Bob Neuwirth had a career as a singer, songwriter and visual artist that lasted six decades, but nothing he achieved in those guises could erase the dominant memory of his presence as Bob Dylan’s sidekick, accomplice, henchman and licensed provocateur during the time in the 1960s when Dylan was emerging from the folk scene, conquering the world and trying to work out how to deal with his popularity in ways that were not always pretty to observe.
Most symbolically, Neuwirth, who has died aged 82, was the headless figure in black jeans and an orange-and-white striped T-shirt, a camera dangling from his hand, standing behind an inscrutable Dylan in Daniel Kramer’s photograph on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, the 1965 album that included Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row. During what Dylan’s biographer Clinton Heylin called his “amphetamine years”, when the young star’s entourage kept the straight world at bay while sending it up at every opportunity, Neuwirth was always alongside him, the hippest of the hip.
