Count me among the newly insufferable disciples of Bob Dylan’s musical genius.
And renew my longtime membership among the disciples of genius filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who seamlessly edits Dylan’s early musical development into an inspiring, breathtaking journey.
“No Direction Home,” on PBS Monday and Tuesday nights and already available on DVD, does not offer insight into Dylan the human being. He never will let us go there.
What it paints, brilliantly, is a portrait of the artist as a young, developing instrument of pure talent.
More subtly, it’s one of the most succinct portraits ever created of the devouring nature of American celebrity: We make people famous and then eat them alive. “No Direction Home” shows us exactly why and how Dylan has, thankfully, been running full speed away from us for 45 years.
Scorsese opens with the most enduring legend about Dylan, the kind of apocryphal story casual listeners might let slide for years without examination: The fateful period in 1965 and 1966, when acoustic-folk hero Dylan went back to his rock roots and began fronting what came to be The Band on electric guitar. We see Dylan plugging in before a hostile British crowd, shouts of “Judas” in the air, and Dylan snarls back and rips into one of the greatest questions ever asked by rock ‘n’ roll: “How does it FEEE-eeeel?” from “Like a Rolling Stone.”
I’ve heard that story a dozen times. But how did he get there? Why did it matter? That was the year I was born, how should I know?
Trust Scorsese to tell us, and to remind the baby-boomer fans who may already know. Dylan emerged from the Greenwich Village coffeehouses in 1961 as the new Woody Guthrie, asked by his fans to lead us through song into a more human future. We see remarkable footage of Dylan playing Woody, not so much imitating him as absorbing what he can of the same genius.
And then we see Dylan rejecting all demands to be anybody but himself. What he wanted from Woody, and Muddy Waters, and the Carter Family, and countless others he pays homage to, was not their aura but their skill. He was possessed by the need to learn every style of guitar picking, strumming and crooning; only by trying everything could he eventually reject all of it.
Dylan’s Minneapolis friends speak illuminatingly, if mysteriously, of how fast all this happened. He left for New York, they say, and a few months later he came back “a master.” They cite the legend of blues great Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads to become a guitar virtuoso; they smile nervously, but you can tell that they believe Dylan actually did it.
As Dylan’s songwriting talent grew to poetic proportions, his fans’ demands grew ever more restrictive. They wanted a world leader. He wanted nothing more than to be a bandleader. Scorsese shows that the period in which the public allowed Dylan to be himself was a nanosecond. Without explicitly saying so, Scorsese also makes this point: Isn’t being a true “fan” giving the artist your trust? Follow him a little more, question him a little less?
By the end of his movie, Scorsese has circled back to that British confrontation, and the Newport folk festival blowup that preceded it. Now we understand the anger, both Dylan’s fury and the insatiable desires of his needy legions. This may be only five years of Dylan’s life, but it says all we need to know. He has consciously done exactly what he wants ever since, and good on you, mate.
“I came to see Bob Dylan, not a pop group,” whines one fan leaving the British concert hall.
“Not many pop groups like that,” says a chuckling, more satisfied customer.
Exactly.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
