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Sean: Tangled up in Bob

Martin Scorsese's PBS documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is manna for a music critic but simply monotonous for a TV writer.

By SEAN DALY
Published September 26, 2005

There's a subtly mind-blowing moment early on in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, the new 207-minute doc/archival orgy obsessively directed by Martin Scorsese. The mercurial icon - giving his most lucid interview in a long, cryptic career - is reminiscing about his teen dating days at Hibbing High School, where a chubby-cheeked Robert Zimmerman courted two Minnesota cuties: Gloria and Echo.

"Both these girls . . . brought out the poet in me," says Dylan, who leers into the camera, a slow sliver of smirk growing in one corner of his mouth. He holds that pose for a few extra, teasing beats, all but daring the viewer to conclude the real reason for his musical motives:

He was only in it for the ladies.

Ain't that just like Bob? The Voice of His Generation - a man who translated a nation's fears as it seismically shifted from the 1950s to the 1960s - is still playing sleight of hand with his legacy, only this time he's doing it in a humble, even charming way. With awkward modesty, he continues to claim he's never been anything more than a "song and dance man."

And who knows? Maybe he really does believe that.

Throughout No Direction Home - a powder keg of a travelogue that details the icon's life up until 1966, a year after he (in)famously went "electric" - the now-64-year-old tries to explain his role as the ultimate antihero, a contrarian who about-faced from a folk phenom performing at Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington to a bitter star burdened with the label of "savior."

"I almost wasn't sure it was happening myself," he says about his early life, acknowledging the possible presence of a great power working the puppet strings.

Credit Scorsese for painting his subject with warts and all, especially during the film's explosive second half, which casual Dylan fans will find more riveting than a first half that lingers in Greenwich Village a bit too long. The director contrasts a young Dylan's increasing apathy with his role as leftist mouthpiece with flickering images of slain presidents, civil rights wrongs and horrors from Vietnam. It Ain't Me, Babe, indeed. His abandonment makes for a gripping narrative.

On one hand, who could handle all the pressure? On the other hand, all those young fans who loved, worshiped and praised Dylan for his Freewheelin' folk ways never see the sucker punch coming. But we sure do.

Then and now, Dylan comes off as a music fan, a joke teller, a casual observer and, of course, a con man ("I'm not a topical songwriter . . . I never thought I was breaking through anything"). About that last stubborn pose, Scorsese can't help but call his bluff, at one point lingering over the words of 1962 tune Song for Woody, which contained this commentary on the world:

It's sick and it's hungry, it's tired and torn.

It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born.

The year was 1962. He was 21 years old. He wasn't a song and dance man. He was a prodigy.

"We thought he was hopelessly politically naive," explains folk singer Dave Van Ronk, a friend from Dylan's prefame days and one of several notables who granted Scorsese an interview. "In retrospect, he may have been more sophisticated than we were."

In lieu of his usual camera trickery, Scorsese streamlines great chunks of remastered performance footage (including scenes from the never-released 1966 film Eat the Document) and scores of fun, fan-boy anecdotes. Al Kooper, the man responsible for Like a Rolling Stone's life-affirming organ line, recalls how he had to sneak his way onto the song. And there's hilarious debate about whether gentle folkie Pete Seeger tried to violently sabotage Dylan's gone-electric set - with an ax, no less - at Newport in 1965.

Howling poet Allen Ginsberg and Irish troubadour Liam Clancy also provide vigorous recollections, but it's Joan Baez who packs the strongest emotional punch. She's all aglow when remembering the Greenwich days; they were "special friends," she teases.

But Baez's comments soon become bitter, especially when she recounts tagging along with Dylan on his 1965 British tour - the calm before the storm. Not only did the moody star often ignore his former duet partner, but not once did he invite her onstage.

A present-day Dylan squirms at this memory: "You can't be wise and in love at the same time," says this man of 1,000 faces, finally showing us the real one. "I hope she sees the light sooner or later on that"

- Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or 727 893-8467. His blog is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/popmusic

[Last modified September 24, 2005, 08:41:02]