An American Master: No Direction Home

10/4/05

Imagine yourself a young adult in 1964. You are a little bit bored and you are a little bit restless, so you go down to the local record store to pick up an album. You browse the bins that contain all the vinyl records looking for nothing in particular.

This is what you find:

The mean, brash young face and the accusatory title, this album cover tells you all you need to know about Bob Dylan.

But if you want a more in depth look into the huge transitional period in American cultural history known as the 1960s, all you have to do is watch the brand new Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home," which aired on the American Masters series on PBS Monday and Tuesday and is also available on DVD.

Scorsese attempts to tell the story of the journey of this one man, Bob Dylan, from Minnesota to New York City, from folk hero to rock star and how, in the process, he truly changed the course of American culture.

In a complete moment of clarity, Martin Scorsese wisely chooses not to make a linear biography of Dylan’s whole career focusing just on the years between 1961 – 1966. Personal relationships, drug use and other such components of his life, the things that would fill a typical and inferior documentary, are rarely mentioned if at all. Instead, the breath and quality of his work as well as the deep impact made on the general culture are highlighted, brought to life by an unbelievable wealth of candid films of the performer and the performances themselves.

There is no official "narrator," making definitive statements of objective truth. The story is told with a series of talking heads, all of who were contemporaries of Dylan, and an extensive interview with Dylan himself commenting on the different events being shown.

The Dylan interview is extremely revealing in the fact that it does not reveal anything except what you, the audience, want it to reveal. His brilliance is in the fact that it is the interviewer who is being exposed.

The documentary features many clips that illustrate this main point. For example, here is an exchange from a press conference between Dylan and one pretty intense "hippy":

Hippy: What is the meaning of the photograph and significance of the "Triumph motorcycle" T-shirt you are wearing on your album cover?

Dylan: What would you like to know about it?

Hippy: It’s an equivalent photograph. It means something. It has a philosophy in it. I like to know visually what does it represent to you because you are a part of it.

Dylan: I don’t know. I haven’t really looked at it that much.

Hippy: Well I have thought about it a great deal.

Dylan: We just took the picture one day. I don’t remember.

Hippy: What about the imagery of the motorcycle in your songs?

Dylan: We all like motorcycles to some degree.

Hippy: I do.

Here is another one between Dylan and a reporter in Sweden:

Reporter: They said that you must be the ultimate beatnik?

Dylan: What do you think? I mean c’mon, between you and me, don’t worry I won’t tell anybody.

Reporter: Well, I have no opinion on that.

Dylan: Why not?

Reporter: Because I have not heard you sing yet.

Dylan: You have not even heard me sing and here you are asking me all these questions.

Reporter: It’s my job.

And with an inexperienced reporter in San Fransisco:

Reporter: Do you prefer songs with an obvious or subtle message?

Dylan: A message? Like what song with a message?

Reporter: Like "Eve of Destruction" and songs like that.

Dylan: Do I prefer that to what?

Reporter: I don’t know. Your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.

Dylan: Where did you hear that?

Reporter: I read it in a movie magazine.

The ridiculousness of these press conferences comes in loud and clear. The fact that there were press conferences at all strikes the modern viewer as silly. Dylan knew this even then and treated these journalists accordingly. In one of the more telling exchanges, I believe he blows the lid off of the whole game:

Reporter: You seem to be embarrassed or reluctant to acknowledge you are a very popular singer?

Dylan: I am not embarrassed. It wasn’t a goal I strived for. It just happened like anything else that happened.

Reporter: But you have no personal thoughts on this?

Dylan: What would you like me to do, jump up in the air and yell Hallelujah and do something freaky for the camera? Just what exactly do you want me to do? Tell me exactly what you want me to do and I’ll go along with you and if I can’t, I’m sure you’ll find someone else to go along with you.

And his present day explanation as to why he acted the way he did was as simple and practical as you can get:

I didn't answer these questions any more or less than any other performer really. For some reason, the press thought that performers had the answers to all of society’s problems… which struck me as absurd.

Think about that simple statement the next time you see a swarm of reporters with microphones surrounding U2’s Bono.

In his interview, Dylan comes off as a lawyer who does not have an agenda. He concedes nothing, no matter how obvious it sounds, which at times seems disingenuous. But, if you truly listen, the end result is understanding yourself a little better.

For example, in the present day interview, he is asked about the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he infamously "plugged in" and ripped three loud blues driven numbers (Including a seriously cool version of "Maggie’s Farm") causing the overwhelmingly acoustic folk audience to boo unmercifully.

Dylan’s response is:

There was no negativity to the songs really. The booing had nothing to do with what they were hearing.

At first I thought this was a typical line from Dylan, "pretending" not to know or recognize the obvious. But then I thought about what he said and realized that he actually said something that was incredibly deep and cut more to the bone then any other "proper" analysis could.

His answers are cryptic and seem to ignore or deny the obvious for the sake of being a ball-breaker but, if you think about them, also contain a deeper truth and meaning.

Brilliant.

And that sound you heard in the distance was Dylan himself laughing at me writing this.

"To be on your own..."
NYC - 1962

One of the techniques Scorsese uses to really enhance the already riveting material is his use of chronology. The various talking heads (Old Time Folkies and Dylan himself) speak of events that are arranged pretty much in order: Dylan arrives in New York; Dylan gets discovered by John Hammond; Dylan gets signed with Columbia; Dylan goes electric; etc.

Simple enough, but interspersed between the declarative statements of the interviewees are clips from a concert in England filmed in 1966 where the audience is verbally assaulting Dylan.

For example, in one scene you could have the modern day Pete Seeger or Peter Yarrow saying something like, "the power of the songs were their inspiration," and then cut to Dylan in 1966 sitting down at a piano as someone from the audience yells "You should be sent to Vietnam."

In fact the opening of the film has Dylan and Robbie Robertson, his lead guitarist, counting off as the prelude to "Like a Rolling Stone" and someone yells out "Traitor."

These are dramatic juxtapositions and the intensity of the audience’s dislike in the clips from 1966 is palatable. But watch Dylan’s face during these sequences. Whoever filmed these scenes knew what he was doing. He kept the camera tight on Dylan’s face expressing complete resolve. His eyes usually gravitating to the sky, accenting every line.

It is as if he is so immersed in the song he can not hear the "slings and arrows" of his enemies. He doesn’t seem like he is even in the same room.

If that was all "part of the act" it sure as hell convinced me.

I thought of similar concert footage I saw of that same period. The Beatles at Candlestick Park, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals and they were all the same. Four or five guys in matching suits playing a three minute song and then bowing in unison. And then it hit me.

I possibly was seeing scenes from the first "modern" rock concert.

"Your sons and your daughters
are beyond your command..."
London - 1965

What Scorsese achieves using this method is to try to visually demonstrate just how deep Dylan's betrayal was, or how great was his triumph. Because the two scenes he is usually inter cutting are not that far apart in real-time. In one scene he is being cheered by thousands of people after singing "Mr. Tambourine Man" in 1964 and in the next one, only two years later, someone is shouting "Judas" at him.

Did Dylan betray the folk audiences of the early 1960s or was the audience revealing just how shallow they really were?

The movie falls on the side of Dylan and, quite frankly, so does history.

The "folk community" comes off looking rather badly in this film. Here they are acting as the keepers of the flame of "real music" when in reality they were badly out of touch. When Dylan "plugs in" in 1965, Pete Seeger says, "the distortion was terrible. You could not make out the words." That sounds like a cliché. The old man can’t make it out so it must be bad.

And that film of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival...What a historical cultural document!

When Dylan walks off the stage, after playing only three songs to cat calls and hostile booing, a visibly shaken Peter (from Peter, Paul and Mary) comes to the microphone and begs "Bobby" to come back on the stage and play another song with his acoustic guitar. He looks frightened and he is wiping the sweat off his forehead.

What Peter did next, as we are told by Peter himself, through a contemporary interview, is:

...I ran backstage and found Bob in the corner. I went up to him and he said, "What have you done to me?"

Think about that statement for awhile.

Dylan returns to the stage by himself and plays a beautiful acoustic number. By the end of the song, the crowd is roaring with applause, because now he is playing "real music" again.

Fittingly, the song he plays is "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

WOW.

What comes in loud and clear is the narrow mindedness of these "folkies" when it came to music and yet they were supposed to stand for "the people." I particularly like the way one of them described the mood in Greenwich Village when the news went around that Bob received a recording contract with Columbia:

We all wanted it, so we made it a moral issue. We had to. What that signing did was make us take a long hard look at ourselves…and we didn’t much like what we saw.

Again, Dylan exposes, just by being.

The unjustified moral indignation heaved at Dylan was beautifully answered musically in the songs "Positively 4th Street" and "Like a Rolling Stone," which, I believe, both talk extensively and relentlessly about phoniness, hypocrisy and betrayal of the so-called liberal left.

Dylan's disgust is pretty obvious with lines like:

You never turned around
to see the frowns
on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did
tricks for you

You never understood
that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people
get your kicks for you

"Like a Rolling Stone" - 1965

and

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, "How are you?" "Good luck"
But you don't mean it

When you know as well as me
You'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once
And scream it

"Positively Fourth street" - 1965

But although those two particular songs seem very specific in nature, I believe the genius of the songs is in their grandeur.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, the subject of Dylan's rant is someone in particular whom we do not know. Couldn't his lyrics also be applied to society in general? Is his comment that this whole place is filled with non-sense and double-talk and the closer we come to recognizing our true feelings and thoughts is the closer we get to actually living? Certainly the press conferences and interviews he participated back that position up.

Of course, that’s what I think.

Dylan himself would probably say, "I don’t know anything about that."

In the end, Scorsese skillfully gives us a portrait of a man who, depending on who you asked, was a poet, sage, shaman, musician, celebrity, traiter, sell-out, singer, beatnik, hippy, goof-off, wise-ass or innovator.

But, most importantly of all, he was himself...and still is.

As Joan Baez, former girlfriend of Dylan, put it perfectly:

For those who are not interested, they can just ignore it and who cares. But for the believers...his stuff cuts deep...real deep.

Bob Dylan is not God.

Bob Dylan is a man who makes you believe there could be one.

This is a must see film.
Lawrence Blanchard