Thoughts on part II of Dylan documentary

Just like part one, part two of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan movie, “No Direction Home,” broadcast September 27 on PBS, was fantastically enjoyable. Except for “Don’t Look Back,” I had never seen footage of Dylan performances from the Sixties (and also had not listened to Dylan or pop music at all for the last five or ten years), so the scenes of him singing in various venues in 1965 and ‘66 were a marvel, a revelation of his unique genius. I was transported out of myself watching it. Unfortunately, the film came to an abrupt halt, not building up to a satisfying emotional conclusion. In the end, it presented bits of songs rather than entire songs or at least longer sections of songs. It offered a bunch of tantalizing tastes rather than a full meal, and was also disappointingly superficial in its treatment of Dylan the man and of Dylan’s creative process. What lived in the movie were those bits of performances. But oh what bits!

Regarding the fragmentary quality of the footage, a reader had written in response to my comments about part one:

Cosmic indeed. Other worldly. The England ‘66 clips were the high point though I liked the interviews with Dylan’s folkie friends. It took great effort to get the England ‘66 video and audio restored so cleanly. Probably using new digital tricks and techniques. Some of those 30-50 second clips were actually 2, 3, 4 videos and audios melded, spliced together

I replied:

I and the friend I was watching it with both felt dissatisfied by the absence of more extended performances, complete songs. I also wondered, if there’s all this unbelievable concert footage of Dylan, why the heck don’t they just produce a film of that?? That’s the ultimate thing. Not interviews with people who knew him and stuff (though the interviews were good). But if what you’re saying is true, its not as simple as that, they had to piece together everything they showed us.

But there was mention of Pennebaker filming Dylan’s ‘66 concert tour. What about all that footage?

The correspondent replied:

I’ve been reading up on that. You can check the Dylan newsgroup at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.music.dylan?lnk=sg&hl=en for some answers too.

It seems that Pennebaker filmed bits and pieces of concerts on the UK ‘66 tour because it was to be a documentary of Dylan touring England. Not just a concert film. He wanted to save on film expenses so not so many whole songs were filmed. He did record full audio for each concert. Even then there were a lot of synchronization problems between film and audio when all the material was reviewed to make the film many years ago. Maybe Pennebaker and his crew were getting stoned some of the time? Dylan and The Band were. Dylan was stoned to a fare thee well on some of the concert footage. He was only 25 back then.

To make a decent concert film would involve piecing together audio and footage from different concerts. Getting the audio and film in sync, with some material needing to be cleaned up digitally. Doable but will take an effort. Believe you me many others would LOVE to see such a film.

I think some of the UK ‘66 concert footage we saw Mon & Tues was cleaned up too well. Maybe even enhanced. It was a bit other worldly. You used the word cosmic.

So, maybe Scorsese, rather than deliberately giving only fragments of songs, was actually engaged in a heroic endeavor of restoring what bits of songs he could.

In any case, despite its flaws, “No Direction Home” brings Dylan back into our experience and our culture in a new and positive way. Now we get the essence of Dylan’s creative genius, the purity of his art, without the usual countercultural baggage and other distractions involving the Dylan cult that were present in earlier decades. We’re getting the pure, true Dylan. And that Dylan, for me, is an ever-fresh source of life and joy.

This became particularly true for me in the early 1980s. I had attended a Dylan imitators contest at a Greenwich Village night club and met a Dylan fan who had all the Dylan “bootleg” and unofficial tapes, and he later created for me, for free, ten audio cassettes of Dylan outtakes and concert performances (many of which ended up on the “Biograph” retrospective album a few years later). For me, who had only known Dylan from his albums, these unofficial performances were a revelation—there was an edge and freshness to them that went beyond the official recordings and made listening to him a completely new experience. I used to go running or walking in New York City playing my Dylan types on a Walkman, and would also play them on long car trips. That’s the Dylan—the Dylan of his concerts and studio outtakes—that is also featured in “No Direction Home.”

A final point. Before part two of the Scorsese film aired, I said I was bored with the old obsession about the way fans at the Newport Folk Music festival in 1965 booed Dylan’s move from accoustic soloist to electric band. This was because I thought that the booing was a single incident. But, as the movie shows, Dylan fans in concert after concert, in the U.S. and England, were intensely unhappy with his new style and openly booed him as he was performing. This reaction is in keeping with Dylan’s continual creative process, which would disappoint people who had become attached to his last innovation but were not ready for the next one. So the intense anger expressed by some of his fans in ‘65 and ‘66 is a key part of the Dylan story.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 09, 2005 07:36 PM | Send