Tonight I watched the first part of Martin Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.
Much of Dylan’s youth sounds similar to that of many other folks born in the Midwest in the early 1940s. He talks of growing up on Minnesota’s Iron Range in the early fifties, with its Main Street parades in the summer and duck-and-cover atomic fears. As a child, Dylan bought few albums, but intently listened to music in booths at record stores and on radio stations broadcast from afar, because the local ones tended to play popular favorites like “The Doggie in the Window” by Patti Page. He absorbed early folk, rock and country music, including Bobby Vee, Hank Williams, Odetta and John Jacob Niles. Dylan says he could learn a song after hearing it once or twice and sometimes he’d only borrow an element of it: the rhythm or the picking technique, for instance. “I had a very agile mind,” he says. He talks of being inspired in his singing and songwriting by his first girlfriends. “They brought out the poet in me,” he says with an impish grin, one of the only times he smiles during the documentary.
Woody Guthrie was a mammoth influence on Dylan, who says, “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.” Dylan picked up on Guthrie’s protest hymns, his technique, his humor, the way he dressed. He hitchhiked to New York City in 1961, in part to visit Guthrie, who was hospitalized there, but also to play the folk circuit in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and lurk around to hear the other players perform. For his first performance in the city, he opened for John Lee Hooker. Dylan was only 20 years old! Joan Baez, who met Dylan at this time, recalls he resembled a “ragamuffin” and that the first thing she always notices in the photos of him and herself together from the early ’60s is the “baby fat” on their faces. A newspaper review from the time describes him as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.”
His first album, recorded that year in New York, had only two original songs; Dylan says he didn’t want to give too much away. But the city sharpened his focus. In 1963, his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained only one cover and several of the dozen original compositions were landmark. Dylan says he didn’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” “would be good or bad. It just felt right.” Of course, the song was a hit, although more for Peter, Paul & Mary than himself. The documentary suggests that Dylan’s music publishing profits trumped his early album sales, pouring in from these cover versions, most of them unmemorable, but a handful era-defining, like the Peter, Paul & Mary song and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Dylan wrote for the Byrds’ first album.
Allen Ginsberg speaks of returning from India, hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” (also from Freewheelin’) and weeping, realizing that a generational torch had been passed. Ginsburg speaks of the poetry in Dylan’s lyrics, “words that are powered that make your hair stand on end.”
That year, Dylan, along with folksingers and other musicians like Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf, played the Newport Folk Festival in front of 15,000 people. Part one of the documentary winds down with Dylan and the folk elite—Pete Seeger, Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and others—in a rousing group rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But the good times wouldn’t last, the voiceover narration would solemnly intone at this point, if the documentary had a narrator, which it doesn’t, thankfully—that’d be a boring and lazy way to tell a story like Dylan’s.
Overall, the documentary’s interview footage with Dylan is well edited and precisely cut. He’s still got a bit of the ol’ mumble, but he’s more articulate than I thought he’d be. Engrossing, too. At no point did my attention waver and I nearly cursed the lack of commercials (it’s being shown on PBS) because I couldn’t tear myself away to brush my teeth. More than the concert footage of Dylan, I enjoyed the clips of Dylan’s musical influences—in fact, these far outnumber and outlast the clips of Dylan himself. It helps put his music in a historical perspective and realize how much he borrowed and stole from others, for better or worse. The documentary also seems to cut down on the myths Dylan built up around himself early in his career, such as that he grew up among the cowboys and ne’er-do-wells of New Mexico.
So far, so good; part two is tomorrow night.