I watched Martin Scorcese's documentary about Bob Dylan in his Greenwich Village and Newport Folk Festival days on PBS this week. Four solid hours of many, many interviews with ancient people who knew him then: Dave van Ronk, Joan Baez, a Clancy brother (Liam), Maria Muldaur, his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (lovely face, still) and record execs. Available as a DVD it contains the soundtrack of many live performances never-before released on CD.
One of the record execs said that in those days the song was the big thing you sold, and they made sure that Bob Dylan's songs were recorded by everyone, because that's how they made money. Blowin' in the Wind was recorded by just about everybody it seems, even the Staples Singers. That's why Dylan got famous: he wrote the best songs.
There's also some amazing film of Dylan singing. Singing? He kind of redefines singing. Who sings more demotically, more conversationally, more vernacularly? He's like a Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady on amphetamine cut with heroine. A crazy bard. His style is so distinctive, it's like he's from another planet, some weird Appalachian New Orleans Creole region where the people speak in sneers and innuendo and mumbles — method actors who've forgotten their method — and drop the words out of their mouths like unwieldy insect pebbles with stings in their twitching tails.
Three songs stand out: Blowin' in the Wind, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and Masters of War. Protest songs they were called. There's also an exceptional live version of the exceptionally strong Ballad of a Thin Man, with Bob sitting at the piano and knocking out the chords, and belting the lyrics so animatedly, he seems like a doll spinning down from maximum windup. Also, nice versions of Desolation Row and Bob Dylan's Dream.
He looked like such a baby then. Joan Baez talks about how they both had so much puppy fat in their faces.
A much older and grizzled Dylan is interviewed throughout. He says that it was very easy for him to write songs then, because it was new to him, and he felt he was doing something in an arena of his own that nobody was doing.
His songs of those days have the unique air of a Biblical prophet about them. The language itself is Biblical, or shall we say high-toned St. James, ex cathedra from on high, and morally inflamed with righteous anger, scorn and remonstrance. Very biting, highly damning. Yes, he outright damned — for example, in addressing the Masters of War:
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Sean
Interetsting critique. I think the reason we don't have a "Dylan" now is twofold. First the music scene is so fractured that no one artist can transcend the various genres. Rap fans are notlistening to country; Country fans are not listening to reggae; etc.
Second, Dylan is that rare artist who though he is very much of his time also transcends his time. Think Shakespeare or Dante. That is the company Dylan keeps.
My favorite part of the documentary was when he spoke of two high school sweethearts and how they brought out the poet in him. He smiled as he said it, and for a moment he was not "Bob Dylan." Rather, he was Bob, a middle aged guy reminiscing about long lost love.
2 - Bob A. Booey
Good God. Stop yourselves.
Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Matisse, Bergman, Dante, Shakespeare, Rushdie, De Niro?
He was an above-average pop poet who actively borrowed from the language of poetry and wrote so-called "protest" songs of social relevance without ever doing the political thought necessary to flesh out any real political commitment. Dylan was mystical and vague and preferred the aura of mystery where others (like Baez in the documentary) got on the frontlines and used their art to change the times.
"Hard Rain" is a great song, but as poetry itself, it's nothing special. Very few tenured English professors actually teach Dylan and the hippies that do are pseudo-academics trying to seem hip and pretend that their Boomer ideals weren't compromised by the fake counterculture of the 60s that Dylan was at the forefront of, a vague, gooey product of rebellion and sentiment to be consumed.
The worst analogy of all that you infer is to Martin Luther King, Jr. Dylan had none of the courage and grace and only half the poetic beauty of King and his words. Dylan was never an intellectual, as the documentary makes clear, and to attribute great ideas to his lyrics does a disservice to the people you analogize him to.
The problem with Dylan is that he never would or did stand up to the Christian Right or those CEOs. In fact, you're as likely to see them at his concerts driving their gas-guzzling SUVs while buying $35 concert T-shirts and wearing $150 Birkenstocks as you are to find ex-hippies who run an organic grocery in their retirement from being stock brokers. That's the problem with Dylan -- he hinted at a lot of things, but never challenged anyone to change or give up their lifestyles of diffident consumption and cruetly.
Adam, I like a lot of this piece and it sounds like it could belong in any mainstream review publication, but Ithink you were trying too hard to sound writer-ly with this:
"drop the words out of their mouths like unwieldy insect pebbles with stings in their twitching tails."
That is all.
3 - Butt-Head
What?
4 - Shark
[Shark enters "Dylan Review Room" -- notices the attack pup Bob A. Booey already gnawing on leg of gold-plated plaster statue of Robert Zimmerman; Shark decides to keep his mouth shut and admire attack pup's "biting" analysis.]
=====
Oops, a stray thought...
"...I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children..."
Funny, typing out the lyrics to "Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" makes it sound more like a pile of steaming, pretentious, amateurish bullshit.
======
PS: "A Martin Scorsese Picture" -- this arrogant asshole should be taken out and hung by his thumbs over a vat of hot popcorn butter. Ooooh, an AUTEUR who uses 90% of other people's film; now that's FUCKING IRONIC.
5 - Shark
Adam's Next review:
"Madonna's Truth or Dare: She's Frida Kahlo, Botticelli's Venus, and Colette All Rolled Into One!"
6 - Kent Bourland
Dear Adam Ash
I think your perspective is valid, and your comments are pretty well considered, and interesting.
You are just simply mistaken when you say he is played out, and wonder why he's still playing.
The fact is that he is living what he said; becoming what he is.
After you and I have become memories, the tapes of the 21st century concerts will be gathered together as jewels, and the regret will be that each one of them was not preserved in visual format.
There is no mystery about why we seek to see him at each opportunity: He is in his performance prime THESE days.
Kent Bourland
7 - Adam Zero
No Direction, Period
The much-hyped Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan's early career to 1966 has arrived on U.S. airways, thanks to PBS American Masters.
I'm not sure what the point of this series is, beyond heaping homage and glorification on hand-picked American Artists, and then communally basking in their glow. After all, we as Americans "created" them. Don't we deserve some of the credit--if only sitting passively through documentaries informing us of the importance of these "Masters"?
So it is with Bob Dylan--via Scorsese. The hype is through the roof on this one. "The Best Film About Anybody" one headline screams. Another says this is Scorsese's best picture.
As Dylan himself wrote on the back of one of his albums, "Whaaat?!"
There is nothing that unique or informative about the Dylan opus--shown in two 2-hour installments. Dylan's own playroom attempts at film hold more stylistic interest. No, despite the hype, this is not on the level of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver (to be honest, Dylan's just not as interesting as Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle). No, unlike Werner Herzog who has made some truly visionary documentaries that complement his fictive work, Scorsese has yet to turn that corner. His attempt at documentary is garden variety--"newly found" vintage clips interspersed with candid interviews with friends capped with "authorized" words by the man himself. (Is there a reason why some of the musicians interviewed have to be holding their instruments awkwardly, as if they were an extra appendage they never put down--e.g., Pete Seeger?)
We wander through the familiar narrative of Dylan's life--the us-vs.-them agon of hipster and folkie. The hero-artist performing for booing audiences. The genius typewriting late into the night, fed by an number of cross-indicated stimulants.
The upshot of the film seems to be: "golly gee whiz, Dylan wrote all these amazing songs, suffered to such for it, he must be a Genius or something." He's touched by the holy spirit (according to producer Bob Johnston) or a shaman (according to Allen Ginsberg). Or he's the supremely talented dope (according to Joan Baez, who seems closest to the voice of sanity in this thing).
For more check adamzero.blogspot.com
8 - Adam Zero
No Direction, Period
The much-hyped Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan's early career to 1966 has arrived on U.S. airways, thanks to PBS American Masters.
I'm not sure what the point of this series is, beyond heaping homage and glorification on hand-picked American Artists, and then communally basking in their glow. After all, we as Americans "created" them. Don't we deserve some of the credit--if only sitting passively through documentaries informing us of the importance of these "Masters"?
So it is with Bob Dylan--via Scorsese. The hype is through the roof on this one. "The Best Film About Anybody" one headline screams. Another says this is Scorsese's best picture.
As Dylan himself wrote on the back of one of his albums, "Whaaat?!"
There is nothing that unique or informative about the Dylan opus--shown in two 2-hour installments. Dylan's own playroom attempts at film hold more stylistic interest. No, despite the hype, this is not on the level of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver (to be honest, Dylan's just not as interesting as Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle). No, unlike Werner Herzog who has made some truly visionary documentaries that complement his fictive work, Scorsese has yet to turn that corner. His attempt at documentary is garden variety--"newly found" vintage clips interspersed with candid interviews with friends capped with "authorized" words by the man himself. (Is there a reason why some of the musicians interviewed have to be holding their instruments awkwardly, as if they were an extra appendage they never put down--e.g., Pete Seeger?)
We wander through the familiar narrative of Dylan's life--the us-vs.-them agon of hipster and folkie. The hero-artist performing for booing audiences. The genius typewriting late into the night, fed by an number of cross-indicated stimulants.
The upshot of the film seems to be: "golly gee whiz, Dylan wrote all these amazing songs, suffered to such for it, he must be a Genius or something." He's touched by the holy spirit (according to producer Bob Johnston) or a shaman (according to Allen Ginsberg). Or he's the supremely talented dope (according to Joan Baez, who seems closest to the voice of sanity in this thing).
For more check adamzero.blogspot.com
9 - adam
Listen up, Booey and Shark:
I have a question for both of you posturing Dylan ignoramuses: who do you think is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan? In fact, who do you rank as a great songwriter? Mariah Carey? Michael Stipe? Jennifer Warren? Madonna? Kurt Cobain? Ozzy Ozbourne?Usually I find comments from you guys more valuable than most on BC, and I'm grateful the two of you exist in what is often a field of endless fools, but when it comes to Dylan, you both have a black hole where an important part of your brain should be.
I'm not the only one who thinks Bob Dylan wrote the best song lyrics of all time. The Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, a dude whose views on poetry I respect more than yours, regards him as one of the best poets of all time. Here's a discussion from one article:
Bob Dylan is an actual artist working in a popular field. We have precious few of those, and I think I mentioned just about all of the better songwriters in my post to make my point for Dylan being the best of all. Songwriting can be a high art, and Bob Dylan's lyrics places his songwriting among the highest art, as Bergman makes the greatest art out of the popular medium of film.
So dudes, get your sneering wise-ass heads out of your asses, and check out his albums. You both seem old enough to have been around during the 60s or the 70s when Dylan produced his best work, but perhaps you were too busy cracking bongs and selling T-shirts on Grateful Dead tours. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but clearly you have some work to do to make up for a regrettable lack of basic cultural enlightenment.
10 - adam
Shark, you're right about one thing, BTW. No Direction Home was not directed by Martin Scorcese. It was merely edited by him. He's a pompous asshole to call himself the director, that's for sure. The closest thing to a director on it was Dylan's manager, who did the 10-hour interview with Dylan that Scorsese edited for the film, and presumably had all the footage besides the stuff Pennebaker and Lerner had shot.
11 - Chris Kent
I've never thought musical composers/performers were bookish intellectuals, and I never will. That does not diminish the unique greatness of Bob Dylan. He's imperfect, pretentious, fascinating and extraordinary.
As for knocking Scorsese in such a vile manner. Well, that says more about the writer than Scorsese.
No Direction Home was thought-provoking and about as fine a documentary as I've seen in a long time. I loved it. Those of us who love both music and film found an interesting meshing of the two. Highly, highly recommended.
12 - Natalie Davis
Exactly what I was thinking while watching it. The footage all came from other sources and had other directors; Scorsese simply played cut-and-paste. And frankly, while I enjoyed the documentary and seeing all the rare video and hearing young Mr. Zimmerman croon, I really didn't learn anything new about Bob Dylan. Essentially, No Direction Home was a pleasant diversion, but not much more. Which is a shame: I consider Dylan to be one of the most important artists and poets of all time. It would have been nice to have seen something more than a stylized slobberfest with pretty pictures.
13 - Chris Kent
"That Ken Burns fella didn't do anything but film a few sunsets and do a cut and paste job. He dudn't know anything about makin' dem dar documentaries. Just a beeg heestorecal slobberfest with peety pictures."
14 - adam
Natalie, you're right.
I'd also like to throttle Scorcese for cutting away from some great performances. When Scorcese cut away from Ballad of a Thin Man, just when Dylan was really tearing into the song, I wanted to stick every Dylan song up Scorcese's gray sphincter. An opportunity was missed -- he could've made a really great documentary.
I think, just for a start, it would've benefited from some rock critics weighing in, like Greil Marcus, for example. And Prof. Ricks.
It strikes me that Scorcese was a total Dylan ignoramus (the first he ever heard of Dylan was when he heard Like a Rolling Stone, for chrissake) and that he was asked to get in on the action because he'd made The Last Waltz about The Band, Dylan's backup band.
I think Dylan's manager, who is the big mover behind this, should try again, with someone who's actually familiar with Dylan's work. There's the rest of Dylan's life to be chronicled -- and the greater part, which includes his even more magnificent songwriting of the 70s.
It might be great to get a knowledgable fan like Professor Ricks to do it, with a better editor than Scorcese to help him.
Did you see Scorcese interviewed about it by Charlie Rose? Scorcese struck me as a dabbler in Dylan territory, with no inside-himself idea of Dylan's significance, and no actual abiding love for his work, merely the respect of an amateur outsider. Heck, I could've been a better editor of the material, because Dylan actually MEANT something to me.
15 - Mark Saleski
that Scorcese was a total Dylan ignoramus
and there's a parallel here to burns' jazz movie. burns didn't know much about jazz and so relied upon people like Wynton and Stanley Crouch.
so what we got was Louis Armstrong in every freaking episode.
16 - Bob A. Booey
Thanks for the nice words and good debate, Adam. Does anyone else think Shark is trying to be the Ginsberg to my Dylan in a weird way? :)
Scorsese is a FAR more brilliant, valuable artist than Dylan. Marty would probably disagree since he is a huge Dylan fan (maybe not as geeky as you all), but he has for more interesting ideas, more genuine passion and command of a far more challenging medium.
Ricks is trying to seem current and hip, but he would have never gotten tenure at Oxford had his major work been interpreting Dylan's vague hippie poetics.
Even the article you quote contains a HUGE caveat -- he says:
""The case would need to begin with his medium. [...] songs are only fully realized in performance. It takes the lyrics, music, and voice working in tandem to unpack the power of a song, whereas a poem ideally stands up by itself, on the page, controlling its own timing and internal music. Dylan's lyrics, and most especially his creative rhyme-making, may only work, as critic Ian Hamilton has written, with "Bob's barbed-wire tonsils in support."
He's saying Dylan's words wouldn't stand up on their own in a poetry anthology, which is obviously quite true, but that he loves the music so much and Dylan's voice that it makes the words work in a way beyond their literary quality.
So he's a super fan-boy, good for him.
Here's someone smarter than all of us and maybe even smarter than Ricks, and certainly more objective on this point, Thomas Frank:
"And from its very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors. [...] Apart from certain obvious exceptions at either end of the spectrum of commodification (represented, say, by the MC-5 at one end and the Monkees at theother) it was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counter-culture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particulary the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were the rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies.From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Boby Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and THe Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s."
Give me time to catch up to Ricks, Adam :) I mean, if he really likes Dylan so much that he'd sacrifice his professional credibility and taste, it shouldn't be too hard.
That is all.
17 - Shark
Adam: "I have a question for both of you posturing Dylan ignoramuses: who do you think is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan?"
Oh, the list goes on and on.
(BTW: I wrote better poetry than Dylan when I was in junior high. But I had much better drugs.)
========
Chris Kent, you talkin' to me?!
re: Ken Burns -
well, yeah, FEH.
I don't have a problem with an artistic assemblage of old photos with a nicely written voice-over; but I think the well-lit talking heads going on for hours is/was a bit of a cop-out/overkill.
"I'm not a writer; I don't have anything original to say; I think I'll stick a few historians in a chair and LET THEM TELL THE STORY FOR ME."
feh.
His brother, Rick Burns makes much better documentaries.
======
re: no knowledge on subject, etc. -- What Saleski said re. Armstrong.
(btw: Jelly Roll, one of the greatest geniuses of jazz -- was given about 30 seconds in that entire epic; ie CRIME.)
18 - Shark
One more thing, Kent: all I'm asking is that these directors drop this "A FILM BY..." and/or "A ___ FILM" if they didn't write the screenplay, operate the cameras, edit, cast, act in, do production and costume design, etc, etc.
Auteur Theory is a crock of shit...
..and "A Martin Scorsese Picture" implies that he's an arrogant dick with an inferiority complex. Isn't "Directed by..." ENOUGH?
19 - Bob A. Booey
OK, I'll bite Adam's bait :)
Wait, that didn't sound quite right, but here goes ...
Yes, Kurt Cobain was a better musician than Bob Dylan and more important too when people look back on this era of music centuries later. Cobain basically destroyed corporate rock and brought punk to bear upon the mainstream years after it failed to shake America the first time around. He influenced an entire generation of Gen X kids in fashion, politics and culture. Dylan was a brilliant salesman of images and culture, but he was more interpreting the spirit of the time than leading it. Dylan DID NOT change the society he lived in -- any objective analysis of the politics, consumption and lifestyles of his Baby Boomer fans makes that VERY clear. He merely gave mediocre capitalist pseudo-intellectual types a poetic diversion as the soundtrack for their unchallenged lives.
As lyricists, Dylan and Cobain share some of the same faults, writing vague, abstract metaphors and bizarrely juxtaposed images to avoid having to say anything concrete or political. Cobain was Dylan with more anger, balls, and integrity.
That is all.
20 - Shark
Added points for killing himself.
21 - ss
Just a question since I have some Dylan fans here.
I heard a Dylan song about a boxer who fought until he got beat to death, and no one would take responsibility, like the ref blamed the manager, the manager blamed the crowd, the crowd blamed the sport, etc.
What is the name of that song and what album is it on?
I heard it a old friend/music snob's house, and his music snob girlfriend commented on how great it was, like they both knew it and really wanted me to ask and show my ignorance.
I just couldn't do it, which has been my loss for about five yeats now, because it was a great song.
Can anyone help me out on this one?
22 - dymoku
Who killed Davey Moore? is the song in question. It's from way back and i'm not sure it was on an album.
23 - adam
Dear Booey:
I'll give you this, at least you take up my challenge, unlike Shark, who is running away from the challenge like a wimp of a sardine. But, Booey, man, you're displaying Swiss Cheese holes bigger than actual cheese protein in your brain to an embarrassing extent.
Cobain made two albums, one of which was good. Dylan has made over forty, of which at least eight are masterpieces, from which at least a hundred songs count as absolutely incredible.
Cobain's influence on the culture? Johnny Rotten had more influence. Cobain's contribution comes down to inspiring kids to wear flannel shirts hanging out of their jeans, for chrissake. Are you being serious, dude, or have those bongs from your Grateful Dead days left you permanently scarred?
As for Scorcese -- he's made one masterpiece, Raging Bull, and three other OK movies, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. Plus reams of embarrassing crap, of which The Last Temptation of Christ is not even the most embarrassing.
Hardly an output that places him in the same firmament as Bob Dylan. You can't even put Scorcese up there with Billy Wilder, or a workmanlike dude like Wise, let alone Orson Welles or Bergman or Fellini or Godard. The only reason Scorcese counts today is that all our current US directors suck, and film school students slobber over him because he started out pretty flashy, but he's still resting on his 80s laurel of Raging Bull. For the last 20 years Scorsese has been about as valuable as Michael Bay.
Thomas Frank!? Please. A hack pol commentator who struck it lucky with one book. Calling Dylan a fake Woody Guthrie shows him for the faker he is.
Booey, I'm disappointed. I expected more of a debate from you. But then I forgive you, because it's crystal clear that you're unfamiliar with Dylan's work, and have entered a debate for which you're completely unqualified. So you get an A for brashness, and a Z for ignorance. Kurt Cobain indeed. For chrissake, Elton John has a better and bigger collection of songs, and had more influence on the culture than Cobain, what with Elton making it safe for gays to be flamboyant queens in our society.
Booey, do yourself a favor: listen to maybe only three Dylan albums, say Blonde on Blonde, Desire, and Blood on the Tracks, none of which you've obviously ever listened to, and then let's talk again.
But at least you didn't duck my question like that guppie who calls himself Shark. He ain't no Ginsberg to your Dylan. He's not even the Mary in Peter Paul and Mary.
24 - RogerMDillion
"Cobain basically destroyed corporate rock"
No, he didn't. He made the suits take notice and change their business models, resulting in "alternative" and "grunge" becoming the latest new fads that people could easily identify.
While flannel sales went up because of the "grunge" look, what was the political impact that Cobain had?
Shark, if you have an issue with a film's credits, protest against the DGA and stop watching films. It's their rules that allow it.
25 - adam
Unless the song you're thinking of is "Hurricane" about the boxer Hurricane Carter, first track on the Desire album. As a propulsive rock song, it's perhaps even better than "Like A Rolling Stone." It really rocks out with some damn righteous fury.