Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (1 Viewer)

[Sam Favate]

There's no denying the political implications of Dylan's work, even if he didn't write them with political intent. In the beginning of his career, Dylan wrote very topical songs, but if you look at the 40 years since Like a Rolling Stone, he's branched out to so much more. It's much too narrow to say he's a "political writer" and nothing else.

 

[Frank@N]

As a Dylan fan, I'm looking forward to the PBS airing of the program tonight.

But to be honest, I'm bracing myself for the frustration I usually experience whenever watching or reading recent Dylan interviews (Newsweek or 60 Minutes).

Dylan is a musical/lyrical genius, but when speaking about his own work he usually attempts to obscure and obstruct any attempt to understand it.

The gist of his comments usually is that he never did anything important, never did anything pollical, never ment anything by anything, hasn't written anything good since the 60's, never wrote anything autobiographical, etc.

I listen to the music regularly and read Paul William's excellent books and articles, but prefer not to look to Dylan for any greater understanding of his work.

 

[dpippel]

Bracing yourself is a great idea.

 

[Rich Malloy]

Is Dylan "political"? What he was and what he became can't easily be separated, but I think Pete Hamill's notes to "Blood on the Tracks" go a long way in defining the way Dylan is and gratefully isn't.

Blood On The Tracks (Liner Notes)

In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No, it turned up again in America, breeding in a compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up and above God’s green earth, released it in silent streams and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud.

And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism. Painters left the easel to scrawl their innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for ideology.

And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal the worms, many retreated into that past that never was, the place of balcony dreams in Loew’s Met, fair women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves in the Creamsicle summers, while Jo Stafford gladly promised her fidelity. Poor America. Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died.

Except for Dylan.

He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and had remained true. He was not the only one, of course; he is not the only one now. But of all our poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the roiled sea and put it in a glass.

Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us of the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas of 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.

So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust. Remember that he gave us voice. When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that moment into art. The wonder is that he survived.

That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed, the maps are blurred. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant as the tarnished statues in the public parks. We live with a callous on the heart. Only the artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the poor land again to feel.

And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album he is as personal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the music, the tone of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. They are the poems of a survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy. It is not his voice that has grown richer, stronger, more certain; it is Dylan himself. And his poetry, his troubadour’s traveling art, seems to me to be more meaningful than ever. I thought, listening to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.

"If you see her,
Say hello,
She might be in Tangiers..."

So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice, and as dangerous. Dylan doesn’t fall in. Instead, he tells us of the essentials; a woman once loved, gone off, vanished in the wild places of the earth, still loved.

"If you’re making love to her,
Kiss her for the kid,
Who always has respected her,
For doing what she did..."

It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of poets, but is about love filled with horror, and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so few can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a life. That song, and some of the other love poems in this collection, seem to me absolutely right, in this moment at the end of wars, as all of us, old, young, middle-aged, men and women, are searching for some simple things to believe in. Dylan here tips his hat to Verlaine and Rimbaud, knowing all about the seasons in hell, but he insists on his right to speak of love, that human emotion that still exists, in Faulkner’s phrase, in spite of, not because.

And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over the hurt, delivered almost casually, as if the poet could control the chaos of feeling with a few simply chosen words:

"Life is sad,
Life is a bust,
All ya can do,
Is do what you must.
You do what you must do,
And ya do it well.
I’ll do it for you,
Ah, honey baby, can’t ya tell?"

A simple song. Not Dante’s Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of, Kerouac, racing Deam Moriarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music drove them, they always knew they were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance and read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme’s dream flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artists generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their promise.

Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self. Listen to "Idiot Wind". It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor’s anger, as personal as anything ever committed to a record. And yet it can also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in contact with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivializes lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, in the poisoned air, and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with
them.

Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts". It should not be reduced to notes, or taken out of context, it should be experienced in full. The compression of story is masterful, but its real wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist has left out of his painting. To me, that has always been the key to Dylan’s art. To state things plainly is the function of journalism, but Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the great privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.

Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan’s art feels, and invites us to join him.

That quality is in all the work in this collection, the long major works, the casual drawings and etchings. There are those who attack Dylan because he will not rewrite "Like A Rolling Stone" or "Gates of Eden". They are fools, because they are cheating themselves of a shot of wonder. Every artist owns a vision of the world, and he shouts his protest when he sees evil mangling that vision. But he must also tell us of the vision. Now we are getting Dylan’s vision, rich and loamy, against which the world moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned world, is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom.

So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind. Don’t mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into the courtyard, padding across the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about "flowers on the hillside bloomin’ crazy/ Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme..." A girl, red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the poet sings to all of us:

"But I’ll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love,
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go."

Pete Hamill, New York, 1974

 

[Henry Gale]

Not targeting Frank by quoting him, but I'd like to make the point that the DVD is a must for fans.
It has extras...including full performances of many songs by Dylan and others.
Speaking of others, this would have been worth the price for me just for the clips of dozens of other artists that are included.

 

[Cees Alons]

Saw the first part on the BBC last night. The second part will be this evening.

Excellent film. Lots of everything in the Dylan era, lots of present-day-Dylan talking and reflecting. Lots of music.

An absolute must for Dylan fans, but very interesting too for anyone who's just interested in the period and in pop.


Cees

 

[Joel Vardy]

I believe that Dylan would cringe at the idea of his work or his performances being categorized as 'pop'. He was quite explicit about his views of what Sonny and Cher had done with one of his songs...Even though his work did cross over to people who are pop fans the vast majority of his work and his fans where out of the mainstream pop culture.

Has anyone seen the 30th anniversary concert that was available on video? I watched it after viewing the DVD and it puts a lot of perspective on the '92 Madison Square Garden concert. I would love to see this 4 hour 'Bobfest' (as coined by Neil Young) come out on DVD...

Joel

 

[Cees Alons]

Yes, I think so. But, frankly, I wasn't referring to Dylan's most typical work when I added that. The film gives such a good general picture too, not just about Dylan and his work, with lots of other songs (especially C&W ), surrounding the place, so to say, BD occupied in that period, and including his earliest recordings.


Cees

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I think that a major weakness of PBS today is that so much of the stuff they show is not exclusive; a lot of it is available on DVD. On another tack, I was watching this last night and had more difficulty than usual picking out shot-on-video from shot-on-film material; did Scorcese transfer video to film, and then telecine the result? Strange idea. There was a short, very early clip of Joan Baez which really grabbed me by the back of the head and yanked. I'd like to know where that came from and if there's any more of it; she's still incredible, but there's just something about that old recording.

 

[Cees Alons]

Saw the second part Yesterday evening.

Did I say it already? A must!

One of the big topics of the second part was the use of audio amplification and electric instruments. Fans calling him (Dylan) a traitor, and so on. Pete Seger running around back-stage with an axe to cut the electric wires. That sort of things.

Old fashioned reporters in suits asking BD questions like "how many protest singers (after extenively explaining the term) are there?" (BD: "136" )

Great stuff.


Cees

 

[andrew markworthy]

I'm sorry to be the dissenting voice, but I didn't like it. I suspect that you will have to already be a Dylan fan before you'll like it.

I've never been a big Dylan fan - I liked some of his early songs but preferably in cover versions (i.e. by people who could actually sing; sorry, but I've never found mumbling approximately in time and tune to be artistically appealing). I also have an aversion to the rather twee folk scene of the early 60s - I always thought it lacked the genuine sense of anguish and rage of Woody Guthrie et al from earlier generations and the testosterone and sense of fun of the later electric folk bands. I'm afraid that the sight of oh-so-earnest men in aran sweaters singing about giving their love a chicken without a bone engenders the same reaction as Mr Belushi in that wonderful scene from Animal House. And as for Joan Baez - am I the only one who thinks she sounds patronising even when she's singing?

So okay, I wasn't perhaps going to respond to the documentary all that well, but I was prepared to give it a go. From what I've heard BD say in the past, he seems a likeable person, and some of his lyrics are literate (though not quite as godlike as some of his fans seem to suppose). However, I found the experience rather dull. BD goes to school, plays some gigs, gets discovered - I think that takes us through the first couple of hours quite nicely. I don't think I was any closer to discovering what made the man tick, how his songs relate to his time, or any of the insights a good documentary might be expected to give. Perhaps it's different if you're a fan and all of it falls into place. However, all I can say is that as a non-fan it didn't grab me.

Before anyone says that I came with a closed mind, I should add that Sign O The Times converted me to Prince's music within two numbers, and the Buddy Holly Story not only converted me from dislike to love of BH's music but also turned me on to early rock and roll. I'd hoped this documentary would do the same, because a lot of people I like and respect really love BD's work, but it's left me more disenchanted than before.

 

[Joe Karlosi]

It's nice to hear a different view, Andrew. I myself am a so-so Dylan Fan, and I thought the documentary was "Good," but nothing "great". Something you said summed up why I was a little disappointed:

 

[Michael Elliott]

If you're waiting to see what makes the man tick then that's something you'll be taking to your grave. If the mystery gets out of the bag then there isn't a Dylan.

 

[Henry Gale]

I've never heard anyone say that, not even rabid fans.

 

[Frank@N]

Dylan doesn't generally mumble on studio recordings, but live performances can be a bit more sloppy.

If you think you might be a fan, buy the Bootleg Series 1-3 (a single product).

Listen to songs from across ~30 years and only buy the albums from the eras you like (with no overlap).

For the Fans: this month's MOJO magazine is dedicated to Dylan and comes with a free CD.

It's a very nice issue and only costs $9.

 

[Michael Elliott]

Fan conspiracy?

Several of Dylan's friends have told stories and none of them are horrid. In fact, most people say the thing people don't get to see is how funny he is. Having seen him in concert 12 times the past 6 years, again, I haven't heard any bad stories. I know several people who waited by his bus after shows and he treated all of them well. The media is now eating him up and not talking about anything negative. Willie Nelson, The Dead, Phil Lesh and Paul Simon (all who toured with him) haven't said anything bad either.

Buy the studio albums and then all of the Bootleg Series. The guy changes from album to album, from year to year and from concert to concert. I had every available live recording from 1961-2003 and you can hear a difference from night to night. You go to two shows in a row and you aren't going to get the same show. You'll be treated to a different setlist (for the most part) and he even sings the songs differently each night. Britney Spears has a beautiful voice. Bob doesn't.

As the doc said, crowds go to Dylan, Dylan doesn't go to the crowds.

 

[Cees Alons]

I'm not a Dylan fan at all - and I don't like his singing any better after seeing the documentary. But, to be frank, I started to like the man better now. Yes.
And I got some insight about the whole, ahem, experience. I still think this documentary is a must for anyone who wants to gain a better insight in what went on in those days.


Cees

 

[Colin Jacobson]

A BIT? Hoo boy, is that an understatement! I saw him last year and had not the slightest clue what he was saying/singing most of the time. It was funny how my perception of Dylan's voice differed from my friend's, though. She'd been listening to fairly recent Dylan before the show and thought his voice was okay. I'd been listening to Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 and thought he sounded absolutely horrid.

Must admit I'm a middling Dylan fan. I agree with this statement: "I don't think I was any closer to discovering what made the man tick, how his songs relate to his time, or any of the insights a good documentary might be expected to give." I enjoyed the documentary but thought it fell well short of expectations. Honestly, I liked The Beatles Anthology much more - better depiction of the music and greater connection to the band's significance...

 

[David James]

After seeing the DVD, reading comments here and dozens of other places, I'm getting the feeling that Dylan was/is a very gifted poet who can morph his thinking and words in boundless directions. But as a philosopher, political or otherwise, he may not be much deeper then the paper the lyrics are printed on and ya know what, I'm not sure Dylan would have a problem with that.

 

[Michael Elliott]

I wasn't around back then but wouldn't you say The Beatles "ate up" media attention while Dylan tried to stay away from it? 1965 or 2005, I really don't think Dylan wants to explain himself to anyone. I mean, at the height of his career the guy simply walked away for eight years (only to return with his next three albums being the biggest sellers of their year).

Dylan could have been even bigger back then probably. I'm going to guess that The Ed Sullivan Show did back then for artist what MTV does for them today. The documentary didn't cover this but Dylan walked off the show minutes before it was going to air because Ed wanting him to change the lyrics to a song so it wouldn't be so "politically harsh".