BEFORE: Well, I COULD have dropped in the movie "Howl" in between the two Bob Dylan documentaries, because that film does use footage of Allen Ginsberg, I think. But no, screw Allen Ginsberg, I'm not a fan. Why should I go out of my way to include that film here if I'm not a fan of the beat poets, especially Ginsberg? I've already re-scheduled the film "Howl", but shoehorning it in here would interrupt the flow of the Summer Concerts Series, which only just got underway. Just like Bob Dylan, I'm cutting Ginsberg out of the show, as best as I can. And screw Jack Kerouac while I'm at it, the movie version of "On the Road" sucked and I'm betting the original book does, too. Screw all the beat poets, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey too. What have any of them produced lately? (I know, they're all dead, but that's a rather poor excuse for shirking off work.)
Bob Dylan carries over from "Rolling Thunder Revue", as do a few members of his entourage.
THE PLOT: A chronicle of Bob Dylan's strange evolution between 1961 and 1966, from folk singer to protest singer to "voice of a generation" to rock star.
AFTER: Before I start in with my thoughts today, another point of order: Is this a movie? "No Direction Home" is essentially two episodes from the PBS series "American Masters" that have been cut together for streaming on Netflix. Does that make it a movie? Well, it's being packaged and promoted like a movie, and given Netflix's predilection to turn everything into a series, it's kind of amazing that they didn't split this into two or eleventeen parts and call it a series. Instead it's a solid 3 hours and 28 minutes long, that's movie-length and then some. So how come on the IMDB page for the American Masters series, the length of "No Direction Home" (Season 19, Episode 7) is given as 6 full hours? Did I just watch a cut-down version on Netflix, or is this an error on the IMDB? Or were they making time allowances for pledge breaks - it aired on PBS, after all.
It's worth noting that I was under the mistaken impression that this would be the DEFINITIVE documentary about Dylan, picking up where "Don't Look Back" left off, and bringing us up to the present day. But even with a running time of three and a half hours, it only covers the formative years of his career, from 1961 to 1966, and it stops just before the motorcycle accident. In one way this is kind of great for me, because yesterday's film picked up 8 or 9 years after the accident caused Dylan to stop touring, even though I've now watched two films about His Bobness in the wrong order, I can still piece something together here in my mind. "No Direction Home" comes first, then the accident, then he toured with The Band in 1974, then after that came "Rolling Thunder Revue", and then a few months after that tour came....well, that's tomorrow's film.
Still, there's going to be a huge gap in my Bob Dylan knowledge now, everything from 1976 to present day is going to be a big mystery, unless Scorsese does another follow-up documentary. Still, maybe that's OK because Bob Dylan probably doesn't remember all those years, either. I think he's full of crap, I think he remembers everything perfectly, he's just re-invented himself so many times that it probably feels like all those memories happened to somebody else. Geez, the only person who adopted more personas and rebuilt his image time and time again was probably David Bowie - and part of me is still waiting to see what the next stage of Bowie's career is going to look like. (I know, he's dead, too, but that's still no excuse. I will continue to expect his next fabulous stage.)
Dylan, on the other hand, turned 79 this year. And my only fear about watching these documentaries about someone so far along in their career is the slight chance that he might die this week - hey, you never know - and then I'm going to look like a ghoul for watching a documentary about him, when I'm aware that weird coincidences have been known to happen, where real-life sometimes coincides with my planned movies. But, I went through this two years ago when I watched movies about the Rolling Stones, and they came out of that just fine - so I'm not a jinx after all. Man, if Dylan and Jagger and McCartney ever kick it, then the 60's will truly be over. I mean, I know they've been over for 50 years now, but their spirit somehow survives as long as there are a few icons left. You just don't meet too many people these days who claim to have been at the original Woodstock concert - and anyone who was there and is still alive probably doesn't remember it, I bet, for one of a few reasons. (Years ago, the oldest actor who played a Munchkin in "The Wizard of Oz" passed away, and now I think we'll have to start wondering which Woodstock performer will ultimately live the longest - Joan Baez is as good a bet as any, but perhaps it will be John Sebastian or Carlos Santana. #WoodstockDeadPool)
But we all know what you came here for, if you've watched "No Direction Home" - you want to see that fateful moment where Bob Dylan "plugged in" and "went electric" and disappointed all of his fans - just like if you watch "Gimme Shelter", you're going to keep an eye out for when that Hell's Angels bodyguard killed that guy during the Altamont concert. You know, I'm really starting to worry about you. Don't worry, "No Direction Home" has you covered, you sick person. It opens with a 1966 concert in England shortly after the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, this is the concert where someone in the crowd shouted "Judas!" after they realized the concert would be half acoustic and half electric. You have to admit, this took balls, coming from a British chap. I thought they were so genteel over there, as the Beatles often talked about how their first few concerts for the gentry were very quiet, because the upper crust Brits didn't know when to clap, and they certainly didn't scream like the teenage girls.
But here's the thing, limeys, you paid to see Bob Dylan and you got to see Bob freakin' Dylan. So shut the hell up and enjoy the show that Dylan wants to do. (Yes, I realize I'm giving advice to British teens from 1966, and they're all probably in their 70's by now, if they're lucky.). Who the hell complains about HALF of a concert that they don't like? If I went to see a band and they played all their hits, then did something new and perhaps even experimental, I'd champion that, especially if they were a big star or my favorite band! Look, one time I went to see a double-bill of Jethro Tull and Suzanne Vega, and I may not be a big Suzanne Vega fan, but it was Jethro freakin' Tull! I'll endure half a concert of folk music to get to see a rock legend. (Only problem was, there were two VERY different groups of people in that crowd. I remember one Tull fan yelling out "Show us your tits!" while Ms. Vega was performing. And no, that was not me who yelled.)
It's called progress, you Cockney bastards, so get on board and get ready to rock. After showing clips from the 1966 concert in the U.K., the film snaps back to Dylan's early days growing up in Minnesota, and eventually works its way back up to that infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival. And I learned a lot about this incident - for example, Dylan only played 15 minutes of an electric set. There were boos from the crowd, sure, and Pete Seeger thought the performance was so terrible he was pleading with the crew to turn off the band's microphones, or cut the power entirely. What I did not know was that after the electric set, Dylan was persuaded to grab an acoustic guitar and get back out on stage to perform more songs, in the style that the crowd obviously wanted to hear. But while the popular belief is that the crowd was booing Dylan's use of an electric guitar, an alternative theory is that the crowd was really booing the poor sound (possibly distortion caused by the louder electric instruments) and the announcement that Dylan would be playing a shortened set. So there may be more to the story of this incident than we've been led to believe. If I paid big bucks for a concert ticket, I know I'd be inclined to TRY to enjoy the concert no matter what, so I could feel like I got my money's worth. That performance would have to be TERRIBLE for me to raise a fuss, and I just don't think that Dylan's 1965 performance was that bad. Was the audience filled with folk music purists who were immediately hyper-aware that they were witnessing a sea change to an entire genre of music? That does seem kind of unlikely.
However, it's more likely that by the time of the 1966 European tour, word had spread that Dylan had changed his style - so I think by the time of that "Judas!" accusation, his fans had come to learn about the change-over from acoustic to electric, they'd had time to think about it, and clearly some people were not happy about it. So this story seems more believable than the confusion surrounding the Newport incident.
(Look, I'll be honest, my one experience seeing Dylan play live was SO horrible, that performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" at the David Letterman "Late Night" 10th Anniversary show - actually, everything about it was GREAT, except for Dylan phoning it in. He was both OFF and AWFUL, he'd wait until the band played an entire line of the song, and then he'd quickly blurt out all the words from that line, after the fact. I don't think he was trying to sing the song in a different style, unless that style was "BAD". Now I'm wishing that I had shouted out "JUDAS!" during that performance, I think I would have been more justified than the British audience was in 1966 when he played a half-electric show, because at least in that performance, you could understand what Bob was singing, and I couldn't. What I saw sounded exactly like an instrumental version of "Like a Rolling Stone", but with a drunk homeless man suddenly remembering the lyrics at the last minute, but still not being able to sing them in time. But if I had screamed "JUDAS", I probably would have been thrown out of that Letterman show - and I wonder what Dylan's reaction would have been.)
For further reference, "No Direction Home" prefaces the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with footage of Dylan's performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, which was obviously a more folk-driven performance for him (try to ignore the fact that he looks about 15 years old instead of 22, for some reason. I think he looked thin, maybe he wasn't eating very well, that first record may not have been selling very well, or perhaps the royalties took a while to kick in.). Dylan also casually mentions that he's come a long way in his career in a very short time - he wouldn't have even been able to play at the 1961 Folk Festival, yet here he was, headlining it just two short years later. And two years after THAT he went electric and all hell supposedly broke loose. And so we see a very neat progression of the stages of any music star's career - first there's "Who's Bob Dylan", then comes "Wow, it's Bob Dylan!", followed two years later by "Wow, Bob Dylan sure has changed!" and then finally "Who's Bob Dylan" again - only that last stage NEVER HAPPENED. Instead he toured like crazy after 1975 and everyone in the free world now knows who Bob Dylan is.
At the start of the film, there's so much in the way of musical context set-up that I wonder if there may not be TOO MUCH context. Homage is paid to nearly every folk singer of note, from Leadbelly to Odetta to the obscure John Jacob Niles - surely Dylan wasn't influenced by EVERY SINGLE one of these people, was he? Then again, maybe he was, because he stole - sorry, borrowed - a couple hundred of that collector's records just so he could listen to them and learn all those tunes. Eventually I think the hammer's going to fall when people realize how many of Dylan's songs were essentially re-workings of obscure folk and blues songs - "Maggie's Farm" is essentially just a re-tread of another artist's "Peggy's Farm". Sure, every act copies - sorry, pays tribute - to other acts that have gone before, but stealing songs, even when they're tweaked a little is still considered a no-no. Currently Led Zeppelin is still on the cultural black list because they didn't properly credit Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and others. They even stole "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" from a Joan Baez song! I think eventually Dylan's "borrowing" in his early work will be exposed as well.
I suspect this has something to do with why Dylan felt very uncomfortable after being labeled as the "Voice of a Generation", because he didn't feel he was addressing current political topics with his songs that had elements "borrowed" from older folk and blues songs. The torch of social commentary had been passed from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger, or alternatively to the beat poets, but when no replacement for Seeger seemed obvious, people turned to Bob Dylan and started connecting his lyrics to their own calls for social reform. Remember that the 1960's were a time of great upheaval, racial injustice and dissatisfaction with corrupt politicians. (Umm, kind of like now.) And when Dylan felt that his work was being pushed into the social commentary arena, he then tried to get out of that line of work, and become a true rock star instead.
I also didn't know that Bob Dylan was AT the famous March on Washington in 1963, he was right there for MLK's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Heck, I didn't even know there were singers performing there, but after Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, most of the rest of the performers were white, which seems a bit odd. Joan Baez sang "We Shall Overcome" (umm, who's "We", Joan?) and then Dylan sang "When the Ship Comes In", and "Only a Pawn in Their Game", and only one of those is directly about racism. Then Peter, Paul and Mary performed Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind", I guess because they had released a record of it at the time, and it was successful on the charts? Bob Dylan later said that he felt uncomfortable as a white man, serving as a public image for the civil rights movement. Also, Dylan's since publicly stated that songs he wrote after reading about events in the 1850's or 1860's were misinterpreted by people in the 1960's who thought his songs were commenting on current events. He wasn't singing about civil rights, he was singing about the Civil War, and it was all a big misunderstanding - albeit a positive one.
Perhaps similarly, Dylan's said he wrote "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though technically he wrote the song a month before (Bob never lets truth get in the way of a good story, apparently.). Although there's no direct connection, the song is about a period of hardship and suffering that's approaching - so when JFK got assassinated, some people felt this added a new layer of meaning to the song - there were a few years of suffering as the country recovered, and once again, Dylan looked like a prophet - though an accidental one.
But now that the era of protests is back, with calls for racial justice and racial equality, Black Lives Matter and all that, where is this new generation's Bob Dylan? Why hasn't the entertainment media reflected the new era of protests? Even though Dylan claimed that his songs weren't about civil rights, at another point in time he said, "All of my songs are protest songs." But perhaps he was just being cheeky with a reporter, it sure seems like he didn't like answering dumb questions from the press.
After the infamous U.K. concert where Dylan was called "Judas", he's seen talking to his musicians and staff (?) where he expresses a desire to cut the tour short, not go to Italy, and return home to the U.S. He was apparently somewhat afraid of dying in a small private plane crash in Europe if he continued on the tour - and the ironic thing here is that shortly after arriving back in the U.S., he had that motorcycle accident near Woodstock and stopped touring for 8 years. I guess we'll never know what might have happened if he'd stuck it out in Europe for another week - maybe he would have died in a plane crash. Maybe the reality in which he broke his neck on a motorcycle and lived like a very productive recluse for a time is the best of all possible timelines.
But since this documentary wraps up just before that crash, and we all know that eventually Dylan toured again and had many hundreds of concerts still left in him, somehow a documentary that's three and a half hours long also managed to feel somewhat incomplete. How is that possible? And is Scorcese ever going to make a follow-up that explores the 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th) halves of Dylan's career? Or is he just going to stop with the Rolling Thunder tour? I saw one fake obituary online where someone claimed that Bob Dylan "died" in 1965, I believe they meant metaphorically. Fans of acoustic guitars still have an axe to grind, I guess - but then why were there rumors about Paul McCartney dying in a car crash and being replaced by a look-alike, but no similar rumors about Bob Dylan?
Also, from now until the end of my days, I'm going to think about Al Kooper every time I hear "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio - Al had been outshined on the guitar during the recording sessions, so he relocated to the control booth, but took the opportunity to get back in when the organist was called away. Al jumped on the keyboard to the dismay of the recording's producer, but he didn't really know all the chord changes - so you can hear that the organ often comes in about a half-second after everyone else, that was Al after confirming the new chord. Dylan noticed it and apparently liked it, he asked the engineer to turn the organ UP instead of down, and Al thought he was about to get fired from the session, but that wasn't the case.
It's worth noting that Bob Dylan may not have EGOT status, he's only halfway there since he has no Emmys or Tonys. But he has several Grammys, and also an Oscar for the song "Things Have Changed" from the movie "Wonder Boys" in 2001. So if you add in his special Pulitzer Prize and the recent Nobel prize for literature, he does have PONG. (Pulitzer, Oscar, Nobel, Grammys) How many other people can say they've achieved that?
Also starring Joan Baez (carrying over from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Allen Ginsberg (ditto), Bob Neuwirth (ditto), Liam Clancy, John Cohen, Lamar Fike, Tony Glover, John Hammond, Carolyn Hester, Bob Johnston, Mickey Jones (last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Harold Leventhal, Greil Marcus, Mitch Miller, Artie Mogull, Maria Muldaur, Paul Nelson, D.A. Pennebaker, Christopher Ricks, Dave Van Ronk, Manny Roth, Suze Rotolo, Pete Seeger, Roy Silver, Mark Spoelstra, Mavis Staples (last seen in "Graffiti Bridge"), Sean Wilentz, Peter Yarrow (last seen in "While We're Young"), Izzy Young, the voice of Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman")
with archive footage of Steve Allen (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Selma"), Mike Bloomfield, Sonny Bono (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Johnny Cash, Cher (last seen in "Mermaids"), David Crosby (also last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Rick Danko (last seen in "The Kids Are Alright"), Ossie Davis (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), James Dean (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday, Garth Hudson, Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "The Irishman"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Peter La Farge (carrying over from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Roger McGuinn (ditto), Richard Manuel, Johnny Mathis, John Jacob Niles, Odetta, Lee Harvey Oswald, Patti Page, Webb Pierce, Johnnie Ray (last seen in "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World"), Robbie Robertson (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Mario Savio, Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, Bobby Vee, Gene Vincent, Muddy Waters (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"), Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf and the voice of Studs Terkel (last seen in "Life Itself").
RATING: 7 out of 10 Greenwich Village clubs
No comments:
Post a Comment