"No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"
Ken A. Bode
October 19, 2005
At one point in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," Joan Baez observes, "Some people are just not interested in Dylan. But for those who are, he goes way, way deep."
She is right, and this documentary is for the aficionados who will applaud the decision of Susan Lacy of Thirteen/WNET's American Masters series and her production partners to give Martin Scorsese two segments and the equivalent of a full length movie to tell his story.
With archival and concert footage blended with Dylan's own home movies, the video is astonishingly rich, never repetitive, deeply engaging. Scorsese covers only the period between 1961-1966, following Dylan from boyhood in Hibbing, Minnesota to New York City, a pilgrimage to find the ailing Woodie Guthrie.
Organized chronologically, the documentary follows Dylan to the cafes and coffee houses of Greenwich Village to the Newport Folk Festivals which became so important in the artist's musical transformations. When Dylan first met Johnny Cash at Newport, it is said that the awestruck youngster walked twice around the man in black, nodding and examining. Then he stopped, looked up at Cash and exclaimed, "Yeah!" In a gesture of admiration, Johnny Cash gave Dylan his guitar.
Scorsese tells the story with a masterful tour of Dylan's music, his musings and the reminiscences of friends like Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur, Allen Ginsberg and the many others who shared the concert stage and coffee house jam sessions during the most explosive period of Dylan's talent. For those who love the music, the rich reward of these programs are the protest songs and the story songs, sung the way he did in his earliest albums. Scorsese anchors the music to the times by using news footage to remind viewers what was going on offstage. We see JFK's motorcade in Dallas, a CBS News report from Vietnam and Mario Savio's firebrand speech at Columbia U.
This is the period of the skinny, scruffy, playful balladeer who usually took the stage alone with an acoustic guitar and harmonica. It is the time when Dylan and Joan Baez were lovers. She was devoted to the civil rights and peace movements. He was involuntarily dragged along as the ordained troubadour of those changing times, easily the most powerful cultural force around.
During these years, Dylan's productivity was so phenomenal that he sometimes lost track of the songs he wrote. In one lovely, black-and-white scene, Dylan and Baez are together, he composing at a typewriter, she strumming and singing "Love is a Four Letter Word." Bob Dylan liked the song when he heard it, Baez recounts, but he had forgotten he wrote it.
In the second section of "No Direction Home," a good bit of time is devoted to Dylan's transition from the acoustic period to the raw edged rock and roll with back-up by musicians who would later become The Band. Among fans and friends, there was great resistance to this transformation, led by none other than Pete Seeger. The remodeled Dylan was repeatedly met by a chorus of boos and charges of betrayal. At a London concert, a disappointed fan calls it "rubbish."
Change has been a constant hallmark of Dylan's career, and Scorsese lets him explain himself in footage from old interviews and press conferences along with a recent session with the singer more reflective and expressive than in his own autobiography, "Chronicles: Volume 1."
At one point, Bob Dylan is asked by a news reporter, "Are you a singer or a poet? What is your role?" Dylan replies, "My role is to stay here as long as I can." Surely he has done that.