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DYLAN: TALKIN' BLUES AND A LOT MORE
By BILLY HELLER
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"No Direction Home" captures Dylan in his formative years between 1961-66.
Photo from "No Direction Home"
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September 20, 2005 -- BOB Dylan is both well known and little known.
Notoriously reclusive - always letting only his music speak for him - Dylan began to lift the veil of privacy last year with his best-selling memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One." Now, the unmasking continues with the Martin Scorsese-directed "No Direction Home," a documentary for PBS' "American Masters" series, out today on DVD. A memorabilia-packed companion volume, "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook," is out today as well.
And Dylan speaks!
Culled from some 10 hours of interviews conducted by his manager/archivist Jeff Rosen - a producer of the film - we hear Dylan chuckle about a couple of high school girlfriends back in his Minnesota hometown. Gloria Story was the first, and he laughs about her name. The other was named Echo and, he says, "I serenaded her under her window." The elusive Dylan is seen cracking a smile. "Both these girls brought out the poet in me."
The music, too, is amazing. Dylan's electric performances - including his legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where fans reacted with cries of "Judas" for "betraying" the folk movement - are explosive and piercing.
All the Dylan interview segments are shown in a tight-frame close-up, offering a good look at his wisp of a mustache, his creased face, his deep blue eyes.
At one point, he says that he thought about going to military school, but couldn't get into West Point, "the one I envisioned going to." And he insists he wasn't a "topical songwriter." Talking about "Blowing in the Wind," Dylan says, "I didn't really know it had any anthemic qualities or anything."
"I wrote the songs to perform the songs," he says.
"No Direction Home" producer Susan Lacy says Dylan "is mesmerizing. You can't take your eyes off him."
With the singer/songwriter at the top of her "wish list," Lacy says she'd been calling Dylan's management for 10 years, asking if he'd cooperate with a bio-film. It was well-known, Lacy says, that Rosen had been conducting interviews with many of Dylan's musical colleagues and friends over the years.
They're all part of the film - Joan Baez ("Bob looked like a ragamuffin"), Allen Ginsberg, Peter Yarrow, Al Kooper, Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur - the people who were there during the time "No Direction Home" focuses on: from 1961 (when Dylan arrived in New York looking for Woody Guthrie) to 1966, when, after a motorcycle accident, he vanished from the public eye for eight years.
Together with Rosen and another producer, Nigel Sinclair, who worked on Dylan's film "Masked & Anonymous," they approached Martin Scorsese, who directed "The Last Waltz," the concert film on The Band, in which Dylan played.
Lacy, who has not met Dylan, says Scorsese didn't get together with his film's subject, either. But he did winnow and assemble thousands of hours of interviews and archival footage into a compelling 3 1/2-hour narrative.
As to why Dylan, after all these years of staying out of the limelight, agreed to talk, Lacy says she wouldn't presume to speak for Dylan.
"He's a private guy, but he's also part of history and sometimes that sense of history must kick in."
By BILLY HELLER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No Direction Home" captures Dylan in his formative years between 1961-66.
Photo from "No Direction Home"
Email Archives
Print Reprint
September 20, 2005 -- BOB Dylan is both well known and little known.
Notoriously reclusive - always letting only his music speak for him - Dylan began to lift the veil of privacy last year with his best-selling memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One." Now, the unmasking continues with the Martin Scorsese-directed "No Direction Home," a documentary for PBS' "American Masters" series, out today on DVD. A memorabilia-packed companion volume, "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook," is out today as well.
And Dylan speaks!
Culled from some 10 hours of interviews conducted by his manager/archivist Jeff Rosen - a producer of the film - we hear Dylan chuckle about a couple of high school girlfriends back in his Minnesota hometown. Gloria Story was the first, and he laughs about her name. The other was named Echo and, he says, "I serenaded her under her window." The elusive Dylan is seen cracking a smile. "Both these girls brought out the poet in me."
The music, too, is amazing. Dylan's electric performances - including his legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where fans reacted with cries of "Judas" for "betraying" the folk movement - are explosive and piercing.
All the Dylan interview segments are shown in a tight-frame close-up, offering a good look at his wisp of a mustache, his creased face, his deep blue eyes.
At one point, he says that he thought about going to military school, but couldn't get into West Point, "the one I envisioned going to." And he insists he wasn't a "topical songwriter." Talking about "Blowing in the Wind," Dylan says, "I didn't really know it had any anthemic qualities or anything."
"I wrote the songs to perform the songs," he says.
"No Direction Home" producer Susan Lacy says Dylan "is mesmerizing. You can't take your eyes off him."
With the singer/songwriter at the top of her "wish list," Lacy says she'd been calling Dylan's management for 10 years, asking if he'd cooperate with a bio-film. It was well-known, Lacy says, that Rosen had been conducting interviews with many of Dylan's musical colleagues and friends over the years.
They're all part of the film - Joan Baez ("Bob looked like a ragamuffin"), Allen Ginsberg, Peter Yarrow, Al Kooper, Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur - the people who were there during the time "No Direction Home" focuses on: from 1961 (when Dylan arrived in New York looking for Woody Guthrie) to 1966, when, after a motorcycle accident, he vanished from the public eye for eight years.
Together with Rosen and another producer, Nigel Sinclair, who worked on Dylan's film "Masked & Anonymous," they approached Martin Scorsese, who directed "The Last Waltz," the concert film on The Band, in which Dylan played.
Lacy, who has not met Dylan, says Scorsese didn't get together with his film's subject, either. But he did winnow and assemble thousands of hours of interviews and archival footage into a compelling 3 1/2-hour narrative.
As to why Dylan, after all these years of staying out of the limelight, agreed to talk, Lacy says she wouldn't presume to speak for Dylan.
"He's a private guy, but he's also part of history and sometimes that sense of history must kick in."
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