Mike Evans, Bob Dylan's "Big Police," Talks Security and Food Fights on Rolling Thunder

"I go upstairs, and it is like Animal House…"

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In Renaldo and Clara, Bob Dylan’s movie documenting the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, Mike Evans’ team gets credited as “Big Police.” Promoter Barry Imhoff gave them the “Masterpiece”-nodding nickname due to their role overseeing security for Dylan and the musicians. You can see Evans himself guiding-slash-shielding Dylan in the above still from Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder film.

Protecting Dylan from biting fans (we’ll get there) was only part of his job though. He also oversaw advance show promotion, making sure the word got out locally often with just a few days notice, and various other tour logistics, making sure everyone was in the right place at the right time. With such a large and ragtag crew, that was no small feat.

He’s stayed in the music business. These days he’s the President of Live Nation Arenas, where he oversees shows in much bigger venues than some of the tiny rooms Rolling Thunder popped up in. We recently talked about all the work involved in keeping Rolling Thunder rolling.

I live in Burlington, Vermont, and I was alarmed to hear that a Dylan fan bit you on the Rolling Thunder stop here.

Every summer, poolside with cocktails, inevitably after the second or third, somebody will say, "How come that one place on your wrist doesn't tan?" I say, "Well, I was bitten by a savage animal."

Vermont, man, we're supposed to be like hippies…

I know there's one meat eater up there.

It was really an inadvertent thing. Bob was walking in front of me, and he had these big feathers in his hat. The guy reaches out for the feather. I slowly just grabbed his hand and pushed it back. It was just a real gentle, "No, no, no." Like you'd say to a two-year-old: "Don't touch that." Then all of a sudden this guy has clamped onto my wrist. He actually got a chunk of skin. Besides being painful, it's just the way it healed. It just kept getting infected. Just cleaning it out and having it rewrapped and everything else was nuts.

I wasn't even alive then but I still feel obligated to apologize on behalf of Burlington.

I've never held it against the state of Vermont.

Let's rewind to happier times, before you got bit. Barry Imhoff hires you for the tour. What are you hired to do exactly?

Like a lot of things on the Rolling Thunder tour, everything was moving at such an intense speed and a lot of it hadn't been done before. What Barry wanted me to do was threefold.

One, the original intent of the Revue was that we would just show up in town and do a show. That's where the name Revue came from. It wasn't like, go on sale and six months later you have a concert. We would just show up.

I needed box office people. What those people would do is they roll into town and start handing out handbills. The way they used to do with the circus, saying "The circus is coming to town." In this case it was the Rolling Thunder Revue. The plan was to sell usually the day before, so that you were dealing with local people. Get the tickets in the hands of the fans. Scalpers weren't getting hold of them,

The next tranche of three were to provide one very close body person to Bob. You needed someone that we could coordinate with. “Where is Bob?” “What's needed?” Things like that.

Then the other group, I would have a guy that basically was the sheep-herder to would handle the band, whether you call them Guam or the musicians or whatever. If we said, "This bus is leaving at four o'clock," making sure they're there at four o'clock. Which was a yeoman's task with this group. You don't have cell phones. We had walkie-talkies, but people would get spread out.

Then I would be the point person. I would take my marching orders, if you will, from Barry and Lou Kemp. I quickly learned that Bobby Neuwirth was going to be my man. Bobby had one foot on the business side and one foot on the artists side. If we're in a hotel and there's a ten o'clock curfew, and these guys decide they want to rehearse at 2:00 AM, Bobby is the one that I could say, "Make sure they stay in this room. Don't be walking the halls with alcohol, because if I can't keep the hotel manager in line, we're going to have police here." Neuwirth and I became close. Real close. I wish we could have maintained the relationship. I have great admiration for Bobby Neuwirth.

Then it would be doing a lot of advance work too. It’s so simple today, because you're playing venues that have been there, and it's basically computerized. But we were playing unconventional rooms. On the day of the show, I was more focused on what the next two or three shows were than I was on the show in front of me.

Imhoff called my group the Big Police, after the lyrics in Bob's song “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” That's the way we were listed in Renaldo and Clara.

Were you doing personal security too, if you're the guy who's trying to stop people from stealing his feathers?

Well, it's like the show's over, Bob's going to the Winnebago. Andy [Bielanski] and Gary [Shafner] were most likely walking in front of him. I'm just walking behind him to make sure. I'm like a mother hen in a lot of ways.

I think part of the problem [in Burlington] was us being at, again, an unconventional venue. Most venues, Bob would have entered through his vehicle underground and things like that. But he had to walk through a parking lot.

I imagine that also came into play with all the filming for the movie. It's not like Dylan is hiding away for 22 hours a day, other than the show. He's out on some boat in Cape Cod or visiting a Native American reservation. He's going all over the place during the days.

The plan was, in the mornings, while everyone is still sleeping, Barry, Lou, the film people, we would be in the lounge. We would be talking about, "What's going to go on today?" Neuwirth the day before might have said, "Hey, let's take everybody to Jack Kerouac's grave."

I would then grab my guy with Dylan and say, "All right, you need to be back by X. I don't care what time you get there, how much time you spend there, but you need to be on your way by X.” We'd make the film crew aware of that too, but you know what film crews are like. You tell them from ten to eleven to do this, and at ten o'clock the guys are all on break. Or they would get there and say, "It’s cloudy. We want to wait an hour for the sun to be out."

You can make all the schedules you want, but there was so many impromptu things. You could be driving down the road, and Neuwirth would say, "Oh, look at that diner. That'd be cool to shoot." They're going to pull over and do it. I can't control the day when they're filming, but I can control what time they need to be back.

Do you remember the first time you met Dylan himself?

I was in New York. We picked up two Cadillac DeVilles. It was the last year the Cadillac DeVille was going to have a convertible.

These are for what? To drive around on the tour?

Yes. I remember Andy and I drove one from Quebec to Toronto. I think Lou drove one of them. Memory is light. I don't remember driving one at the beginning, because I had rented a Granada at Hertz that had 10 miles on it. When I turned it in, it was 22,000 miles.

When we came back [from picking up the Cadillacs], Bob was standing out in front of the Chelsea Hotel. We all stood around there. Neuwirth goes, "Hey, this is Mike." He knew who I was.

I would talk to him every day. He might talk to me every fourth day. Usually that was, "Got it. All right."

Can you just describe what your job was on a typical day,? You get up before everyone else and you're meeting with Louie and stuff. What happens next?

We have a time where everybody's supposed to be at the hall, usually that would be about 3:00. We always made sure the stage and everything was set up by three o'clock, so we could do rehearsals and stuff. Having so many musicians, having so many people come in and out, changing the set list constantly. I would be cognizant if Bob was off doing filming. We had CB radios that we would communicate with.

I would then probably work out of my hotel room, then go over to the hall, mainly because there'll be lunch there. Then at about one o'clock, start working on any issues where we're going to be playing the next day. Three o'clock, the artists start rolling in. Then you get a report that Artist A decided to go to this amusement park 50 miles away. There's always something.

Then there would be one or two things. If we're staying in that town that night, we were big on setting up lounges. Rooms where the artists could be. We'd have something set up where these guys and gals could sit around and jam and everything else. We had an unwritten rule: You could bring one guest from the outside. If that guest got out of line, we'd deal with it.

When people came down, we would have a luggage call. We actually had Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, his partner, handling it. They took the luggage situation seriously. They would check and make sure everybody had dropped off their luggage. Inevitably somebody would have left it in their room, so we'd go get a master key and deal with that.

That's funny. Ronee Blakley told me that Allen and Peter were moving luggage. I didn't realize they were so organized about it.

Oh yes. They took it seriously. They were a big help. Particularly Peter. Allen was Allen, but Peter was the nuts and bolts and the sweat.

You get the luggage, you're heading to the venue.

We get to the gig, they're doing their sound checks. If it was a normal venue, I would know the people. If not, I'm getting to know the people. Re-coordinating when the doors open, who gets to go where, what the passes mean. We had a great pass system all coordinated around different colored buttons. I had to make sure, all right, T Bone Burnett is wearing the button from three shows ago. Tell him it’s orange tonight.

The problem was, of course, these guys were always roaming around. They'd go out in the house and want to watch other sets. The touring people themselves all had a laminate. Each day we probably had to make three or four laminates because oh, Joni Mitchell is here tonight and her manager and her agents need credentials. That was a major deal to do that kind of thing, to pack up and move lamination materials and everything on the road.

Like your own little traveling Kinkos.

Yeah. All goes in the road case.

Then the show would start. We didn't really have issues with people rushing; this isn't a show where people are going to rush the stage. So I'm now figuring out, how do we get out of here? If we're going to the hotel, do we need food, or are we getting on the bus and traveling?

Where are you during the show itself? Are you backstage working? Are you side-stage watching?

I'm backstage for sure. Walk out in the house every so often. I will be out front probably, just out of habit, for the main artist, Bob. “Hey, I really like when Bob Neuwirth and Dylan do ‘When I Paint my Masterpiece,’ I want to go watch that." The band is going to do 30 minutes of instrumental stuff? That's a good time to go call my wife.

I wanted to ask just about a couple of specific shows. The one where they played the prison, the Hurricane Carter thing, that must have been different than your typical gig. Speaking of nontraditional venues.

It was very different. There was actually a great picture when we're all in the room talking with Hurricane Carter. We were in New York, getting ready for the Garden show. This [prison show] was a side deal.

Evans in upper right above Ginsberg

I remember going in the Winnebago, just a couple of us. Got to Rahway [State Prison], and there wasn't a whole lot for me to do. I remember the show going over dead. It was deader than a doornail. The inmates were just sitting there. Joan [Baez], on her own, got up and started into a whole Motown thing. She did three or four Motown songs and it just changed the whole attitude. People got up and danced.

Even though they weren't supposed to leave the stage, she jumps down in front of the stage. It was very cool to see.

Did it stay that energetic for the rest of the show after Baez’s Motown bit?

Yes, it changed the thing. People got into it after that.

The other one that really struck me was that we did one on an Indian reservation outside of Buffalo. They were filming there. That one was intense.

How so?

There were no issues with the state prison. The one at the reservation, there was a resentment for us being there. It came through very apparent. I was going around [telling] my guys, "We have some issues here." It was fine, we got out, but it was pretty intense.

Just in terms of security? At a prison, you also have a bunch of security guards. I imagine you don't at a reservation.

We had no security issues at the prison—nor would there been anything we could have done about it.

I want to ask you about a couple other side excursions, I think these are all the next year, 1976. Bob took a trip to Disney World?

Yeah, we rehearsed at the Biltmore over in Clearwater [Florida]. Our first gig, I believe we did Lakeland, and then went to Orlando [a couple other gigs in between, but close enough].

Disney World was still relatively new. I grew up in Anaheim, California and just about every parent I knew worked at Disneyland. We got there and we pull into the Contemporary Hotel. There's a couple Disney people that are, I don't want to say hassling us, but giving us rules. Again, we don't listen to rules—we make the rules. They said, "There's too much luggage on that luggage cart." I said, "No there isn't." I start pushing it down the hall, and I snap off one of the sprinkler heads. Mea culpa.

The next day, Bob and the kids went to Disney World. I don't know if Andy went with him or not. I believe he did.

I've talked to a number of the musicians and what they tell me is that the music on ‘76 was great, but the vibe, particularly from Dylan himself, was worse. Was that your experience as well?

We got through the fall tour and it was pretty much the way it had been envisioned, a traveling revue. When you get to the spring tour, it is much more corporate. All traditional venues, hard sales.

Is that due to money? The fall tour had lost a bunch of money and it needed to be made up?

We sat around talking about finances much more [in ‘76]. I don't know in the first leg if anyone ever said, "Oh, what does that cost?" The attitude was just, do it. On the second leg it was, "What's it going to cost, and how much do we need to do it?" That pretty much tells you everything.

You think of '75, it's this enormous crew of people playing these tiny places. An idyllic setup, but I can't imagine the money required to lug all those people around.

You can sell out Plymouth Auditorium twice in a night and you're not going to pay your catering bill. The attitude was to go bigger in the South. Quite frankly, at that point in time, it's not the new South we have now. It was the old South. The whole concept of Rolling Thunder Revue didn't mean as much as it did up north.

It seems like it worked out backwards, where in New England where he could easily fill enormous venues, they're playing these tiny spaces. Then in the South where they couldn't fill enormous venues, they try to play them.

Plus, we were doing things like playing Mobile, two shows on a Tuesday. It looks silly now.

We still had our sidebars. There wasn't a city that we didn't have something going on. We're near Montgomery, so half the team wants to go out and see Hank Williams' grave.

Do you remember any other particular side excursions of the many?

There's one that's taken on a legend of itself. When we went from New Orleans, we had a couple days off before we had to be in Houston. Bobby Neuwirth says, "Hey, we're going to go to Bobby Charles' place out in the swamp." I look at him. He goes, "Bobby Charles! ‘See Ya Later Alligator.’" I said, "All right, what's it going to entail? Do we need rooms?" He goes, "Naw, we're just going to hang out there. Everybody’ll be fine." We get out there, it's been pouring rain for days, buses are sinking up to the tires in mud. Bobby had poached an alligator, and they had this big barbecue going on.

I'm a diehard horse racing enthusiast and participant. At one point I said, "We're right near Evangeline Downs. I'm going to go to the track for a few hours." I had it in my mind at this time that I'm going to hit every track that there is. I'm getting ready to go and Neuwirth comes over. "Hey, I hear you're going to the track. I want to go." Then all of a sudden I realize we have seven or eight people, T-Bone Burnett and a bunch of people. We are covered in mud. There is no way we are going to get this mud off us from being at Bobby Charles’.

We get to the track, and it was like 50 cents to get in the grandstand and 75 cents to get in the clubhouse. I said, "Let's go in the clubhouse." They go, "Oh no, you need a sport coat. We've got some right here you can rent for 25 cents." All the stuff that had been left in lost and found. These guys went nuts. Being in Louisiana, they were all gold, purple. Everybody's trying to find the wildest ones. T Bone, I remember wearing one where the arms on the coat stop at his elbow. Everyone in the track was looking at him.

Was Dylan along for this one?

I have said in the past that he was. I don't believe he was. But I don't know why I would have cared about going in the clubhouse if I didn't have Bob with me…

I know I had Neuwirth. Sometimes in my old age, I confuse Neuwirth with Bob because Neuwirth was constantly in my presence. He would tell me stories about Bob from the early days. I think sometimes they became my stories.

My sense from talking to these musicians that, you see Neuwirth on stage, but that was a fairly small part of his actual role on that tour.

Oh, absolutely, without a doubt. Totally unappreciated. I would never go to Steve Soles and say, "You can't do this." But I would go to Bobby Neuwirth and say, "You got to get Soles to stop smoking in this non-smoking area." Something along those lines, right?

I got along with the band real well, because I don't believe in picking fights for the sake of picking fights. If it says no smoking, let's find a place to smoke. I said, "Anything you need, I will go and try and make happen. If you screw up, I will defend you to the hilt, but if I tell you that it's wrong to do something and you go ahead and do it, you may be on your own." It worked. I never had any problems with those things.

We did this beach thing once on the second leg. We were on a beach and they wanted to build a fire. Of course there were a million signs, "No fires on the beach,” but I knew a fire was going to be built. I'm saying to somebody within [Dylan’s] presence, "At some point, the authorities are going to be coming. I'll deal with it, but while I'm dealing with it, it needs to stop."

They didn't chafe at you having to be the authority figure?

No. That's why I always felt it was important to get Neuwirth on my side.

One other thing related to '76 I wanted to ask about. I read there was a tightrope walking instructor on the road?

Oh, yes. We'd have to set it up every stop. Bob didn't necessarily use it every stop.

You're setting up a literal tightrope every stop?

Yes, what's the word. A slackline.

So low to the ground? This is not 20 feet in the air?

Oh, no, it was not high wire by any stretch of imagination. It has those two bases that look like an X. She was Bob's slack wire instructor.

I can see it for sure in New Orleans. I remember we stayed in a hotel that the windows didn't open. I had some issues there because some of the musicians tried to kick the windows out. I'd spend a lot of time talking with hotel people.

I was just watching Dont Look Back for the first time in years, and one of the first scenes is Albert Grossman defending Bob from some irate hotel manager. Same thing happening 10 years later.

When the bus pulled up to the hotel in New Orleans, there was a young lady waiting for us outside, prim and proper. Somebody says, "Mike, she wants to talk to you." She says, "I have been told by the manager I need to collect a $1,000 deposit." I said, "We don't do that. What's this all about?" “Well, we had, Aerosmith in here last week and they caused a lot of damage.” I said, "Don't worry about it. These people are not like that."

To make matters worse, I had my wife fly in, so she was standing there waiting for me. I said, "Look, on the top of this tower, there's a breakfast thing for just the band. Why don't you go on up there and let me sort this out."

I'm standing there, and my friend Andy, who's with Bob, comes down. He says, "I couldn't take it. You can send me home. I don't care. I'm tired of this." I go, "What's the matter?" He goes, "It's all Neuwirth's fault!" "What's Neuwirth's fault?" “We were sitting there talking and he said, ‘I'm going to smash pancakes in your face.’ I told him, ‘Go ahead, I dare you,’ and he smashed the pancakes in my face.”

All of a sudden the elevator door opens. My wife goes, "You better get up there."

Oh, no.

I go upstairs, and it is like Animal House. The tables are turned over. Pitchers of orange juice are being sent like mortar shells over the top. Neuwirth is leading one charge. Food is flying around. I can't say Bob was involved because I don't think he went up, but everybody else was there in the food fight. Baez was there. Animal House hadn't come out yet. I hate this word: I was triggered when I saw Animal House. That was what it looked like. Just this over the over-the-top food fight.

I immediately said to the hotel, “We'll pay the cleaning bill.” She goes— now she's shaking—"I need the deposit." I said, "No deposit. I don't have money. Later on when people come here, we'll sort it out. Just get whatever we need for damages."

Later on, Joan had Gabriel, her son. I think it was his fifth birthday. Everybody's sleeping because they'd been driving all night, but at one o'clock Joan decides she's going to have a birthday party for Gabe in her room.

So all these these knuckleheads get up and they take a shower and they wrap a towel around themselves and they leave the room to go to Joan's room to see Gabe. Inevitably it's like a boys' locker room, right? Somebody rips somebody's towel off, and they're running up and down the halls. Other guests are calling the hotel.

I get the call in my room. She goes, "Mr. Evans…" I said, "The money will be there in five minutes."

You mentioned in an old Telegraph interview that once he talked to you about the Minnesota Vikings?

That was at The Last Waltz, seeing Mr. Chatty. That was weird. Not weird, but just interesting.

What was your role at The Last Waltz?

Bill Graham called and he said he was doing this thing over Thanksgiving. He wanted me to deal with the logistics. His problem was there was not much backstage at Winterland. Then you add in Scorsese coming with all the film equipment and stuff like that.

The idea was to use the Miyako Hotel up the street from the old Winterland as the backstage. Down at Winterland, there was no food, no beverage, no bar, no hang. You stayed up at the Miyako until it was like a half an hour before you're supposed to be on stage. We had limo shuttles going back and forth. You were allowed to take your spouse and one person. You want that to be your agent? Your guitar tech? Your manager? If Ringo Starr was going down, I had to make sure that ten people didn't get in the limo.

So the Miyako is where all the debauchery happens? All those stories about the show runs super long, Neil Young does so much cocaine that Scorsese has to edit it out of the shot. That wasn't actually at Winterland?

For the most part.

And you said Dylan was more, for whatever reason, chatty…

Yes. After the show, somebody asked me, "Can you fly down on Bob's plane?" Not his private plane—we flew commercial down to LA. We went to the airport together, we hung around. I was on the phone. He starts talking about the Vikings and everything else. He is just chatting. "Hey, look at that sunset." It just was not anything profound.

Moving up to the present, have you booked him during your current role at Live Nation?

I've been a landlord. I have promoted [his] shows. We opened the Met here in Philadelphia with him. I went down. He's got a whole different circle around him. You don't necessarily get in that circle. I don't. I see T Bone Burnett every once in a while in weird places. That's about it. Every once in a while, something would happen with Neuwirth.

Did any of the skills you learned or honed during that crazy Rolling Thunder run help you in your later roles?

It's an interesting question. Look, touring was relatively new. In fact, talking about the financial side, in the middle of the second leg, all of a sudden I get this call: "We're going to sell T-shirts at the show." I go, what? That was like, you never would do that at a Bob Dylan show.

It would've been unusual to sell t-shirts back then?

It was like, you gotta be kidding me!

Actually from that, I developed a relationship with the Winterland Productions people, Bill's merchandise company, which then took me to the Stones. I ended up for '81 and '82 enforcing their intellectual property rights worldwide, putting together injunctions and things like that.

Working for the Stones, you pretty much get to know everybody. That's how my profile within the facilities business got elevated, and that wouldn’t have happened without Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder, I look at as like: a lot of people, when they graduate, they go to Europe. I got to hang out with the coolest entourage that could possibly be for two years.

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Thanks Mike! Today, December 7, is the anniversary of that show at the jail for Hurricane. Here’s a TV news story with some concert footage:

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Many more Rolling Thunder interviews in my book! For instance, Rolling Thunder ‘76 percussionist Gary Burke tells another good story from the Bobby Charles excursion, involving beer kegs and Allen Toussaint.