Photo by Frank Beacham
On a sultry, slow July afternoon, a gypsy called Scarlet Rivera left her Lower East Side Manhattan flat, violin case in hand.
She was heading for a friend's place to kill time before a rehearsal with an obscure 10-piece Latin band that paid her $100 a week.
"Then this car comes up and cuts me off," said Scarlet, picking up the story.
"Some ugly green car. The guy driving asked me if I really knew how to play the violin."
He never showed his face, but the impassive profile was unmistakable.
"Actually, he had this woman next to him ask me," Scarlet corrects herself.
"He asked her to ask me for my phone number, but I told her to tell him that I didn't give out my number to somebody stopping me on the street."
No, not even to Bob Dylan.
"Come downtown and rehearse with me," Dylan finally said for himself.
"I'm heading uptown," Scarlet snapped and brashly requested a ride.
She was beckoned in, Dylan turned downtown and hijacked her to his studio.
The rest is rock legend.
Shortly thereafter, Scarlet was to become an indispensable member of Dylan's Rolling Thunder caravan, and it is her writhing, poignant improvisations that so deepen the nine cuts of his current chart-topping album, Desire.
There is one other bizarre switch to Dylan's pickup.
As Scarlet recalls the green car encounter, "He started making up this entire fantasy all about him being some gypsy musician named Danny who had just gotten off the boat from Hungary."
Of course, if truth be told, Rivera's Romany roots are as fanciful as those of her fabled chauffeur. Scarlet comes not from an Andalusian cave but from suburban Chicago.
Scarlet Rivera was born, Donna Shea, and is of Irish-Sicilian ancestry.
By Jim Jerome
People Magazine Archive
February 23, 1976 Vol. 5 No. 7