Scarlet Rivera on Dylan Dreams: The Fiddler On Her Roots

“The fiddler, he now steps to the road,” Bob Dylan wrote once upon a time, when a girl then called Donna Shea – later Scarlet Rivera – was still a teenager in Joliet, Illinois. She came to New York City to study at the Mannes School of Music, chose a new name for herself, and was walking along 13th Street in Greenwich Village one day when Dylan spotted her from his passing car. She was carrying her violin case; he wanted to know if she could play.

Scarlet Rivera showed him – and soon showed the whole world – that yes, she could. She joined Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue, and has performed his songs ever since, amidst a career shaped by many other integral elements from social and environmental activism to Celtic music.

The fiddler, she’s now stepped to the road this summer for a tour of Italy. I was glad to be able to speak to her on an evening off. Me, I was mired in the rain in Woodstock, New York on a working day; Rivera was somewhere between Lake Como and Milan, having just come back from an evening gelato in the warm air.

Her first record on which she takes lead vocals, as well as playing, is now available digitally; it’s an EP entitled Dylan Dreams.

“I chose songs that are very spiritual to me,” Rivera explains. The first track to be released from Dylan Dreams is 'Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)' (1978), from Dylan’s so-called “gospel period.” News flash: it began long before this, and, in my opinion, still hasn’t ended.

“He’s not talking about a ‘man,’ when he sings ‘Señor', he’s talking about the man, the Lord,” says Rivera. “That line: ‘Do you know where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon’ – it’s where we are right now. People are taking the planet down a dangerous road. The ‘trainload of fools’ are bringing us all along.”

REALLY MEANINGFUL
Scarlet Rivera has been singing ‘Señor' in live performances for a couple of years, now, and her rich, earthy voice brings the song inside out, straight from the heart. Whoever told her she sounds like a contralto cross between Johnny Cash and Tom Waits, as she laughingly admits to me, was right on the money.

The lion’s share of the other Dylan songs on Rivera’s record come from the late 1980s and the recording sessions for his 1989 album Oh Mercy. 'Series of Dreams', an Oh Mercy outtake that Dylan revised repeatedly and memorably shaped into a 1991 music video, is something of a governing spirit for Rivera’s album.

“The video, it’s a reviewing of his life – very autobiographical,” she reflects. “Yet it’s also concise, the images he chose and the people he put in it. He hand-wrote in the frames, like a private message.”

The video, chiefly put together from archival footage with a few contemporary glimpses of Dylan in a hoodie in a cityscape, begins with Dylan applying his Rolling Thunder whiteface makeup in 1975. We see him drinking from a water bottle, the focus on his eyes spectacularly intense; riding on a train somewhere in the United Kingdom in 1966; as a boy and as a man. Rivera is in the video as “the fiddler she now steps to the road” – Dylan specifically revised the line to suit – in a montage of herself on stage during Rolling Thunder blurring into a sign for Highway 61, and then into Dylan himself.

Rivera was drawn to 'Born In Time', another Oh Mercy outtake. “I just love the beginning, that ‘lonely night’ and ‘pale blue light’,” she says. It is also a song that centres on the idea of dreams and dreaming, the leading reason she chose it for this record. We talk for a moment about his many revisions to this song.

“Some of the lines are more significant for me than others,” she observes. “That ‘foggy web of destiny’ at the end, that’s really meaningful to me, personally.”

The last of her Dylan covers is 'Where Teardrops Fall', one that did make it onto Oh Mercy. It, too, is a dream-song, a celebration of the past and memory, floating into a possible, gentle future.

“It’s a what-woulda-coulda-been song,” says Rivera. “The holding up a toast if we meet, in love and kindness. That line, ‘You know the song in my heart', is full of a very personal feeling.”

BEAUTIFUL TRIBUTE

Of the songs Rivera performed on Rolling Thunder and on Dylan’s studio album Desire (1976), she’s only performed 'O Sister' recently, and includes none on Dylan Dreams.

“I didn’t choose to sing it, even then,” she recalls. "I just sang harmony.” Instead, she closes her record with two compositions of her own, 'Sacred Wheel' and 'Dust Bowl'. The first she wrote, she explains, as ”A celebration of the wheel of life, the directions north, south, east and west, with a centre – just as the Native Americans saw it. It’s more than a wheel of fortune; it’s destiny.”

The second is a homage to Woody Guthrie. It’s also, she says, “A cautionary tale, about where we’re going. The Dust Bowl was the first great environmental disaster in America. Farmers didn’t know better, and so many lives were torn away – ‘scattered dreams, precious memories, they were blown away'.”

Her voice trails off for a moment, and then she tells me about the olive trees of Puglia, Italy. A bacteria in the mouth of a bug, brought in most likely on an imported ornamental plant, began killing groves of ancient olives.

“It took hold and was very invasive,” she informs me. "Farmers were told to cut down the trees, but they couldn’t bear to – their trees that still looked so healthy. And now they have died.”

Rivera is on the board of the Hollywood/Los Angeles Beautification Team, active since 1992 to help communities citywide, among other things, become greener. “We pull up pavement at schools, and help put in trees and grass,” she says happily. "We plant thousands of trees every year in LA."

Listening to her sing 'Dust Bowl' as Dylan Dreams ends, I think how appropriate it is as an ending to the record: a cautionary tale indeed, that, alas, keeps on – and on – needing to be told, as humans just become more and more careless of our Earth. Woody Guthrie and his social consciousness is, in a way, where Bob Dylan’s own dreams began – with Woody and, yes, with Little Richard and Elvis too.

Dylan Dreams, I thought: such a multivalent title Rivera has chosen. They are Dylan’s dreams in the sense of being covers of his own dreaming songs; they are the singer’s own interpretations – and therefore her own dream-versions – of his compositions; and there’s also a verb lurking there. Dylan dreams, indeed he does, and he shares those dreams with us all.

This is the most powerful aspect of Dylan Dreams, and a beautiful tribute from Rivera to the man who clearly remains her favourite bandleader, even as she now tours the world with her own.

• Dylan Dreams by Scarlet Rivera is out now.