Sam Peckinpah’s movie “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” was released 50 years ago. This was a convenient detail as I set out early this year (2023) to write a paper about Dylan’s involvement in the project as a musician, song writer, and actor. Nothing in particular set me on this path. It was a rather reckless idea that grew into this 7,500-word paper, about a third of which I spoke, with slides, at the World of Bob Dylan 2023 symposium, sponsored by the University of Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Institute. I refer to this as my Dylanology debut. Will I keep this line of work up? Stay tuned.

By STEVE PAUL

(c) Steve Paul, 2023

Introduction

At a recent poker game of my acquaintance the host’s classic-rock-radio soundtrack dialed up “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” I knew the song, but couldn’t place the band. Guns N’ Roses, I learned. My metal experience was (and remains) limited, but I appreciated reaffirming Bob Dylan’s wide footprint on pop music history.

As you undoubtedly know, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is the musical highlight of Sam Peckinpah’s movie “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” which was released in the spring of 1973, almost exactly 50 years ago at the time of this paper presentation. The song’s simple, aching, lyrical lines resonate with the movie’s ultimate theme of mortality. Although it foretells the fate of the two title characters, the song appears in the movie as a secondary character, an old sheriff named Baker, played by Slim Pickens, enters a slow-motion departure from this earth.

Bob Dylan not only provided the movie’s signature song and its full soundtrack, he had a small though not inconsequential acting role. Dylan’s appearance and his pop status was enough to earn him marquee listing in the movie’s marketing campaign, right below the stars—James Coburn as Sheriff Pat Garrett and Kris Kristofferson as the outlaw Billy. (A Polish poster I unearthed during research lists Dylan first.)

This paper traces Dylan’s connections to the movie in roughly three sections. The first section provides cultural context and the backstory of Dylan’s involvement in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” The second section deals largely with Dylan’s never-ending persona transformations, including a digressive though not unrealted take on his late 1967 record “John Wesley Harding.” The third section takes us to the movie set in late 1972 and early 1973. This last account of Dylan and others in action is based on contemporaneous reporting, interviews, historical perspectives, production logs, and other documents. It provides new perspectives and corrects the record as put forward by many previously published articles and books.

 Part 1: Westward Ho!

To examine the origins of Dylan’s involvement in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is to enter a spider web of connections, correlations, and coincidences. It’s a sprawling network as intricate and branching as the wild patterns in the bloodshot eyes found almost daily on the Peckinpah movie’s tequila-fueled Mexican set.

For starters one could reach back to Peckinpah’s 1962 movie, “Ride the High Country,” to begin tracing a period of transformation in Hollywood’s approach to the conventions of western myths and movies. Or, from the same year, the contemporary Western “Lonely Are the Brave,” based on the Edward Abbey novel The Brave Cowboy, in which the central character, played by Kirk Douglas, experiences death on horseback by a truckload of toilets.

For the purposes of this paper, however, we can zoom forward a few years and narrow the field.

“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” was among a handful of movies in just a four-year period, beginning in 1969, that reflect two powerful and intertwined forces of the era. One was the intense focus on examining and revising the traditions of Western movies, a movement that aimed to strip away the heroic-cowboy conventions and upend the mythologies that adhered to America’s frontier conquest. The other factor at play was Hollywood’s desire to channel and commercialize the countercultural values of the so-called Woodstock Generation.

Several Hollywood releases of the day emphasized hallucinatory experiences and personal freedom and worked to attract younger eyeballs by casting or otherwise involving popular musicians of the day. Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” had shown the way, in 1967. Rather than relying on typical Hollywood orchestral compositions, “The Graduate” soundtrack featured five songs from the folk-pop duo Simon and Garfunkel, interspersed with instrumentals by the jazzy composer Dave Grusin, and when released as an LP it became a Grammy-winning hit.

Just listing some pertinent movies and musical details from this four-year period begins to feel like a parlor game of six degrees of separation. Consider:

+ In 1969, Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” with its anarchic story and ultra-violent bursts, serves to reset audience expectations about the Western genre. “Even the hero is tragically flawed,” writes Dave Marsh, “doomed like everyone else.”

+ The same year brings “Easy Rider.” Although not a genre Western, it’s set in a contemporary West and presents motorcycle outlaws and drifters as well as a rocking soundtrack—Steppenwolf’s anthem “Born to Be Wild,” songs by The Band and The Byrds, and Roger McGuinn singing Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” as a runup to the tragic climax. The stars included Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper (who directed and played a long-haired goof named Billy, as it happens), and Peter Fonda, all of whom can be identified as figurative outlaws among the acting talents of Hollywood.

+ Also in 1969, Dylan delivers “Lay, Lady, Lay” too late to make the score of “Midnight Cowboy,” a kind of urban or existential Western. That film’s principals instead turn Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” into a certified hit. In another musical interlude, Crosby Stills Nash and Young records Neil Young’s “Helpless,” which, as others have noted, could segue almost imperceptibly into the rhythm and chord patterns of the not-yet-written “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

+ In 1970, John Wayne stars in the traditional Western “Chisum,” the largely historical story of an influential New Mexico rancher whose workers include William Bonney, a/k/a Billy the Kid, in their war against threatening developers. President Richard Nixon applauds Wayne and the movie’s clunky vision of good triumphing over bad. Stay tuned for Peckinpah’s counterpunching version of these characters in “Pat Garrett.”

Forgive me if I’m skipping over Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic Western “El Topo” and Arthur Penn’s “Little Big Man” from 1970, but 1971 and 1972 become banner years in this timeline.

+ In 1971, Peter Fonda is handed an opportunity to direct his first movie. It’s “The Hired Hand,” another story of drifters, reminiscent of “Easy Rider” but this time in the old West. Fonda stars alongside Warren Oates, whom Peckinpah had cast in “Ride the High Country” and “The Wild Bunch.” Significantly, the haunting/dreamy, string-instrument soundtrack of “The Hired Hand” is composed by Bruce Langhorne, the studio guitarist and “Mr. Tambourine Man” inspiration whose work with Dylan dates back to the Village in the early 1960s and in fact will resume in February 1973 at a recording session for the “Pat Garrett” soundtrack. Making an appearance in a minor role in “The Hired Hand” is the Beat poet and playwright Michael McClure. McClure, you will soon discover, plays an outsized role, perhaps speculatively, in the DNA of Dylan’s path toward Peckinpah’s project.

+ Another 1971 film of note—we could call it an honorary Western—is “Two-Lane Blacktop.” The movie stars Warren Oates (again) and also features two musicians turned actors—James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys). It’s directed by Monte Hellman, a graduate, like Fonda, of Roger Corman’s low-budget, Hollywood film factory. Hellman doesn’t like the script and entices the writer Rudolph Wurlitzer to fix it. Wurlitzer is an emerging, avant-garde storyteller with a couple of Samuel Beckett-inspired, existential-drifter novels under his belt and the draft of a screenplay about Billy the Kid already in hand. Esquire magazine is so excited by the prospects of “Two-Lane Blacktop” that it publishes Wurlitzer’s screenplay in the April issue. The movie fails to meet box-office expectations.

+ In June of 1971, the director Robert Altman releases his outstanding revisionist Western (and my personal favorite), “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” This moody and wintry meditation on freedom and capitalism stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and memorably features a soundtrack incorporating three songs by Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen! Surely Dylan notices.

+ The next year brings some small but notably pertinent moments in music that punctuate the recent turn toward country folk and rock. Townes Van Zandt releases his cross-border outlaw song “Pancho and Lefty.” Ry Cooder puts out a frontier-themed album, “Into the Purple Valley,” which included his version of “Billy the Kid,” a traditional ballad first recorded in 1927 by Vernon Dalhart and covered in the 1950s and ‘60s by the likes of Burl Ives, Oscar Brand, and another singer whom I’ll get to shortly.

+ In early 1972, the award-winning singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who, as a janitor in a Nashville recording studio, had emptied Dylan’s ashtrays during the recording of “Blonde on Blonde” (in 1966) makes his movie acting debut in the drug-themed contemporary story “Cisco Pike.” Kristofferson also contributes the soundtrack. (His hit song “Me and Bobby McGee,” by the way, had made a cameo on the “Two-Lane Blacktop” soundtrack.)

+ In April 1972, Sam Peckinpah, replacing the aforementioned Monte Hellman in the MGM studio plan, signs a contract to direct “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” Peckinpah has been fascinated with the history of Garrett and Billy for years. He had envisioned an adaptation in the late 1950s, a project that ended up instead in the hands of Marlon Brando (“One-Eyed Jacks,” 1961). Because he’d admired Hellman’s “Two-Lane Blacktop,” Peckinpah agrees with producer Gordon Carroll’s suggestion to bring Wurlitzer into the project. Carroll had seen Wurlitzer’s Billy script as early as 1970 and advised the writer that his vision of Billy was too bleak for Hollywood. Peckinpah urges Wurlitzer to bring the sheriff more into the foreground of the story arc, setting up a tale of Pat and Bill’s friendship and its tragic decay. After watching “Cisco Pike” and hearing Kristofferson perform at a Los Angeles club, Peckinpah lures the musician into the role of Billy.

“None of this has to connect”—so Dylan advised Sam Shepard, whom he’d invited to chronicle the Rolling Thunder Revue a couple of years later. “In fact,” Dylan added, “it’s better if it doesn’t connect.”

But, I say, it does all connect, even if only in non-linear ways. I think what this accounting adds up to is that there was an atmosphere of cross-pollination in the entertainment world, a world adrift at the time, that was well-suited to Dylan’s spontaneous, collagist poetics and his aspirations. He had already scratched a movie-making itch when he worked with Howard Alk to construct the scrapbooky “Eat the Document” out of D.A. Pennebaker’s footage of Dylan’s 1966 European tour.

But now, in late 1972, Dylan goes all-out Hollywood.

Part 2: “Who Are You?”

When Dylan speaks his first line in his mostly laconic role in Peckinpah’s movie, it’s in response to an unfriendly question from Pat Garrett. Garrett, having a shave in a combination bar and barber shop, is absorbing the news that his onetime friend and now nemesis, Billy Bonney, has escaped from the Lincoln County, New Mexico, jail, killing a deputy and a jailer in the process. “Who are you?” Garrett asks. Dylan, as a character known only as Alias, is sitting at a table with a whiskey bottle and a newspaper. He replies: “That’s a good question.”

So much mystery and self-aware humor is embedded in that response. Yet, we never really learn in the movie who Alias is.

He worked at the Lincoln County Bulletin until, after leaving Garrett and the bar, he shed his printer’s apron and hooked up with Billy on the southwest border. Paul Seydor, a film editor and historian who has written extensively on Peckinpah and the making of “Pat Garrett,” told me that having Alias emerge from the newspaper office was Peckinpah’s signal that he intended the character to be a kind of chronicler throughout the film—though that thread becomes essentially imperceptible. But how did Alias become so skilled at sharpening and throwing knives? And Dylan himself—was the “who-are-you?” schtick a sly joke on his behalf?

At the time Dylan was going through what we now recognize as the never-ending persona transformation. Self-made poet and musician. Wandering minstrel. Disciple of Woody Guthrie. Not a protest singer. Pop and rock star. Recluse. Family man. Faith seeker. Later: a visual artist, painter and sculptor. “I’m not even a philosopher,” he said at a famous San Francisco press conference in 1965.

Dylan’s album “John Wesley Harding” from late 1967, for example, was all about myth-making and character creation. It captured Dylan identifying with outsiders and existential drifters and slinking along as a creative chameleon.

“Dylan,” Daniel Mark Epstein writes of that album, “wove an allegorical tapestry of the outlaw who takes up arms against the world of men and ideas, seeking redemption and freedom; at last he finds salvation in the arms of his true love.” Even Dylan came to the realization that all the religious imagery on the album, all the searching for faith, reflected his personal identity and that all of his songs were about no one but him. “You see,” he told biographer Anthony Scaduto, “I hadn’t really known before that I was writing about myself in all those songs.” Scaduto’s analysis of “John Wesley Harding” is valuable for its tracings and conjectures about the religious threads Dylan was spinning out. Dylan already was studying the Bible and copying verses from Isaiah, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth) and I Chronicles—Chronicles, I repeat—as some of his pocket notebooks from the era, now in the Dylan Archives, attest. If we want to see Dylan identifying himself as a Christ figure, then it’s not too far-fetched to project that idea onto Kris Kristofferson’s crucifixion pose as he surrenders to Garrett in the early part of Peckinpah’s film. More than a half-century after Scaduto, a leading Dylan scholar, Graley Herren, has presented an insightful and persuasive essay, “Dylan’s Holy Outlaws,” connecting Dylan’s outlaw fascination to his biblical studies and the story of Cain and Abel. “Cain,” Herren writes, “establishes the prototype for all subsequent outlaws who follow in his doomed footsteps, fated to a life of endless wandering.”

“John Wesley Harding” also marked the beginning of Dylan’s turn toward country music. Listen to the last two tracks on the album—“Down Along the Cove,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” —and you hear him anticipating his public reappearance on Johnny Cash’s television show and the sounds that would define his next album, “Nashville Skyline,” with its love-sick ballads, honky-tonk rhythms, and pedal-steel accents. Everybody was going country at the time: There were the New Riders of the Purple Sage, founded in 1969 in San Francisco. The Byrds had put out “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” A Byrds offshoot band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, also debuted unceremoniously in 1969. Crosby Stills Nash & Young had “Déjà Vu,” with its Western-evoking cover photo and Neil Young’s “Helpless.”

Dylan’s imagination had long been stirred by cowboys and outlaws, their mythical image and their music. Think of his passion for Woody Guthrie. Think of Dylan hearing Cisco Houston on his last night at Gerde’s Folk City, shortly before he died in 1961. Think of Cisco Houston’s mustache.

Think of Marty Robbins. As we learn from Dylan’s book Philosophy of Modern Song, Robbins was a grandson of the storyteller “Texas Bob” Heckle, whom Robbins was thinking of when he wrote the hit song “El Paso.” In Dylan’s two-part rave about “El Paso,” he delivers glorious testimony to the power of song and one of the more trenchantly philosophical moments in the book: “The song hardly says anything you understand, but if you throw in the signs, symbols, and shapes, it hardly says anything you don’t understand.” What Dylan doesn’t tell us in Philosophy of Modern Song is that the record Robbins put out in 1959, the year Bobby Zimmerman graduated from Hibbing (Minnesota) High School, a record called “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs” and featuring “El Paso,” also included Robbins’s version of that traditional ballad “Billy the Kid.”

To hear Rudolph Wurlitzer tell it, Dylan almost felt possessed by Billy the Kid. In late 1972, Dylan caught wind that Wurlitzer was working with Peckinpah on the Billy legend and tracked him down. He might have heard this from Kris Kristofferson. (When I reached out to Wurlitzer in 2023 in hopes of an interview, I heard back from his wife, the photographer Lynn Davis, who told me Rudy’s memory was no longer up to the task.)

Wurlitzer had made an intellectual splash with his first novel, Nog, in 1969. Scion of the Wurlitzer musical instrument family, he went his own way—to Europe, to Cuba, to Paris—and eventually landed back in New York pursuing an intellectual life. He hung around with downtown New York artists and musicians—Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg, Philip Glass, Sam Shepard, the Cedar Tavern coterie of hipsters. “I think of him as a quintessentially American writer—just the clarity of his writing, the economy of it, the rigor of it," Glass once said of Wurlitzer. And while Wurlitzer was immersed in the jazz and art ethos of the Village scene, Jonathan Dixon writes, “Bob Dylan was putting on his dandified, surrealist speed-freak persona, and no one was oblivious to the energies he unleashed.”

A propos of Dylan’s kind of persona-shifting identity, the British writer Iain Sinclair works a thought about Wurlitzer’s first novel into a book about American writers. Sinclair presents this in a conversation with a poet, whom, it turns out, Sinclair had made up. The passage goes like this: “I travelled alone. Did you ever read Wurlitzer? Nog, man. That’s how it was. Never wake inside the same head twice.” Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has offered a similar thought about Dylan, in an interview with Ray Padgett: “I don’t think Bob has ever been the same person from one day to the next.”

Wurlitzer and Dylan had a meaningful encounter in the fall of 1972.

“The script was already written when Bob came to see me in my apartment on the Lower East Side of New York,” Wurlitzer told a writer in 2009. “He said that he had always related to Billy the Kid as if he was some kind of reincarnation; it was clear that he was obsessed with the Billy the Kid myth.”

Their mutual interest in Billy the Kid may well have led each of them, a few years earlier, to the Evergreen Theater on 11th Street in the Village. There they would have seen the poet Michael McClure’s outrageously provocative and erotic play “The Beard.”

Of particular note here is this: McClure’s two-person fable presents a heavenly dialogue, framed in blue velvet, between the platinum-bombshell actress Jean Harlow and, yes indeed, Billy the Kid. The actors were Billie Dixon and Richard Bright, who, it could not have been predicted at the time, would appear six years later in a minor though fatal role in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

Rip Torn was making his directing debut—Clive Barnes, in The New York Times, praised his “flick-knifely fluent direction.” “The Beard” had a two-month run, closing in mid-January 1968. Dylan would have been back in New York from the Nashville recording sessions for “John Wesley Harding”; he would have been awaiting the record’s post-Christmas release and preparing for a Carnegie Hall tribute concert to the late Woody Guthrie, scheduled for January 20.

Dylan, of course, knew Michael McClure. Allen Ginsberg had introduced them in San Francisco in December 1965. At that time, there were Dylan concerts in the Bay Area, a gathering at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, a motel party. Dylan gave McClure an autoharp. McClure had been initially resistant to Dylan’s music. That changed in early 1965 when McClure’s wife made him sit down and listen to Dylan’s lyrics. McClure came around and recognized a poetic master at work. Dylan’s epic “Gates of Eden” made McClure weep. “I had the idea that I was hallucinating,” McClure wrote eight or nine years later, “that it was William Blake’s voice coming out of the walls and I stood up and put my hands on the walls and they were vibrating.”

In the summer of 1966, McClure had sent a telegram to Dylan. He had just heard of Dylan’s motorcycle accident, but he also reported on the legal troubles of “The Beard.” It had been performed four times in San Francisco before police shut the play down on obscenity and lewd-behavior charges, arresting Billie Dixon and Richard Bright in the process. The ACLU successfully defended the production.

Why wouldn’t Dylan (and Wurlitzer for that matter) take in McClure’s play when he had the opportunity in New York? Why wouldn’t he want to revel in his new friend’s surrealistic achievement and witness McClure’s mythic exploration of Jean Harlow and the Kid, whom McClure once described as a “Rimbaud-like gunman.”?

Dylan surely could have identified with the recurring, persona-shifting signature line from “The Beard”: “Before you can pry any secrets from me, you must first find the real me. Which one will you pursue?” One could hear those lines as Dylan’s own taunting relationship with journalists, critics, writers in search of his story. One could also think of the introductory exchange between Pat Garrett and Alias in Peckinpah’s movie. And an alert reader could find a similar exchange in Wurlitzer’s third novel, Quake, an apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles in the aftermath of an earthquake, published in 1972 as “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” was rising on the horizon. Two dazed characters are seeking refuge and human connection: “What’s your name?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know how to answer that.”

Part 3: Down and Daunted in Durango

We don’t know whether or not Dylan and Wurlitzer discussed Michael McClure’s vision of Billy when they met in 1972. We do know that Wurlitzer suggested that Dylan travel to Mexico, where production would soon begin, in mid-November. Other sources suggest that it was Kristofferson who invited Dylan to join the production. Conceivably it was both. Kristofferson helped to encourage Dylan, who had to be convinced that he’d be comfortable.

The “Pat Garrett” producer Gordon Carroll quickly became enamored of Dylan’s interest in the movie, according to Paul Seydor. Carroll was a big music fan and he knew what kind of commercial impact Dylan could make for the movie. “Were it not for Gordon Carroll’s extreme advocacy and extreme enthusiasm, I don’t think Dylan would have been in the movie,” Seydor told me.

As part of the recruitment effort, Carroll took Dylan to a screening room where he watched four Peckinpah movies. Dylan professed to like them all but especially “Ride the High Country.” Dylan recognized Peckinpah as a Hollywood outlier, “like he’s the last of a dying breed. They don’t hire people like that to make movies anymore.” Wurlitzer, in need of a song for the movie, sent Dylan a copy of the script. Following the example of the Billy ballad sung by Ry Cooder and Marty Robbins, Dylan quickly turned around a few verses of a theme. Like its public domain predecessor, Dylan’s Billy ballad unfolds in quatrains.

Before leaving New York for Mexico, Wurlitzer also wrote a part for Dylan, the somewhat mysterious Alias. Early drafts of the script indicate Alias spoke with a stutter. We don’t know whether Dylan objected or couldn’t stutter convincingly. But by early January, script changes indicate that the stutter had disappeared from the role.

Kristofferson “talked Dylan into joining him” in Durango, Cameron Crowe once wrote. Durango was a popular movie-making locale (see John Wayne and “Chisum,” for one) at the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains in west central Mexico. Wurlitzer introduced Dylan to Peckinpah. Peckinpah didn’t know anything about Dylan and had been thinking about tapping Roger Miller for a song. But he listened to Dylan’s offering, the Billy theme. “He really liked it,” Dylan told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo, who was reporting a feature story from the set, “and asked me to be in the movie.”

Kristofferson helped Dylan get over his reticence about performing on screen.

“Dylan was interested,” Kristofferson told Flippo. “He had already written the title song but he was still a little reluctant about acting. I said, hell, the only reason I got in was to learn about acting. He said, but then they got you on film. I said, shit, they got you on record anyway. Come on, we’ll have a ball. I still feel guilty about sayin’ that.”

Dylan showed up in Mexico in time for the production’s first shoot on November 12.

His song performance for Peckinpah apparently occurred on his first night in Durango. He joined Peckinpah, Kristofferson and Coburn—where was Wurlitzer?—for a dinner of roast goat in the director’s quarters. Coburn once spun out the scene this way: “We were over at Sam’s house and we were all drinking tequila and carrying on and halfway through dinner, Sam says, ‘Okay kid, let's see what you got. You bring your guitar with you?’ They went in this little alcove. Sam had a rocking chair. Bobby sat down on a stool in front of this rocking chair. There was just the two of them in there.... And Bobby played three or four tunes. And Sam came out with his handkerchief in his eye, ‘Goddamn kid! Who the hell is he? Who is that kid? Sign him up!’”

A couple of weeks later, Dylan went home to fetch his wife, Sara, and their children. The sojourn to Mexico was not a wholly positive experience. Dylan would soon experience Peckinpah’s unpredictable and explosive temperament as well as his wife’s unhappiness with the whole scene.

“I moved with my family to Durango for about three months,” Dylan told Cameron Crowe a decade later. “Rudy Wurlitzer, who was writing this thing, invented a part but there wasn’t any dimension to it. And I was very uncomfortable in this non-role. But time started to slip away and there I was trapped deep in the heart of Mexico with some madman, ordering people around like a little king. You had to play the dummy all day. I used to think to myself ‘Well now, how would Dustin Hoffman play this?’… It was crazy, all these generals making you jump into hot ants, setting up turkey shoots and whatever and drinking tequila ‘til they passed out. Sam was a wonderful guy though. He was an outlaw. A real hombre. … At night when it was quiet I would listen to the bells. It was a strange feeling, watching how this movie was made, and I know it was wide and big and breathless at least what was in Sam’s mind, but it didn’t come out that way. Sam himself just didn’t have final control and that was the problem.”

Kristofferson was impressed by Dylan’s horseback riding and turkey roping. “I couldn’t do it but Bob did it all. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve seen prints and he’s got a presence on him like Charlie Chaplin. He’s like a wild card that none of ’em knew they had. I think they just hired him for the name and all of a sudden you see him on screen and all eyes are on him. There’s something about him that’s magnetic. He doesn’t even have to move. He’s a natural.” (Kristofferson’s regard for Dylan’s acting presence in the movie was not universally shared by critics.)

Kristofferson also was baffled by Peckinpah’s apparent lack of interest in developing Dylan’s character or giving Alias meaningful lines to speak. “I thought it was supposed to be like the fool in Lear. He sees it all, he knows the whole legend and can see where it’s all going. But we never relate as characters. We’re always chasin’ turkeys or some damn thing and don’t even look at each other. But – the fucker’s fantastic on film.”

For his part, Dylan remained mostly bemused by it all. “I don’t know who I played. I tried to play whoever it was in the story, but I guess it’s a known fact that there was nobody in that story that was the character I played.”

Production documents for the movie present a recurring statement: “Waiting for Bob Dylan.” There was also waiting for rain, winds, and local car traffic to subside. And this: “Waiting for Mr. Coburn, his mustache is not ready.” Production slowed over several days in December when Peckinpah took ill, his frequent vomiting and bathroom visits duly noted in the daily logs.

In January 1973 mentions of Dylan recur. On Jan. 10, the crew waited for Dylan at the beginning and the end of the day. On Jan. 15, they waited again for Dylan to return from an excursion to Mexico City. He finally arrived on the set at 11:30 a.m.

Still, details of Dylan’s presence in Durango remain slim. Dylan and Sara took a holiday trip to England, where they hung out with George and Patti Harrison. It’s unclear whether Sara returned to Durango with Dylan in early January, or when exactly she and/or he took the children to settle in California, because at least one of them had been struck by the gastrointestinal illness that coursed around the set. It’s possible we could eventually clarify and fill in some gaps in the record by inspecting a journal Dylan purportedly kept during the making of the movie, but that item, once announced as an incoming asset, has not been deposited in the Dylan Archives in Tulsa.

Barring that, we don’t have much more on the topic than this, from Cameron Crowe’s interview with Dylan circa 1985: “I’d gotten my family out of New York, that was the important thing, there was a lot of pressure back there. But even so, my wife got fed up almost immediately. She’d say to me, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ It was not an easy question to answer.”

Dylan and Wurlitzer flew from Durango to Mexico City that mid-January weekend for some unknown reason, possibly to scout the recording studio where Dylan and Kristofferson’s band would lay down tracks for the movie a week later.          “One night,” Wurlitzer once recalled, “when we were returning to Durango from Mexico City – I forget why we were there – he said he wanted to write something for Slim Pickens’ death scene, which was due to be shot the next day. He scrawled something on the airplane and showed it to me line by line and when we got off the plane, there it was, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Most previous accounts make the assumption that Dylan wrote the song while returning from the recording session in Mexico City on Jan. 20, 1973. Wurlitzer’s mention of an otherwise undocumented trip to Mexico City—surely he would’ve recalled the recording session as he told this story—left me scratching my head until I found the answer in the movie’s production documents in the Margaret Herrick Library in California.

Dylan, in fact, had gone to Mexico City the weekend before the recording session, and showed up to the set late on the morning of Jan. 15. I took that, finally, as confirmation of Wurlitzer’s anecdote and also as confirmation of the importance and glory of archival research, even research conducted remotely.

Peckinpah would have mixed feelings about “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” or about Dylan’s eventual performance of it. But Jerry Fielding, who had scored “The Wild Bunch” and was again in the composer’s seat for Peckinpah, went ballistic over “Knockin’” and over Dylan’s increasing involvement with the soundtrack. “Everybody loved it,” Fielding said. “It was shit. That was the end for me.”

Most accounts, including that quote, leave the impression that Fielding’s departure was immediate, but production documents, including a memo dated April 9, 1973, indicate that Fielding remained on board at least into the post-production, sound-editing period. Maybe hearing the full extent of Dylan’s recordings by then put him over the edge. As Paul Seydor writes, “Fielding reacted so negatively to Dylan’s material that he withdrew before composing a bar of music.” Still some sources indicate that it was Fielding, during editing, who rather effectively split Dylan’s “Billy” theme into pieces and sprinkled verses onto various places in the soundtrack. (Fielding eventually reunited with Peckinpah on his very next movie and overall scored six of the director’s 14 productions.)

After returning from Mexico City, Dylan faced the challenge of one of his biggest scenes—Alias as the knife-tossing killer.

“Reports from the set have said that Dylan learned to throw the knives with great accuracy and skill after only a couple hours practice,” Dave Marsh wrote at the time. “I watched him throw them a dozen times. They never stuck in anything. (Not that they needed to; the scene is a special effect, anyway.) But it is symptomatic that people felt the need to say Dylan was a genius with the knives.”

Marsh’s report from El Sauz that Tuesday was vivid and revealing:

On set, Billy the Kid (Kristofferson) and his gang are getting ready for a shoot-out sequence that encompasses Dylan’s initiation into the gang. The initiation goes like this:

Mike Mikler, on horseback: “What’s yer name, boy?”

Dylan, in ill-fitting clothes, sitting on a stump, twirling a pair of throwing knives: “Ali-uhs .. ”

“What’s yer name boy?”

“Ali-uhs, sir.”

" ’S that awl?"

“Ali-uhs Whatever You Please, sir.” 

In some ways, this is a perfect scene for Dylan. He doesn’t seem certain of his identity, either. Maybe he never was.

Dylan’s other big move in the scene is to throw a knife into the neck of a twitching enemy (who’s already been shot a couple times). This so endears Alias to Billy’s gang that they do not shoot him, even though he is a stranger.

Dylan got flustered and blew the scene a couple times; finally, he cracked, “Ali-uhs Smith” which broke everyone up, and he did his bit all right after that.

Marsh drilled deeper into Dylan and his character: Dylan, he writes, “looked so uncomfortable you began to wonder what all the fuss had been about. This big-nosed, oatmeal-voiced pipsqueak? His eyes are still blue but they don’t gleam anymore. He shuffles along in his costume which is somehow historically appropriate for Dylan more than Alias: baggy maroon pants and shirt, greasy pearl-grey vest, filthy; dusty top hat, mushy boots, scuzzy white gloves, holster drooping half way to his knees, holding a pair of knives, no gun.

“The costume, as the role, was designed to make Dylan look ludicrously young. It was as though he’d listened to ‘My Back Pages’ and decided to acquiesce. His body had co-operated with the physical diminuation of the abdicated king. So he shrank in all ways, on the road from heavyweight rock’n’roll champ to everybody’s next one.

On Saturday, Jan. 20, shooting on the set wrapped up by 2:30 in the afternoon and Dylan returned to Mexico City with an entourage, including Gordon Carroll, Coburn, Kristofferson, Kristofferson’s girlfriend and future wife Rita Coolidge, who had just performed as Billy’s consort in one of the movie’s final scenes, and Kristofferson’s band members. Peckinpah stayed behind, apparently fuming, because he was hosting a screening of his recent movie, “The Getaway,” and all of these VIPs went with Dylan instead.

Proceedings at the CBS Discos recording studio began at 11 p.m. According to Chet Flippo a “table sagged under the weight of food and drink.” Dylan and the band warmed up with a pass at “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (A recently unearthed recording of this Mexico City session, posted in the bootlegging depths of the Dylan internet, does not include this song.)

The session continued with an instrumental version of the Billy theme and multiple vocal takes. Dylan had expanded the song to as many as ten verses, according to one typescript draft in the Dylan Archives dated December 4, 1972. A leading favorite was a slimmed-down arrangement featuring only Dylan and the bassist Terry Paul (no relation). Another track included the sounds of two Mexican trumpeters, who were on hand as required by the Mexican musicians’ union.

Near sunrise, at the end of the long night, Dylan “found a last drink and last cigarette before leaving,” according to Flippo’s account. “I want now to make movies,” he said. “I’ve never been this close to movies before. I’ll make a hell of a movie after this.”

Before he could make his own movies, however, he had to stick around for the completion of this one.

Production logs indicate there were other days when Dylan was missing in action or didn’t arrive at a rehearsal. On Feb. 5 he was reported lost while trying to find the shooting location. Dylan conceded that by that point he was just going through the motions. “Why did I do it, I guess I had a fondness for Billy the Kid. In no way can I say I did it for the money. Anyway, I was too beat to take it personal. I mean, it didn’t hurt but I was sleep walking most of the time and had no real reason to be there.”

The shooting wrapped a few days later, and the proceedings moved to Los Angeles. Dylan and family took up residence in a rented house in Malibu.

Two recording sessions took place that month at Burbank Studios. Dylan recorded instrumental and vocal versions of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He apparently got word that Peckinpah preferred the song without the singing. “All right, let’s do it without a vocal…[but] this is the last time I work for anyone in a movie on the music. I’ll stick to acting.”

At the second Burbank session Dylan was joined by Roger McGuinn, drummer Jim Keltner, and Bruce Langhorne, the guitarist who had made that shimmering instrumental soundtrack for Peter Fonda’s “The Hired Hand.” The musicians played as rushes from pertinent scenes were projected above them. Watching the death of Sheriff Baker while playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” made a visceral connection. Said Keltner, “I cried through that whole take.”

Under pressure from the overlords at MGM Studios, Peckinpah had less than three months to turn his daily rushes into a feature film. They wanted it released around Memorial Day, 1973. Well into the editing process, Peckinpah notoriously balked and walked out. No one was really happy with the final cut—there were two preliminary “preview” versions, and one of them was released anyway.

Dylan eventually expressed his frustration over the finished film’s soundtrack to Cameron Crowe. “The music,” he said, “seemed to be scattered and used in every other place but the scenes in which we did it for. Except for ‘Heaven’s Door,’ I can’t say as though I recognized anything I’d done for being in the place that I’d done it for.”

Despite the somewhat shoddy release, which omitted a handful of key scenes, and despite Dylan’s unhappiness with how his music was treated, or mistreated, he recognized Peckinpah’s achievement. In an unpublished notepad jotting, Dylan complained about critics who panned it, but, as found in an unpublished fragment in his archive, he called the final product “THEE Billy the Kid movie.”

A year after the film’s opening, a newly installed MGM official tried to lure Peckinpah back to consider re-editing the movie. Peckinpah declined, but among his observations were that something had to be done about the score. Dylan’s music seemed thin, he told Daniel Melnick.

The film underwent a long and colorful history. Turner Movies released a purported “director’s cut” in 1988, which, as it happened, replaced the vocal version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with an instrumental take. Eventually, Paul Seydor was commissioned to re-edit the movie and in 2005 finally transformed it into a “special edition,” something that, he argued, more closely matched Peckinpah’s intentions. It’s terrific.

“It is a cliché of Western fiction and film,” Seydor writes in his 2015 book, “that the way of life of the Western hero, be he cowhand, sheriff, or outlaw, is being pushed aside by forces of progress that are increasingly fencing in or crowding the last open spaces.” Often underlying that theme is a darker one—“how the Western way of life itself, transitory by its very nature, contained the seeds of its own destruction, its people, hero and villain, complicit in its (and their own) destruction. I’ve rarely seen this complex of themes better realized than in Wurlitzer’s screenplay and the deeper, rich film Peckinpah eventually made from it.”

Peckinpah was long gone when the 2005 DVD re-release occurred. He had died in 1984. By then Dylan made a stab at condensing his Peckinpah movie experience into the Mexican-inflected “Romance in Durango” and punctuated every Rolling Thunder concert with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” tacking on at least one new verse that carried an anti-war sentiment. And he had gotten past his Hollywood resistance by making a movie reflecting his own vision and his own rules—the Rolling Thunder offshoot “Renaldo and Clara.”

One could consider those projects as part of the ongoing laboratory of Dylan’s experimental personas. Witness Dylan as Jack Fate in “Masked and Anonymous” (2003), directed by Larry Charles. And then, in 2007, came “I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’s movie exploring the many distinct innards of Dylan. It’s all of a piece—the never-ending dissection of a mysterious, incomplete, and ever self-inventing man called Alias.

Works Cited/Consulted

Aghed, Jan. “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Sight and Sound 42 (Spring 1973), reprinted in Hayes, Sam Peckinpah Interviews, 121-136.

Burns, Sean. “‘Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid’: Peckinpah's Unfinished Masterpiece.” WBUR, Aug. 10, 2015. https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/08/10/pat-garrett-billy-the-kid

Crowe, Cameron. Biograph liner notes booklet, Columbia Records, 1985.

Dettmar, Kevin J.H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Dixon, Jonathan. “Writer Rudy Wurlitzer’s Underappreciated Masterpieces,” Vice, Feb. 25, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wd43ab/the-inteior-frontier-0000581-v22n2

Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Bob Dylan Papers, the Bob Dylan Archive, Tulsa.

Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait. New York: Harper, 2011.

Flippo, Chet. “Dylan Meets the Durango Kid: Kristofferson and Dylan in Mexico,” Rolling Stone, March 15, 1973. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dylan-meets-the-durango-kid-kristofferson-and-dylan-in-mexico-242768/

Hayes, Kevin J., ed. Sam Peckinpah Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008.

Herren, Graley. “Dylan’s Holy Outlaws,” https://shadowchasing.substack.com/p/dylans-holy-outlaws

Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. New York: William Morrow, 2001

----------. Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments, Day by Day: 1941-1995. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996.

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“The Hired Hand.” Peter Fonda, director.

Hoberman, J. The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties. New York: The New Press, 2003.

Jacobs, Rodger. “Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto,” Popmatters, July 30, 2009. https://www.popmatters.com/109095-the-last-of-the-real-outlaws-2496063564.html

Licht, Alan. “An Interview with Rudy Wurlitzer.” The Believer 98, May 1, 2013. https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-rudy-wurlitzer/ Also found on openculture.org.

Margotin, Phillippe and Jean-Michel Guesdon. Bob Dylan: All the Songs, The Story Behind Every Track. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2021.

Marsh, Dave. “Duel to the Death: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Creem, July 1, 1973. https://archive.creem.com/article/1973/7/1/duel-to-the-death-pat-garrett-and-billy-the-kid

“McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” directed by Robert Altman, 1971.

McClure, Michael. The Beard. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

----------. “Bob Dylan: The Poet’s Poet,” Rolling Stone 156, March 14, 1974; reprinted in McClure: Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico College of Arts and Sciences, 1993.

Padgett, Ray. Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, Burlington, Vermont: EWP Press, 2023.

Sam Peckinpah Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, “Pat Garrett and Billy” production log, folder 786, and music notes, folder 788. Other documents from the Turner MGM collection, P277.

Peckinpah, Sam, as director: “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch.”

Prince, Stephen. Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Rogovoy, Seth. Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet. New York: Scribner, 2009.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer.” Written By 3, no. 11, November 1998. Online: The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Scaduto, Anthony. Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.

Seydor, Paul. The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”: The Untold Story of Peckinpah's Last Western Film. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015.

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Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Morrow/Beech Tree, 1986.

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Taylor, Jack, dir. “The Return of ‘The Hired Hand,’” documentary film, 2003.

“Two-Lane Blacktop,” directed by Monte Hellman, 1971.