Bob Neuwirth may be the rock ‘n’ roll legend that the most people have heard about but not actually heard. A veteran of the folk-rock scene of the 1960s, he became a key figure in the lives or careers of friends like Janis Joplin, T Bone Burnett and Patti Smith — and you’ll see someone playing him in the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” just as you might have seen him on the periphery of the ‘60s documentary “Don’t Look Back.” But given his enormous renown among the cognoscenti, it’s always surprising to look at his actual discography and see how thin it is: When he died in 2022 at age 82, he’d recorded only six albums in his lifetime.
So if one of those albums happened to be botched in any way, it counted for a lot. That was considered to be the case with his debut album, the self-titled “Bob Neuwirth,” released on David Geffen’s Asylum label in 1974. He had already achieved a level of fame some years prior to that first album, and it would be another 14 years after that before he went into the studio to make a second album, so it’s the only representation of him as a fairly young musical artist. And the general consensus, even for himself and his inner circle, was that it was more of a lost opportunity than blazing introduction. The fact that the record was an all-star affair only made the irony greater: It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say there might’ve been more big names joining Neuwirth in the studio than there were people who actually bought the subsequent LP.
But sometimes records, like people, become stubborn survivors and get a second chance in life. And now 50 years after it first came out, “Bob Neuwirth” is being reissued by Rhino as essentially a completely different album, with a stripped-down re-production — done by John Hanlon, one of Neil Young’s most frequent studio collaborators — that allows the songs to be heard without an obfuscating wall of sound for the first time. This new version was issued on vinyl and CD at the end of September, and it will go up on digital sites Oct. 31, at which time this inarguably improved version will replace the original for streaming. (Stream the old one now, if you dare, while you can.)
T Bone Burnett, one of his best friends and favored collaborators over the last 50 years, and music executive Paula Batson, Neuwirth’s life partner of the past 30 years, spoke with Variety about what this revision will represent in the singer-songwriter’s expanding legacy.
Burnett says he knew the debut album had been a thorn in Neuwirth’s side, but they never subsequently discussed it after its release in ’74. “I think he probably never wanted to bring it up with me again because we probably had a conversation about it 50 years ago. He probably wanted to just leave it alone. But at the time, I think it bothered Bobby a lot, that it was so unlike him. And I think it had been bugging him for 50 years, too. And I thought John did a really beautiful job of bringing it back into reality.”
“I didn’t like it at the time because I knew what Bob was capable of,” Burnett continues. “I heard that record and I felt it was unlistenable. Something about the surface of it and the overdone-ness of it was offputting. And I would hear him do a song sitting in a room and it would be extraordinarily moving. Like, the song ‘Just Because I’m Here (Don’t Mean I’m Home),’ when he would play that in a room, it would be emotional and powerful. I don’t think Thomas Jefferson Kaye, who produced it, trusted Bob as an artist. And I don’t think Bob trusted himself at that time, either, you know? I think he was looking to cover himself up with other people that he thought were better than he was. I don’t mean to psychoanalyze him, even though I think I’m kind of doing that, but it was something like that. There was a lack of of belief that created a strategy about the record that that I thought was offputting. I would’ve much preferred him just recording it in the living room where we played all the time. The new version has more to do with the way it felt being with Bobby, listening to him.”
The list of people who played or sang on the album is a who’s who of the early ‘70s, with photos from the recording sessions showing more people in the control room alone than God ever meant to fit into a studio. A partial credits list includes Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolige, the then-married couple who Neuwirth had just opened a tour for, plus Don Everly, Dusty Springfield, Cass Elliot, Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Richie Furay, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Booker T. Jones, Geoff Muldaur and Timothy B. (then billed as “Timmy”) Schmit. The fact that no records were kept of who actually sang or played on which songs may be indicative of the atmosphere at the time.
Says Batson, “I think when the record was done in 1974, Bob was certainly so gratified to have so many different people come and be part of the record, and then to have Kris there and his band be kind of the core of it. It was incredible, with all the horn players, and to have Don Everly and everybody else there — it was, I think, for Bob, a great occasion. But in looking back on it … it’s pre-sobriety, right?” (Neuwirth gave up drinking in the late ‘70s.) “And everybody was having a great big party. I guess they wanted people to imagine they were at the party.”
Before his death, Neuwirth had called up Hanlon and asked if he thought there was anything that could be done to give the album a sonic do-over. There wasn’t much more to the conversation than that, but Hanlon said he’d look into it. After his passing, it became more of a mission for the producer-engineer and Batson, even though Hanlon was not able to get access to the original master tapes and faced considerable challenges in stripping away the gloss to get at a real core.
The result, though, sounds like a brand new record — something that could as easily have been recorded as an Americana album today as something that existed a half-century ago. Hanlon has stated he believes Neuwirth has surely done his own listening session in heaven and heartily approves.
“At the point at which we said, ‘Oh, let’s talk to Hanlon about it,’ Bob really, really wanted to have it done, and he totally trusted Hanlon to do it,” Batson says. “Now, if he were around, he might have said to me, ‘Paula, you know, this is gonna be expensive to do this. It’s gonna cost too much. Should we do it?’ — all those things that artists have doubts about. But, did he really want it to happen? Absolutely. It was a dream of his in a way that it could be remixed and really convey artistically what he wanted to convey in the songs. Because the production was not really respectful of the quality of the songs. You felt like the kitchen sink was there, and everything got put in. It didn’t have the same kind of regard for Bob as an artist that we have. So this is a project that I just had to finish.”
Batson notes that the fact that Neuwirth did several covers on his debut was indicative of his attitude. “Bob was a true enthusiast of other people’s talent,” she says. “It wasn’t just generosity of spirit. He just loved other people making art and writing songs, and it gave him a lot of joy for other people to be doing their best work. That’s a rare quality, I think. Not all artists have that capacity to enjoy what other people are doing.” Ultimately, promo of any kind was far from his strong suit. “People knew that Bob moved in all these circles and knew so many different artists, and he did all that without drawing a lot of attention to himself. He was really good at promoting other people’s songwriting and their work, and he wasn’t so good about talking about his own.”
But she isn’t biased in thinking Neuwirth’s own songs had as much value as anyone else. Eric Clapton thinks so: He popped in at a Hollywood memorial concert for Neuwirth two years ago to sing his song “The Call” — and the legendary rocker just recorded it for a new album that came out on Friday.
There will likely be an even more expansive memorializing of Neuwirth, as Batson is working with producers to finance a documentary, “The Anonymous Hipster.” It will include interviews with his friends and those he influenced, along with incorporating performances from the 2022 tribute concert and rediscovered 1960s footage that Neuwirth himself shot. These old black-and-white films from Neuwirth were in the vault of “Don’t Look Back” director D.A. Pennebaker and have been newly digitized; excerpt appear in a new lyric video for the song “Kiss Money.” (Look for a shot of Salvador Dali, while he was visiting Andy Wahol’s studio, as an example of the kind of company Neuwirth kept.)
Beyond being a Dylan confidante in the mid-‘60s, Neuwirth became legendary for things like being the Joplin compadre that co-wrote “Mercedes Benz” with her and urged her to record “Me and Bobby McGee”… who discovered Patti Smith as a poet and urged her to become a musician as well… and who came back into Dylan’s circle as an instigator, host and opening act on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. But being prolific as a recording artist was always the last thing on his mind, even though Burnett, in liner notes for Neuwirth’s sophomore album in the late 1980s, said he was perhaps “the best pure songwriter of any of us.”
“He started up in Berkeley, when Lenny Bruce was up there, and he was part of that world,” Burnett now says. “It wasn’t about recording. In fact, the thing he spent by far the most time on was painting — he went up to Boston to be a painter, not to be a musician or a songwriter or any of that. Paula Batson, the keeper of the flame, has uncovered thousands of paintings he had done that nobody knew about. He would just go over every day and paint, but he wouldn’t show them. He never ‘pursued’ it. He never tried to be an art star.
“Bobby wasn’t a record-maker, really. He was an improvisational performance artist, which is sort of the opposite of recording. You know, when, when you are recording, you’re destroying whatever improvisation you’ve done by codifying it, by solidifying it. So it’s no longer an improvisation. … I’ve said he was like a mad Zen master who believed even writing a poem down destroyed it. And just his ability to marshal language around an idea and then sing it was like a magic trick he did. I’ll say this, he’s the greatest song improviser that probably has ever lived.”
His contributions certainly live on in Burnett’s music. Out on tour right now, Burnett’s nightly set lists include five songs he co-wrote with Neuwirth over the years.
His first meeting with Neuwirth was in late 1970, as he recalls. “Just after Janis Joplin died, Albert Grossman called and said, ‘The Full Tilt Boogie Band is looking for a singer or songwriter to keep going as a band. And we’d like you to come up and meet them.’ So they sent me a ticket and I went up” to Woodstock, where Burnett fell in with others who’d arrived at the scene, including Stephen Bruton, Bobby Charles, guitarist Amos Garrett, Rick Danko, possibly Todd Rundgren, and of course his future partner in musical crime.
“Bobby Neuwirth called himself ‘America’s guest’ because he never had a house. He always just was one of those young men whom the ravens feed, you know? We drank a lot that night, and probably smoked a lot of grass and both fell asleep about 4 in the morning” in adjoining beds. “The next morning I woke up, and there was a bottle of tequila that had about a third of a bottle left from the night before, and I looked over across the table toward Bobby. I saw him raise his head through the tequila bottle and he picked it up and he took a giant swig — and then he handed it to me, and I just had a sip and put it back on the table. And he said, ‘I didn’t see any bubbles.’ And I knew at that moment I had met a friend for life.”
Neuwirth was famous for his cutting wit in his early days — and for being much warmer later in life. Some said in the ‘60s that he almost seemed to be in a contest with Dylan for who had the sharpest tongue.
But, says Burnett (who only came to know both of them in the early ‘70s), “I don’t think he was competing with Dylan. I think Bob was aspiring to be as witty as Neuwirth was — that’s the way I would put it. And I don’t think Bobby was as much cynical as he was incredibly knowledgeable. He had some kind of wild wisdom way beyond his years. And he saw through things and if somebody came in and made a fool of himself, he would basically just say, ‘Stop making a fool of yourself right now.’ He held himself and everyone else to the highest standard of integrity.
“He certainly grew warmer as he got older. But he was hard early on in his life, and he had a lot of tragedy in his life; he had several people die on him and things like that. So there was a dark part of Bob, to be sure. But he was also incredibly loving, incredibly supportive, incredibly encouraging, incredibly thoughtful — always thinking of other people and not himself.”
Being Neuwirth’s foremost champion is “a dirty, thankless job, but somebody has to do it, and he wouldn’t do it,” Burnett says. “That would be way beneath the standards he held. But, you know, we also wrote many, many songs together. Some of my best songs we wrote together. So, I don’t want to just move on without recognizing him, and recognizing his contribution to my life. I’m deeply grateful to him on a number of fronts. He was a great teacher, too.”
What were his lessons? “Well, I think he taught… what’s the opposite of self-delusion? Whatever that is. He really tried to be real with himself, and he encouraged all the rest of us to be real with ourselves about our shortcomings and about our human frailty, and not to get full of ourselves. You know, he worked early on with Jim Morrison, and he just saw what happened to people in the public eye, how people would be overtaken by the intense gaze of the mass audience. He viewed celebrity as a curse, which I do too. I agree with him about that, intellectually and experientially.”
Looking back on Neuwirth’s brief fling with the major-label machinery that was his debut album, Burnett says, Tthat was a time in Hollywood in the early ‘70s when the Eagles became huge mass-culture stars, and I think Linda Ronstadt sort of led the way from the folk music to the mass culture. And I think Thomas Jefferson Kaye was trying to create a record that could be mass-culture, and Neuwirth was never about that at all. You know, I’ve never been interested mass culture, either, because I feel it’s so manipulated. But Bobby was even less interested, you know?”
Burnett brings up a quote that Dylan had about Neuwirth in his book “Chronicles: Volume One.” Wrote Dylan: “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth … If ever there was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.”
“When Bob said he was a character like Neal Cassady, there’s a lot of truth in that,” Burnett says. “He was a cultural force who didn’t put himself forward. He was happy to be a cultural force in his immediate life.”
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