Bobby Neuwirth: The Godfather of "hey, man..."

Dylan and Neuwirth in “Don’t Look Back”

When he died today at age 82, reportedly after a years-long battle with COPD, someone wrote on Facebook that he had the world’s greatest rolodex.  It is true that he knew everyone in the world worth knowing, but he didn’t keep their names and numbers in a rolodex but rather in a fat little address book.  I know this, because I snuck it out of his coat pocket one morning in my room at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood where he was crashing after a long night of hanging out and singing and playing guitars had ended with Neuwirth on the couch and Geoff Muldaur and Kinky Friedman draped over a couple of armchairs.  

The address book I held in my hands was like the Who’s Who of Hip:  there was Jack Nicholson up on Mulholland Drive next door to Marlon Brando and Helena Kallianiotes who with flashing eyes and a nasty tongue played a neurotic hitchhiker in “Five Easy Pieces” alongside Toni Basil; every Beatle but one – George Harrison had somehow escaped Bobby’s grasp; all four of CSNY; the Fillmore’s Bill Graham; the singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson; the painter Larry Poons; at least one exceedingly wealthy princess and a down-on-her-luck baroness; the musical residents of at least four major streets in Laurel Canyon including Michelle Phillips, Joni Mitchell and Roger McGuinn; several dead rock stars including Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix; more than one prima ballerina he had dated; and of course his friend and musical compatriot Bob Dylan, to whom he passed along the whole “hey, man” ethos of hip when he hit Greenwich Village in the early 60’s.

Starting out in Boston hanging out in the folk and jazz scene of the early 60’s, Neuwirth became an accomplished musician, singer, songwriter, producer and painter, but the thing he was known for through it all was being a scene-maker.  If there is one thing I learned from him over the decades we were friends, it was that you couldn’t count on serendipity in your life.  You had to make things happen.  I can’t count the number of times my phone would ring and I would hear his distinctive cigarette and coffee growl, “hey, man…what’s happening?”  It seemed as if he began every sentence with “hey, man,” and he spoke a rapid hip patois you had to listen to closely or you missed half of what came out of his mouth in a tsunami of references to people and stuff you’d never heard of, but you knew that you should, and you would if you stuck with Bobby, because he knew people and he made things happen.

Bobby made a lot of things happen during his lifetime.  He was Dylan’s road manager during his 1965 tour of England and appeared in practically every scene in the film of the tour, “Don’t Look Back,” except the ones where Dylan was alone on stage.  He wrote “Mercedes Benz” with Janis Joplin in a booth at the restaurant El Quijote in the Hotel Chelsea and convinced her to cover “Me and Bobby McGee” just before her death.  He was the glue that put together Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” during late night jams at the Bitter End in the summer of 1975 and became the defacto stage manager and one of the performers on the tour along with Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the bassist Rob Stoner and Roger McGuinn.  He made several albums, including “Bob Neuwirth” in 1974 and “Havana Midnight” in 1999, which if you can find it, you should listen to.  It’s magical.

I first met him when he was the self-appointed Mayor of the Sunset Marquis Hotel.  He didn’t have a house or an apartment or a car.  He lived at the Sunset Marquis and rented cars, it turned out.  If anyone interesting checked into the hotel, the front desk notified him, and he would immediately knock on the door of their suite and introduce himself, and in the case of my room, and charging it to my expense account, pick up the phone and place an order with Turner’s Liquor, up on the corner of Sunset Boulevard. 

Neuwirth seemed to know who I was before we met.  I lived at 124 West Houston Street where Dylan had a ground floor studio and I had met Dylan in the building, and somehow Dylan had mentioned me to Neuwirth, and…you get the picture.  That’s how he met people and networked, as they would put it today.  Back then, it was called hanging out.  This guy would introduce you to that girl who was living with a painter who knew the owner of the Kettle of Fish on McDougal Street where Patti Smith hung who would introduce you to a Warhol superstar who knew Al Kooper who played organ on “Like a Rolling Stone” with Dylan who lived on McDougal Street and had a studio at…124 W. Houston Street.  Get it? 

Neuwirth was right in the middle of it all.  I’ll never forget the morning at the Sunset Marquis when he banged on my door at 6 a.m. asking if I was sober enough to drive Kinky to the airport because he had a gig he had to make on Long Island that night and if he didn’t make it his manager was going to fire him.  We went down to Kinky’s room, Neuwirth hauled him out of bed and we threw him in the shower and dressed him and I stuck him in the back seat of my rented Pinto and got him to LAX minutes before his flight left, and we’ve been friends ever since…because of Bobby.  The next day Neuwirth got me to drive him down to the South Bay to visit Iggy Pop who was laid up in a hospital after an encounter with some substances that didn’t agree with him, but first we had to stop off at a Jack in the Box to get him some 29 cent tacos ‘cause he couldn’t hold down any of the hospital food and he was starving, man…

Neuwirth called me in New York one night and said I should drop by the Bitter End because he and Dylan and some people were jamming, so I did – nearly every night for the next couple of weeks.  Bobby and a bunch of them would end up at my loft at 5 a.m. where I would fix breakfast and they would keep strumming and singing and trading stories.  One morning Neuwirth said Bob was thinking about renting a couple of motor homes and doing a tour of small venues, nothing big, just hit the road and see what happened. 

They did, of course, and the rest is history as they say.  The following December, I came home from an out of town assignment and found my answering machine (remember those?) blinking madly with about seven messages from Neuwirth…Hey, man, where are you?  I left two backstage passes for you at the ticket booth at the Garden, we’re playing tonight…Hey, man, where were you?  Everybody was there tonight, man! 

His messages were interspersed with ones from friends who had been at the Rolling Thunder concert reporting that Neuwirth had told a story about the night he and I wrote a song in Andrea de Portago’s upper east side apartment and he sang it, the messages said. 

Then the phone rang, and it was Bobby with “Hey, man, what’s happening?”  I told him what was happening was that I was going to Norman Mailer’s Christmas party that night, and Bobby immediately asked if he could tag along because he had done the sound on one of Norman’s underground movies called “Wild 90.”  I told him I’d have to call Mailer and ask him, so I did, and Mailer said, “Neuwirth?  I haven’t seen him since he fucked up the sound on ‘Wild 90’.  Sure.  Bring him.”

I called Neuwirth back and told him Mailer said yeah, and Bobby said, “Hey, man…Bob wants to come.  He’s never met Norman.” 

So I called Mailer back and asked if Dylan could come to the party, too, and Mailer said, “sure, I’ve never met him.  Bring him.”

Next thing I knew the doorbell rang and I went over to the window to throw the keys down to Neuwirth and saw parked on Houston Street in front of the loft was one of the motor homes from the Rolling Thunder tour.  I went downstairs and the door to the motor home opened and I stepped in with my girlfriend to find the entire tour there.  Everyone – Baez, Mitchell, McGuinn, Dylan, Mick Ronson, several others.  I asked Neuwirth what the hell was going on, and he said, “Hey, man…everybody wanted to come.”

So we went, the whole tour drove over to Brooklyn Heights to Mailer’s house, and when we walked in, I introduced Bob to Norman.  Across the room was Muhammed Ali and Jackie Onassis and Joe Heller and Gay Talese and the rest of the literary half of hip New York City.

It’s a much longer story, and you can find the rest of it on the Village Voice website where I wrote about that night on the occasion of Dylan getting the Nobel Prize in Literature.  https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/11/02/when-bob-dylan-practiced-downstairs/

But what I remember best about the whole thing was hitting “play” on that answering machine and listening, for the umpteenth time, to the sound of Bobby Neuwirth’s voice growling, “Hey, man…what’s happening?” 

It was the one night in my life that I was the one who knew what was happening and I could do for him what he had done for me dozens of times – take him to the red hot center of the scene and introduce him around and watch him make connections I knew would end up in that address book of his alongside hundreds of others.

What a life he had, and what a guy to have lived it.  So long, Bobby.  There was only one of you, but the thousands of people whose lives you touched will never forget you.