Friends
Inquisitive friends
Are asking me what’s come over me
“(I wanna) Testify” – The Parliaments
For all that first guess would have seen Martin Scorcese, director of The Last Waltz, “presenter” of the PBS Blues series, compiler of many rock soundtracks as the obvious choice to do The American Masters Bob Dylan. The finished thing is, like Goodfellas or Casino or The Last Temptation of Christ, the work of Martin Scorcese, connoisseur of betrayal. At the time No Direction Home was broadcast, someone in Slate grumbled that writers of a certain age talked about Dylan as if he were strictly a 60’s artist and ignored his later career, about 40 years worth. There’s an easy answer, but it’s a good point.Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, and Blonde on Blonde are landmarks, sure, but people that have followed Dylan over the years could as easily put together 3 mix sides of post-accident Dylan that they’d listen to a lot more. By the mid-60’s, Dylan had already recorded with a band and accompanied himself on piano, and rock – particularly the Beatles – was being accorded a previously unknown respect. Electric Dylan, that thin wild mercury sound had no business shocking anybody. It shocked somebody; and that is the subject of No Direction Home.
The film opens with Dylan and the Hawks on stage, in color, playing – just a taste – of one his older songs; and cuts to black and white, and the same song, solo and acoustic. Scorcese certainly knows how to let a song play out and provide the visual accompaniment. Here, he provides snippets. You know this one? Good. How much does he even care about folkie Dylan? He grew up in the same streets in the same years as the folk scene he shows here. He must have passed by many of these people all the time – passed them right by. Picture Michael, the loan shark in Mean Streets, spending an evening listening to Odetta. But even the electric material is doled out stingily. Scorcese likes Visconti better than he likes Dylan, and the music wasn’t allowed to distract from the drama. But after all, you can get the music elsewhere (preferably not on the No Direction Home CDs), and the music in the film is still worth hearing. Michael Bloomfield is here, in his best days. Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, formerly Howling Wolf’s rhythm section, are heard – though not credited – on “Maggie’s Farm,” compounding the offense of Newport.
Dylan’s own offense was not really a musical one. And it was not – except in a more diffuse sense – a political one. The new Dylan did not want to move into a fallout shelter, and he didn’t think that William Zanzinger had got a raw deal. That he wouldn’t say so was disturbing. 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, with its more private concerns – as if – was met with its share of grumbling, but nothing like the spitefest to come – oh, it was reciprocated. The likelihood that “political” Dylan, that certain trumpet, was gone for good, one could resign oneself to it. Some commentary at the time even proposed that loculated protest movements could become a mass movement only by becoming mostly a youth movement, and that essential to that transformation might be the carrying over of the values of the “folk revival” into the newfangled folk-rock: the Big Beat needed recruiting. The cultural politics of the mid and late 60’s made such claims plausible. But then Dylan went around the world at the height of Vietnam playing rock & roll in front of a giant American flag. He said nothing particular, and probably meant nothing particular, about the American (and international) political scene. But as provocation, well, he couldn’t hire Lyndon Johnson for his band.
Bob Dylan came to New York from Minnesota. There he settled into a little bohemia, the folk scene; he picked up a name and began a career; and on his way out the door, he blew the place up. What makes it even better is that he was right. Liam Clancy is shown, got up in a sort of ethnic cap, holding forth in a bar. Of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, he says, “Freedom only existed here in the Village.” And while the Clancy Brothers may have been around the world any number of times, to look at Liam Clancy here, you’d swear he hasn’t stirred from this room in fifty years. And the riches in that room – only a little larger, that was the folk scene – were quite finite, and for a Bob Dylan it would not take long to run through them. There is a sense running through this film, as there was in David Hadju’s book on Dylan and Richard Farina, of Dylan as an opportunist, a hustler.[1] The charge is hard to take seriously. Part of the point of playing “folk music” was that the song came from someone else. Dave Van Ronk concedes that “House of the Rising Sun” wasn’t really his. But no: it really wasn’t his. The question is what you do with the song – and anyone can play. In Mean Streets, Robert De Niro tells Harvey Keitel, “You got what you wanted.” Yeah, even if he did, what does that change?
The film shows a range of Dylan’s musical used-to-be’s. Here is John Jacob Niles, offered as the source for “It Ain’t Me Babe.” It looks like an outtake from Nightmare Alley. To get away from such an encounter with your reason, let alone a song, is an achievement. We hear from Izzy Young: earnest, generous and altogether unpunctual. Peter Yarrow (Songs of Conscience and Concern), Joan Baez, and Dave Van Ronk all talk, all somewhat wronged. All, though the film doesn’t say so, “went electric” after Dylan gave them the idea.[2]
Has any other genre had its falsity so laid bare by a single defector? Pete Seeger is a vivid presence here. He poses with a banjo (I am a folk musician), and he wears a festive red shirt (Here all is jollity). And he is here to say that nothing is wrong, nothing was wrong. Did he try to cut the sound cables at Newport? No, but he was concerned about the sound. One thing Seeger says here is worth preserving. Who were the Communists, once so much spoken of? They were revolutionaries, the only revolutionaries. There were, in a phrase often used, dead men on parole. And how did all that work out? You may pass your idle hours reading the martyrologies of a Paul Buhle or a Victor Navasky, or get it straight from Seeger.
Not 2 years later, instead of singing at the Waldorf Astoria or Ciro’s in Hollywood, we were singing in Daffy’s Bar & Grill on the outskirts of Cleveland and we decided to take a sabbatical.
When Seeger gets to “Waldorf-Astoria”, he pronounces the first A with a hard a, like the first a in “sassafras”, not the schwa a New Yorker would use, nor even the narrow a, as in the name “Astor”. From Seeger’s mouth, it is As-toria. Peter Seeger, untutored rustic, and tread carefully when a four-syllable word looms. Now, the 4th street Dylan was guilty of lots of fake yokelisms, and worse than Seeger’s. But he was young; and subject to bad influences (Seeger’s not least); and they were a product of awkwardness; and a sense attended them of shame. Dylan is a famous mumbler. Actually, he says cryptic things, and is soft-spoken, and sometimes does mumble. Pete Seeger doesn’t mumble.
In the early 60’s, 20-year-olds like to sing:
All my trials
Soon be over
Bob Dylan had read somewhere that all his troubles in the world came from not being able to sit still in a room and wouldn’t they be worth meeting!
In Nick Tosches’ appreciation of the blackface performer Emmett Miller, Where Dead Voices Gather, Bob Dylan’s name is brought up a few times, and each time, he is praised in the highest terms. This is puzzling. Dylan is an icon of the ‘60s. And Tosches’ books include biographies of Dean Martin, the anti-Beatle, and Sonny Liston, the anti-Ali, and Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll, and Country: the Biggest Music in America, both assaults on that sunny image of that sunny child of the sunny 60’s, rock.[3]
No Direction Home helps solve the puzzle. As much as any individual, Bob Dylan invented The Sixties; as much any individual – and at the same time denounced The Sixties.
Greil Marcus used the phrase “the old weird America” (for one thing) to describe the Harry Smith anthology. But the phrase is very much in the spirit of the various things Dylan himself has said about “folk music.” Think again of Liam Clancy in that barroom. The old, weird America was not there. But you could hear about it there, maybe even get a glimpse of it there. Past a certain point, there was no point hanging around. Freedom only in the Village? Freedom was always available: in the old weird America, among Tosches’ desperadoes, in pulp and noir. Claiming it, though, might cost your life. Village freedom was, by comparison, a straitened thing, virtually an oxymoron.
Dylan’s world, ca. ’65-’66, wasn’t the old, weird America, either. It couldn’t be. If not “old”, it was – especially relative to most other pop of the day – rooted. And if not “weird” in that older sense, it was, at least, free to roam. In the film, we hear reactions from English ex-fans after Dylan and the Hawks have played: he “went really commercial”; he’s “prostituting himself”; he has an “incredibly corny group”. It is tempting to call such claims demonstrably false. But these are, after all, questions of taste; and someone who has let it be known that he can’t realize his aesthetic vision without the drummer from “Secret Agent Man” must have known what was coming. There is a shot early in the film of some record charts. Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover of “Blowing in the Wind” is highlighted. That is at #2. Number 1 is “Fingertips, Pt. II”; Elvis Presley’s “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” is #3, and “Wipe Out” is #4. If any song fails to transcend its period, it is Dylan’s. The film shows the Byrds, briefly, playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” before a roomful of screaming teenage girls. Dylan is heard disclaiming any knowledge of “folk-rock”. But put the Byrds’ version of “Chimes of Freedom” – Beatles guitars, Fender amps, bridge appropriated from Donovan, Jim M’Guinn’s awe-struck vocal against Dylan’s original with its world-weary vocal and bare-bones accompaniment. Dylan had just put himself into a more challenging place. A daughter was born to one of the musicians at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Some of the old acoustic regulars, Seeger & Co., take the stage to say, “We’re dedicating this festival to this new child…and this time she’s going grow up in.” This, remember, was a child born into the second half of the ‘60s. If she needed a charm against the time, it would not come from men with banjos, but, with luck, from the Roman candle sounds Dylan had embraced.
The first night of No Direction Home ends with the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. We see Dylan and Joan Baez on stage doing harmony. We see the two at a workshop, Dylan offering pleasantries as he tries to tune his guitar. The pleasantries are received as jokes. The guitar does not get tuned. The second night, and the movie as a whole, ends with footage from 1966 and some inter-titles. The inter-titles tell us that he had a motorcycle accident, was laid up, returned to touring. They don’t tell us – we know already that he had since released album after album, tried out many different sounds, different bands, even different voices, has collaborated with the most improbable people has traveled the world almost without a pause, has taken his older songs places they could never have imagined. The film we see is this: footage, without sound, of people on an English street, in daylight, lined up to get in to see Dylan. Then we see Dylan backstage, strapping on his telecaster, talking half to himself, half to the camera. As he heads for the door, he says that he’s “back from the grave.” Well, not quite, but never far off. Then the screen goes black, and we see the subtitle, “Judas.” We see him, lights up, onstage with the Hawks, and we know the rest of that exchange from Live 66. What’s not on that CD is the visuals. Dylan is bouncing from the mike to the band and back, totally at the mercy of this music that hasn’t started. He’s not happy exactly, happy is not the point, but giddy to be kicking free, someplace else from the people right in front of him who wanted more of what they had already had.
It isn’t here, it isn’t there, it isn’t anywhere you went looking for it.
Notes
1 Hajdu sets Dylan and Farina off against each other, and he leans toward Farina. John Leonard, commenting on Hajdu, and offered that choice, goes with (this is John Leonard, after all) – Joan Baez. There but for fortune…
2 The Bruce Langhorne interview segments are high points of the film, although we’re given no idea of his significance. In the mid-‘60’s, to say that someone had “gone electric” usually meant that Bruce Langhorne had a new record out, and usually meant that he was the most memorable thing on it.
3 Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” was the lost song on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces, following such numbers as “Two Little Hitlers”. If the song had any meaning, it came from the context of a time and musical culture where invocations of “peace” and “love” and “understanding” were suspect – a little “funny”, a little off. The song has been revived in the past few years, that context scrubbed clean. It’s, as they say, as if punk never happened. It’s become “Kumbaya.” There’s one way left to enjoy it: picture Nick Tosches’ face as the song comes on.