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No Direction Home Bob Dylan dir. Martin Scorsese/Columbia Records This review first appeared in Third Way, November 2005.
And now, Dylan bestrides the world. He is unquestionably the most revered living figure in popular music, he is constantly in the papers, and his new album of forty-year-old outtakes is in the Amazon top ten. This 200-minute documentary - this, if you will, folk-rockumentary - from no less a figure than Scorsese is the crest of a revival. How did we get from there to here? Those dry 80s ended with a good album, Oh Mercy, but then the 90s brought little more than acoustic covers, greatest hits and the start of the ‘bootleg’ series of previously unreleased oldies. Then there was Time Out of Mind in 1997, a major critical success, followed by ‘Love and Theft’ in 2001, which also went down well, but apart from compilations and the bootleg series, and a first volume of autobigraphy, that’s it. It doesn’t seem to add up. Perhaps it’s a symptom of a vacuum in today’s music, a lack of moral and artistic vision to compare with Dylan’s. Perhaps it has more to do with timing: his return to form coinciding with a heart-scare - provoking media reappraisal - and with the eventual release of the mythic treasures that fans have been scrabbling around in bins for for decades. The involvement of Scorsese and Dylan himself in No Direction Home seems to have brought in just about everyone else who is still around - Peter Seeger, Joan Baez, Al Kooper, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Paul and Mary, and his first muse Suze Rottolo. Most of them were unrecognisable 40 years on which makes Dylan seem somehow timeless, looking instantly familiar and sounding almost exactly like he did on Don’t Look Back, the 1967 documentary. The most arresting thing about the film is its meddling with the passage of time. Though it’s basically chronological, it starts where it will end up, with footage of the raucous, booed performances of Dylan’s first electric tour in 1966, and the angry disappointment of his folkie fans, and we keep flashing forward to it throughout the show. So the sound and fury of 1966 cast their shadow over all that comes before. 1966 becomes the peak of brilliance which all else climbs toward, at the same time it is the whirlpool of chaos and conflict that sucks Dylan in. This contributes to the films’ greatest achievement: its sense of what Dylan’s sell-out felt like. It always seemed laughable that folk got so upset about a singer performing plugged. Now I get it. He was the eloquently compassionate new hero of the civil rights movement at a crucial point in US history, and he wanted out, to create absurdist rock’n’roll. And the violence with which he tore himself away is astounding: he turns up at the great Newport folk/justice festival with a rock band, plays rough and loud, every word increasingly full of punk sneer: ‘I don’t want to work on Maggie’s farm no more’, ‘How does it feel?’, ‘It’s all over now’. Can you blame them for answering back? Forget Blood on the Tracks, this is divorce music. And while I find Dylan’s punk-folk albums sublime and endlessly intriguing, when you consider the campaigns that he was suddenly distancing himself from, I can’t help feeling kind of let down too. Which leaves me with another mystery. Out of the rancour of this abdication crisis, perhaps the most venomous attack of all is Just Like a Rolling Stone. And yet it is universally recognised by me as the most inspired moment in the history of recorded music. Am I seduced by a snarling siren, or does music really have the bizarre ability to transfigure the unlovely things of the world into something beautiful and compssionate? Or Bob Johnston, producer of these records, put it: ‘I believe in giving credit where it’s due. I think God instead of touching him on the shoulder kicked him in the ass. He can’t help what he’s doing - I mean, he’s got the Holy Spirit.
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when I first asked Bob into my heart, in the mid-80s, |
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