I saw the film on the early years of Dylan’s career with my son at a cosy and posh hotel below Sea Containers House on the banks of the Thames on an early Sunday evening.
However you feel about Dylan, he is most certainly not the kind of guy you’d get to know by listening to the albums he produced in his early years. To begin with, he was allowed to release covers of previously released songs written by other people. When he started releasing his own material it was designed to meet the demands of the folk set , led by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and regulated by a cohort of “folkies”.
It wasn’t until the release of Bringing it all Back Home that we started hearing great music and America had to wait till late 1965 (Highway 61 revisited) and the following year’s Blonde on Blonde till we got music that could deliver something that did not sound written to meet an audience’s requirement for whingeing.
Those who go to watch this film to find out what the complete unknown actually was, will come away unsatisfied. Dylan never seems to understand himself and bullshits his audiences (especially Baez) with spurious nonsense about who he was and how he came to write what he did and play the way he did.
Those who come out of the biopic well are those who do not want to capture his heart. Woody Guthrie never says a thing , Seeger reminds me of the good hearted I know in London, Cash is the genius of the event. He and those who play electric with Dylan aren’t whingeing, they are matching the sounds coming out of rock and roll.
For me, the early years of Dylan show him to be a brilliant liar who gets his way with women, with financiers and with the critics while looking for something that satisfies him. He is beginning to in the final 20 minutes of the film.
But these early years show Dylan as a cynical user, for which I admire him. If we ignore the early albums we can spend time on what followed – 50 albums which are chronicled here (down to the tracks)
Dylan – still 40 years ago (Barcelona)
The main value of this film is in its production and in its refusal to show Dylan as anything other than the bastard he was in those days. I imagine he continues to be. He refused to pick up his Nobel prize for services to literature and has carried on challenging our notion of what he is until the present day.
Perhaps today’s biggest mystery is how he remains so alive. This biopic doesn’t tie him down and tells a small story that is 60 years old. It opens the door to anyone who has an interest of what came next. I have had many hours in his catalogue (thanks Spotify), I will return to the task of enriching myself, by spending more time with this lot.
Not much there I can disagree with, Henry.
Perhaps you’re wrong to appear to dismiss his earliest albums: “… When he started releasing his own material it was designed to meet the demands of the folk set …”
Even that eponymous first album has Song to Woody and Talkin’ New York, with its line that “I get on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, ‘Come back some other day
You sound like a hillbilly
We want folksingers here’.”
You’ve said previously that 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited was your entry to Dylan music.
For me it was Peter, Paul and Mary and then Freewheelin’ was the first album of his I bought. And echoing both early and later Dylan I’d started my own album collecting with Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits.
I got into Highway 61 because in 1977 I was getting excited by punk. I had to endure Supertramp, Genesis , ELP and Caravan in the common rooms of my school. But I had friends who felt like me and we listened to Patti Smith, Ramones, Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen and Television from the States – alongside the Clash, Pistols and the “new wave” when they came along. We weren’t popular or numerous – I suspect you were similar Byron!
It struck me then that Highway 61 was part of the punk thing. Then I went to an outside concert at Black-bush. I heard Dylan alongside Clapton and I reckoned Dylan was the forward looking one – didn’t like Clapton much.
Dylan played Masters of War from the old stuff but it was mainly Blood on the Tracks and onwards. I never got too much into early stuff (except Masters of War)
I was also at the Blackbushe Picnic, Henry, as well as attending one of the six Earls Court concerts the previous month.
I presume Graham Parker & the Rumour were more to your taste in 1978, rather than Clapton?
Or the (German) Lake, or reggae band Merger?
It was a long day … and night.
I’d driven overnight from Glasgow and escaped back overnight, without resorting to Hatfield and the North, by following locals who knew backroads away from the “airport” and back on to the M3.
“Happy day, good memories …” Derek Scott
“There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It’s hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.” Bob Dylan
Henry, you haven’t quite got it, some of Dylan’s folk songs from well before Bringing it all back Home are great stuff, such as Girl from the North Country, Masters of War, Bob Dylan’s Dream, etc.