No Direction Home
Bob Dylan
During the 1980s, I was into a lot of the mod music and a definite trend was electronic and synth, especially prevalent in such bands as Depeche Mode. At the beginning of college I really got sick of synthesizers and wanted a purer essence of music, people that really played their instruments. I started listening to a lot of folk music and that lead me to Bob Dylan. When I was going to college we lived in Provo, Utah. Those were the days when I frequented libraries (couldn't afford to buy books). Orem Public Library had an amazing CD collection and there I was able to access all of Bob Dylan CD's. I immediately fell in love. From that time forward I have been ridiculed by my wife and in-laws for my passion for Bob.
In 1999, while living in California I bought tickets to see Lucinda Williams, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. I took Kiah, who was 7 at the time, we loved Lucinda and Morrison was awesome. Then Bob came on, and he had a rock band with him and they were just Sooooooo DAMN loud, and they were rocking every song hard. You couldn't follow the melody of anything. After about 4 songs we left.
After watching No Direction Home, its clear I had fallen victim to a classic Dylan experience, that he had been engaging on the audience since he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Bob was not going to pander to your expectations, and you were as likely to find yourself in harmony with his musical whimsy as you were to run straight into the wall of his desire to shock you into realizing he's the one in control, you just get to listen.
I loved Scorsese's masterful documentary. That traces the evolution of Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, from 1941 through 1966. A standard tool of the documentary (at least the boring ones I remember in school) is the voice of the narrator who describes, directs and summarizes. There is no narrator here to guide us through the paths of Dylan's past, no overt interpretation. And yet Scorsese creates a composite representation of who Dylan is by cutting together interviews with Dylan in the present, reminiscences from current contemporaries such Pete Seger and Joan Baez and finally concert and interview footage from the 1960s. A subtle interpretation becomes evident, that Dylan is undefinable because he was (is?) always redefining himself. Scorsese uses Bob's contemporaries as a foil to Bob's opinions. Often Bob will opine one view on himself, and then Scorsese will cut to a contemporaries opinion on the same topic and they'll counter or expand the concept in a new dimension or direction. The editing is superb as the bits reveal the layers of Dylan and complexity of who he is (aren't we all this way, a bit more complex than the tiny slice of life anyone else can perceive in us).
Some random observations I jotted down along the way :
- He was eccentric. Just plain weird, and he knew it, reveled in it and cultivated it. It was and is a protective shield.
- He sought recognition and fame (don't we all to some degree) He wanted to be liked and when he became loved he turned away from what they loved, he evolved, he went electric and they hated him for it. I love the England tour when they yelled "Traitor" and Booed him on stage.
- He became incensed by the banal fascination of the media who continually pushed him for what his message was. Who tried to pin him down, to define him. They asked such pointless questions, like "Why do you Sing". I don't blame him for getting sick of their lame forays into Dylan psychology.
- People sought to make a protest singer out of him and he resisted. I loved when Joan Baez said regarding incessant queries of her at protests "Will Dylan be here?" She said : "Don't you get Bob Dylan never comes"
- He aped those around him as he sought to discover fame and himself, he was chameleonic. Eventually coming to his eccentric singing style, which is not clear to me even now, whether that was a homage to Guthrie or his own true style. He worshipped Woody Guthrie, even visiting him once in an asylum. I was also struck by how his first album was songs that others sang on the Greenwich Village coffee house circuit.
- Dylan is an awesome writer. He could tap into a streaming unconsciousness of a creative fury like no other. No one else can spin a stream like Bob. (Bob Dylan's 115th Dream anyone?) His power of the turn of a phrase is unmatched by any artist before or since. Consider the title of one of his songs, the title alone is unrivaled : It takes a lot to laugh, It takes a train to cry or they lyrics from Love Minus Zero :
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
Pop singers of today have no notion of the amazing depth that you can create in a song.