One More Cup of Coffee

Song of the Day 08/09/2022

One More Cup of Coffee by Bob Dylan & Scarlet Rivera

Donna Shea was raised Catholic in Chicago. From a young age, she studied to become a disciplined, classically trained musician. Her parents were harsh with her, not allowing her to have many friends, pulling her out of school early to go to violin lessons with a grumpy old teacher who would strike her with the bow every time she made a mistake. Donna complained to her parents repeatedly. They didn’t care. She was becoming better at violin, wasn’t she? 

In the mid-60s, after her father ran away from the family following an affair with the mean violin teacher’s 19-year-old daughter, distraught and contemptuous, Donna decided to leave Chicago. Roaming around the city in anguish, she met a man on a park bench near the West Loop who told her about the folk scene in Greenwich Village, who denounced anything classical as decadent and superfluous to the counter-culture, who said she would be better off contributing her talents toward the ‘sound of the present.’ She felt motivated, determined. They smoked a joint together. He got up swiftly out of nowhere, his movements like a conversational non-sequitur, telling Donna he was just going to use the bathroom. Instead, he disappeared. To no avail, Donna walked around Chicago looking for him. A few days later, after hitchhiking with a young couple who were missionaries for The Seventh-day Adventist Church, Donna found herself broke and homeless in New York City. First order of action: the name Donna Shea had to go. It was banal and proletariat. She constructed a new one based on her favorite color and the last name of a Mexican painter she admired. In the late 60s, she became Scarlet Rivera.

Rivera went between sleeping in the basement of the Hanson Place Adventist Church (she kept in touch with the missionaries) and on couches of folk musicians as she saved up money busking in Washington Square. She denounced traditional work as wasteful and immoral—if her purpose in life was to play the violin, how could she do something so sacrilegious as to spend her energetic hours waiting tables? All so she could afford rent and groceries? That was a disgusting, petit-bourgeois proposition. 

In 1975, Bob Dylan was driving around the Lower East Side before the rehearsal for his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, his first appearance after a multi-year hiatus following a gruesome, life threatening motorcycle accident. He spotted a frizzy-haired woman in a long, pink velvet shawl walking dutifully down Orchard street with a violin on her back. He rolled down his window and asked where she was going. 

‘Oh, you know, nowhere.’ Rivera responded. 

This was just the kind of response Dylan was looking for. He invited her to the studio to rehearse with them. The two instantly got on well. Dylan and Roger McGuinn, of The Byrds, found that Rivera’s violin was the differentiating sound they’d been seeking. Subsequently, she was asked to record and go on tour with them. She went, practically overnight, from a penniless couch-surfer to traveling around the US on a bus with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, T-Bone Burnett, Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot, Patti Smith, and Allen Ginsberg. ‘Well, I guess it’s all pretty sweet,’ is what she probably would have said; such was her cadence, such was the beautifully naive and innocent spirit of the time that Rivera so effortlessly encapsulated. 

It’s hard to imagine Hurricane, the famous protest song that helped free Ruben Carter from wrongful imprisonment, or most of the other songs off Desire, one of Dylan’s greatest albums, without Rivera’s defining stroke of genius. Following the tour, she continued performing with fellow great artists (Duke Ellington) and contributing to albums (Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, among many others). Rivera soon released a self-titled debut for Warner Bros. It sold OK, but it didn’t really matter. Her success from the tour and the Desire album was already enough to cement her into the status of legendary and ungraspable, an elusive figure who helped transcend the sound and soul of her time. The man on the park bench would’ve been proud, if he even existed at all.