Daily Ramblings:
His Back Pages ...07/23/2005 03:20:38 pm
The level of advance publicity for Scorsese's upcoming TV documentary on Dylan, "No Direction Home," is quite something, especially since it's not due to air until late September. This is from the UK's Telegraph:
Roly Keating, the BBC2 controller, said that the 210-minute film promised an "awesome and unique" picture of the singer, covering Dylan's arrival in New York in January 1961 to July 1966, when he became a recluse after a motorcycle crash near his then home in Woodstock, New York.
....
Anthony Wall, editor of Arena, which is showing the film, said that Dylan talks about his recording of Like a Rolling Stone, the six-minute single driven by a circular organ riff, which broke the barrier of the three-minute pop record.
He said: ''If anything, it's an emotional journey. Dylan talks about Joan Baez [his lover during his first UK tour] but doesn't answer questions in the way some artists do."I'm definitely going to watch this when it's on TV, and I hope and expect to enjoy it (despite reservations expressed back here), but why do I find all the advance word to be a bit of yawn? An "awesome and unique picture of the singer." Well ... it's a picture of the already quite well scrutinized period of Dylan's career between 1961 and 1966. A little odd, considering that the PBS banner under which this is being done (American Masters) is customarily a look at an artist's total career, rather than a selected five year snatch of it.
Clearly that period was a tumultous and exciting one, both for Dylan and those that listened to his music, and for the general rock and pop music world that he completely shook up. Yet, I'm a fan who obviously feels that Dylan's work has continued to be intensely interesting and worthwhile through the late sixties, the seventies, and yes the eighties too, and on to today. The difference in the '61 - '66 period is that the changes that his music was going through coincided with rapid changes in popular music and the popular culture generally, and it's fair to say that many had their eyes and ears opened to all kinds of possibilities by Dylan's own personal creative breakthroughs. (Whether very many others actually succeeded in taking Dylan's lead in an interesting and positive direction of their own is another question.)
Dylan continued going through changes, and making matchless music, but after 1966 he let the pop culture zeitgeist bypass him, and obviously he did so quite deliberately. He'd been the unwitting leading edge of that cultural wind; or at the least he'd been perceived as such by others. He was happy after that to plow his own course without the same sense of the rest of the music world waiting breathlessly for his next move.
As he said in an interview in 1999:
Well...you know, you can influence all kinds of people, but sometimes it gets in the way -- especially if somebody is accusing you of influencing somebody that you had no interest in influencing in the first place.
So, in any case, I expect Scorsese will have lots of previously unseen footage, and the new interview material with Dylan himself will inevitably be fascinating, but I've got to wonder a little bit what all the fuss is about. A really big deal is being made of the fact that there's a film clip of the moment in the Manchester Free Trade Hall when someone shouts "Judas" and Dylan responds before smashing into Like A Rolling Stone.Well, I guess that'll be something to see ... but it ain't really all that new, now, is it? Hasn't everyone kind of meditated enough by now on the resonance of that moment? There may be a point at which all this sinks to nostalgia and navel-gazing on the part of the documentarian and the viewers. This should be an opportunity to break from the clichés and use the benefit of distance to paint a truer portrait of the artist - shouldn't it?
Dylan himself recently wrote about his early time in the Village, in Chronicles, of-course. But he didn't get past 1962 in his account - then he jumped forward to the late sixties, and then to the late eighties. Chronicles is a really good book - maybe a great one. It surprised people. It took people aback (as opposed to just taking them back). It's certainly not an exercise in nostalgia. It's a book that really informs and entertains and beguiles. And it does all that without retreading old stories about hecklers in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Dylan tells us more about himself with a story about visiting a curio shop outside New Orleans in 1989 than most critics have told us with all their millions of words about going electric and falling off the motorcycle and on and on and on.
Quite an achievement on Dylan's part. Here's hoping Scorsese achieves something too.
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