Bob Neuwirth Remembered by His Friends T Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield

Published At: 05 June 2022 , 07:55 AM

Where to begin in assessing the multi-faceted life and career of Bob Neuwirth, the singer, songwriter, visual artist, mentor, creative catalyst, restless collaborator and provocateur who died May 18 in Santa Monica at 82?

As good a starting point as any comes from three longtime friends and collaborators who agreed to share their reflections on Neuwirth’s legacy with Variety: multiple Grammy-winning producer-songwriter-guitarist-singer T Bone Burnett, producer, songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Steven Soles and multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer David Mansfield.

Typical of so many artists whose paths intersected with Neuwirth’s, the threesome entered his circle independently, but once there found common ground with one another. With significant credit going to his frequent role as instigator, they came together as the critically acclaimed Alpha Band in the late 1970s, and subsequently moved on to prolific solo careers.

The Alpha Band emerged out of their parts in the musical ensemble that backed Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn and numerous others who shared the spotlight during Dylan’s wild and wooly Rolling Thunder Revues of 1975 and ’76 — a venture, Mansfield suggests, that was as much a product of Neuwirth’s influence behind the scenes as Dylan’s out front.

Neuwirth released a handful of solo albums over the span of a quarter-century, and contributed to countless other musicians’ recordings for more than half a century. His final solo album, released in 1999, was “Havana Midnight,” for which he and producer Soles teamed with Cuban composer and pianist Jose Maria Vitier in assembling a disparate group of musicians for a characteristically inspired collaboration that yielded exquisite musical results.

He also was a respected abstract painter, having studied art at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and who considered Jackson Pollock a chief inspiration along with Rembrandt and the masters. His work was the subject of a career retrospective in 2011, “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth 1964-2009,” at L.A.’s Track 16 Gallery.

Throughout his life he danced on the edge of fame, but consciously sidestepped its trappings — despite important associations with Dylan, Janis Joplin (he co-wrote her hit “Mercedes Benz,” and introduced her to Kris Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobby McGee”), Patti Smith, John Cale, Kris Kristofferson and too many others to itemize.

As Dylan himself wrote of Neuwirth in his 2004 book “Chronicles: Volume One,” “Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character.”

Yet so many who knew and worked with him knew that fame and fortune never ranked high on his priority list, pointing to his selfless spirit of camaraderie, generosity and underlying positivity. “In the early days, he and the famous Bob were considered word assassins,” Soles remembers, “but Neuwirth traded that angle of inclination to healing humanity through words and deeds.”

The word “mentor” comes up regularly in conversations about his legacy. Neuwirth had, Burnett says, “an eye for latent talent [and] an ability to draw it out.”

More often than not, he worked to put the spotlight on others rather than himself. As Mansfield puts it below, “He gave, he never took.”