downs forgotten. Instead, he is recalled as a loving and supportive friend, after sobriety changed his life and hundreds of others.

"Neuwirth was a legendary artist and musician and scene-maker who in mid-life got sober and spent the rest of his life helping others do the same. I know some of those names in the address book he carried ended up joining him in sobriety. I was one of them," my Substack colleague Lucian Truscott IV wrote in an appreciation after Neuwirth’s passing, partly headlined "the patron saint of ‘Hey Man.'"

Truscott, who was a magazine writer on assignment at the time Neuwirth was making that 1974 album, recalls the bacchanal during and after the sessions. He also writes about taking Neuwirth and Dylan to Norman Mailer's Christmas party in Brooklyn Heights, where they rubbed shoulders with Muhammad Ali, Jacqueline Onassis and others.

But it is his music that is front and center now. Neuwirth's song "The Call," originally recorded in 2001 on Havana Midnight by Neuwirth and Cuban musician Jose Maria Vitier, appears on Eric Clapton's new album (Oct.4, 2024), Meanwhile. And deep in the world's music catalog worth another listen is Neuwirth’s collaboration with John Cale, The Last Days on Earth (1994, MCA).  

Clapton was one of many who performed at a 2022 memorial/tribute concert at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, which also featured T Bone Burnett, Maria Muldaur, Peter Case, Victoria Williams and many others. The evening of Neuwirth's songs may have made even his friends realize the depth and variety of his songbook, which was never as successful as the songwriters and musicians he championed.

"He was a huge enthusiast for other people's talent, you know, he just he loved that, to encourage and promote," said Paula Batson, Neuwirth's partner for the last 30 years of his life. "And you know, tell people about creative people that he admired." Neuwirth was also a painter and visual artist who had galleries and showings in New York in Los Angeles. She says that Dylan convinced him to help out with Rolling Thunder Revue by offering Neuwirth a leather jacket and a set of paints.

Now, in an attempt to flip the script, the centerpiece for the Neuwirth rediscovery is his self-titled 1974 debut album, lavishly supported at the time by David Geffen and his Asylum label.

By "lavishly supported" I mean both the unlimited budget Geffen bestowed on the project, which meant not just studio time but guest musicians, horns, strings, booze and whatever other substances might be padded in an expense account. Before his death, Neuwirth hoped to revisit that album, strip some of the excesses, something more representative of the singer-songwriter and interpreter of the songs he admired.

The 1974 album was originally produced by Thomas Jefferson Kaye and had a "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" kind of ensemble, including six horn players arranged by Jerry Jumonville (including the jazz great Blue Mitchell on trumpet), strings by Jimmy Haskell, and singers and players including Kristofferson, Rita and Priscilla Coolidge, Cass Elliot, Dusty Springfield, Don Everly of the Everly Brothers, country-rock mainstays Chris Hillman and Richie Furay,  Booker T. Jones, Ben Keith, and Fritz Richmond and Geoff Muldaur of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. To name a few.

Photo by Laura Heffington

"Somebody said to me, they thought that the other [original 1974 ] version is like an artifact of the times," said Batson, herself a music industry veteran. "It was his debut album, but that was somewhat obscured by the party atmosphere, and and all the people who were there. And now, when you listen to the record, you really you hear his record, everybody on it adds to it, but doesn't obscure his artistry. We think there are some beautiful Bob Neuwirth songs and other covers that he thought worthy. It's a different record."

Actually, because of the quirks of music rights ownership today, the listener can decide for themselves. The CD and vinyl version of the reissue are available now on longtime music biz pro Len Fico's Sunset Boulevard label. But the remix won't go to streaming services until Oct. 31, 2024. The version that is now on Spotify, for example, is the 1974 album, and will be for the next two weeks.

Batson is the reissue executive producer along with John Hanlon, who mixed and remixed the “new” record. Engineer/producer/mixer Hanlon has worked intimately with Neil Young over the long expanse of Young's career.

Neuwirth's most famous co-write is the album's closer "Mercedes Benz," written with the poet Michael McClure and the singer who made it famous, Janis Joplin. They wrote it on a napkin in a bar near the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY; the story is that Joplin just went onstage and sang it, acapella, as it appears on her posthumous 1971 album Pearl. On Bob Neuwirth, it is recorded with a band, and feels like some of the satirical country-inflected rock songs Shel Silverstein wrote in those days for Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show.

Speaking of Janis Joplin, here's Kristofferson, returning from being out of the country, on how she came to sing another one of his songs. "I heard from a photographer friend that Janis Joplin had sung 'Me and Bobby McGee' at a concert. Bobby taught her that song before I ever met him."

The album is divided between songs Neuwirth wrote, and those he championed. The album opener, "Rock & Roll Time," is by Neuwirth, Kristofferson and Roger McGuinn. "Rock & Roll Rider," "Hero," "Country Livin,'" and "Kiss Money," are by Neuwirth alone.

Among the songs by other writers include "We Had It All," now a country standard by Donnie Fritts and Troy Seals, best known then as a hit in 1973 for Waylon Jennings. And there's a quick hit on Don Gibson's "Legend in My Time" that might be a tongue-in-cheek description of Neuwirth at that moment.

There are also songs with musicians then living in Woodstock, N.Y., where Neuwirth had been spending a lot of time in the early 1970s. "Cowboys & Indians," showing an early awareness of Native American territorial heritage, is by Ben Keith and Bobby Charles. Woodstock's original settlers were not hippies with guitars, or painters with easels, or upper west side psychiatrists with summer homes. The Esopus tribe of the larger Lenape Nation were there first, as perhaps "Cowboys & Indians" alludes. Nearby Kingston, NY, now a hub of the Hudson Valley's revival, was named Esopus by Henry Hudson.

Ben Keith was a pedal steel player and session musician in Nashville who spent most of his career working with Neil Young as far back as Harvest. Bobby Charles was a Louisiana musician who, like Keith, died in 2010. "Cowboys & Indians" was first released by Rita Coolidge on her album Fall Into Spring in 1974, according to Second Hand Songs.

Neuwirth and Charles were regular drinking buddies in the Woodstock/Bearsville music community that then dominated the villages and countryside. Charles was long underappreciated as both singer and songwriter (though he wrote "See You Later, Alligator" for Bill Haley and "Walkin' to New Orleans," the Fats Domino hit). But he seemed to disappear during the 1960s, and Neuwirth appeared on Bobby Charles, the 1972 album on Albert Grossman-founded Bearsville Records.

It was at one of Grossman's area restaurants that Batson met Neuwirth. "I was living in Woodstock, and for a short time I had a job as a hostess at Albert Grossman's restaurant, The Bear. . .and in the afternoons Bob and Bobby Charles would come into the bar at the restaurant and buy champagne, and and encourage me to to to hang out with them and drink and it was very much like that Bobby Charles song, "Small Town Talk.' " I knew Bob since then, and but we didn't become a couple until until later."

That would put their relationship in the early 1990s, and Neuwirth was a very different guy than the master of the put-down for which he was once known and sometimes feared.

There were no more bloody mary mornings, champagne afternoons, and bourbon nights for Neuwirth. He had undergone a personality change by removing alcohol from his life. I had never met or knew Neuwirth, but my music critic and academic friend Don McLeese did run into him once in a while in Austin, or Chicago. McLeese gave permission to use his name, because how else would you know he wrote a wonderful memoir, Slippery Steps: Rolling & Tumbling Toward Sobriety (Ice Cube Press, 2022), for which I wrote a blurb.

"I can't think of anyone whose reputation went through as much a turnaround than Neuwirth," McLeese said. "He became a kind of renaissance man of goodness. In sobriety everybody loved Bob Neuwirth, and he helped a lot of other people get sober."

Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1939, he became a part of the early Cambridge, Mass. folk scene. Neuwirth's first love was what was then known as "hillbilly music." Batson told me the influential guitarist Sandy Bull told Neuwirth he could make some money playing hillbilly music in the clubs of Cambridge and Boston. "Only here,” Bull said, “they call it folk music."

Neuwirth first met Dylan in 1961, at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Branford, Conn. Neuwirth was already familiar with the Woody Guthrie songs the 19-year-old Dylan performed. They were the Batman and Robin of the Gotham Village folk scene immediately thereafter.

Neuwirth with cigarette, Dylan reading newspaper in Dont Look Back. All rights reserved by copyrigtht holder

I've never found anything that describes Neuwirth in his heyday better than another Kristofferson diary entry. "Bobby Neuwirth and I are talking in a late night after concert jam session in a London hotel. Jerry Lee Lewis is playing the piano and singing. Bobby says, “If you don’t believe there’s a God, ask for something impossible and stand back.” Bobby is beautiful. A Shakespearean jester who’s wiser than all the rest. We ran together for a while in a time of guts and glory and dreams coming true or not. I guess he told me more surprising things that turned out to be true than anyone else I’ve run into, personally, on the planet." That is perhaps why the AI transcription of my Zoom chat with Batson refers to her late partner as “Bobby New Earth.”