ABSTRACT
When Bob Dylan played the Philharmonic Hall in 1964, he joked that he had his Bob Dylan mask on—he was masquerading. More than ten years after that concert, a period during which he helped rewrite the rules of popular music and make rock something serious, or something for a serious audience, he actually added a few nonmetaphorical masks to the ones he had been wearing since the beginning of his career. In 1975, he sometimes had his Richard Nixon mask on, but also a whiteface mask that made him look like a hybrid between a French mime and an American minstrel (there is a hidden tradition of whiteface minstrelsy that goes deep to the heart of American vernacular culture: Strausbaugh 2007, Byrne 2004). Dylan probably played both parts, as one of the main characters of his most theatrical tour, where he took the role of a mysterious Renaldo and let somebody else play “Bob Dylan.” This was one of the many puzzling images that could be found in Dylan’s four-hour debut as a movie director, Renaldo and Clara (Lee 2004a, 89–116), for many an extravagant and redundant exercise in improvisation and intellectualistic cinema that hides a brilliant rockumentary about Dylan’s tour of New England in the fall of 1975, the Rolling Thunder Revue.
