Bob Dylan: No Direction Home

About five years ago Martin Scorsese made a film about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home. At over three hours, it’s a very thorough documentary of Dylan from his beginnings in Hibbing, Minnesota up until the Blonde On Blonde era in 1966. One thing that struck me during this film was his audience’s reaction to his shift from his one-man, folk-like acoustic music to playing electric rock music with a full band. His audience saw him as the spokesman of a generation, as one who would use his songs to shine the light on all of society’s ills. Not only did his fans not like his new direction, they hated it. They hated it so much that they would spend money to go to his concerts for the express purpose of booing him. As expensive as concert tickets are today, can you imagine anybody purposely spending money to see or hear something they already know they don’t like? Not only did these people hate Dylan’s electric music, they were very angry about it. In watching interviews of people at the time, you get the feeling that these people had been betrayed by a lover or something. These holier-than-thou folks who just knew that they knew more than you must have thought “how dare he play what he wants to play and not play what WE want to hear.” It is almost as if these folkies felt like they OWNED Dylan. The joke was on them – nobody “owned” Bob Dylan. But this is getting ahead of the story just a little…

When Bobby Zimmerman left Hibbing immediately after high school [he wasn’t “Bob Dylan” yet], in his mind he was a “musical expeditionary” who had no past to speak of, nothing to go back to. He went to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota. He was enrolled, but he didn’t go to class. He felt he didn’t have time to go to class. He was too busy learning about things like Jack Kerouac, who thought the world was completely mad and the only people who were interesting were the people who were “mad” people, those who wanted to do everything there was to do, experience all there was to experience all at once. He really didn’t have any kind of musical goal at the time except to learn all the songs he heard and play them. Then he heard Woody Guthrie.

“He had a particular sound – and besides that, he said something to go along with his sound. That was highly unusual to my ears. He was a radical – his songs had a radical slant. That’s what I wanna sing. I wanna sing that,” said Dylan. Dylan’s feeling was that when one listened to Woody Guthrie’s music, one could learn how to live. He felt he identified more with Woody Guthrie’s book “Bound for Glory” than he did Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He couldn’t believe he never heard of Woody Guthrie, but after he did he wanted to be like Woody Guthrie. So for awhile, he was a Woody Guthrie clone. But “Bob as Woody” didn’t last very long as he began to write his own stuff. John Hammond of Columbia Records discovered him and signed him to a recording contract.

He never thought of himself and his material as “folk” but as “contemporary.” He said he wrote the songs to perform the songs. He wrote about contemporary things using traditional forms, but his songs inspired people. Mavis Staples had no idea how Blowin’ in the Wind came from a white kid from Minnesota. How could he write “how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man”? That was Mavis’ father’s experience, not Dylan’s. But she said Dylan’s songs were inspirational like gospel because “he was writing truth.” Folk musicians back in this time [the late 1950s-early 1960s] were topical. The topical songwriters were a product of the Left. They created material based on topical situations. With songs like Oxford Blues, Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, it would only be natural for these folks to think of Bob Dylan as a fellow traveler. He was seen by many as the heir to the traditions of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. “He has the finger on the pulse of our generation”, so said the guy who introduced him to the audience at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. He never considered himself a “protest” singer. He never thought of himself as the “voice of a generation.” He thought politics as “trivial.”

At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, a lady said this about him: “He came to be, as he is, because things needed saying. And the young people were the ones who wanted to say them. He somehow had an ear on his generation. I don’t have to tell you. You know him; he’s yours, Bob Dylan.” But Dylan stopped writing the “topical” songs, and to leftist folkies they felt he was going away from a political consciousness that they felt they and Bob Dylan all had. He was thought of by the hard-core folkies as having “gone commercial” which to them was an unpardonable sin. Unbeknownst to the folkies, Bob Dylan never got the memo to conform to “the way of the folky.” Bob Dylan was going to do what he wanted, when he wanted, and he did. That pissed off a lot of people when he went and did his own thing. For these kinds of folks it is always about control, and they got a rude awakening that they couldn’t control Bob Dylan. They were always agitating for change, yet when Bob Dylan changed, that upset them greatly. Dylan couldn’t then, and won’t now, do the same thing twice.

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan previewed things to come. He shocked his audience. Instead of coming out by himself with only a guitar and a harmonica to play for an hour as had all the other acts, he came out with a full electric band and played three songs. This is the famous concert where he had “gone electric.” After 15 minutes of playing electric music, Dylan and his band left the stage, leaving a very unhappy audience in his wake. Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary pleaded with Dylan to come out and play one more song. He did, and played It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Was this Bob Dylan’s message to the folkies that things have changed, and that they were never going to be the same? I think it was…

What was the change? Three albums came out in rapid succession – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Bringing It All Back Home starts off with Subterranean Homesick Blues. I have no clue what it’s about, it isn’t bluesy as far as I can tell, but it definitely isn’t folk music. Maggie’s Farm [also on Bringing It All Back Home], one of three electric songs Dylan played at Newport, could be about anything. Is it about Dylan not wanting to play folk music anymore for his oppressive folkie fans? You be the judge. The first shot right out of the box on Highway 61 Revisited was Like a Rolling Stone. It’s a sneer at an unnamed someone who was once high and mighty but had since fallen on hard times. “How does it feel to be on your own?” he taunted his unnamed target. Just how did it feel to go from riches to rags? A year ago I saw the movie Factory Girl. It’s about Edie Sedgwick, a New York trust fund baby who supposedly had an affair with Dylan, who had made underground films with Andy Warhol, who had pissed her money away on parties, clothes, booze, drugs, etc and ended up broke. After having seen that movie, I’m convinced Like a Rolling Stone is about her. There’s some pretty humorous stuff from this period, like Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Tombstone Blues, and there’s some pretty surreal stuff, like Visions of Johanna, Desolation Row, Queen Jane Approximately. I have no idea what those songs are about, but anything with the line “something’s happening but you don’t know what is is, do you Mr. Jones?” has definitely got something going for it.

So with these three albums out in 1965-66, Dylan took his electric show on the road. The band he had included the likes of Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Mickey Jones [who was subbing for Levon Helm], who later became “The Band” [but more on them later]. Dylan would do the first half of the shows by himself with just a guitar and harmonica. The audiences loved that part of the show, but after about seven songs, Dylan would bring out the band and play an electric set. To hear Mickey Jones tell it, “when we kicked off the second half, we did kick ass and take names and we got everyone in their’s attention and they knew that we had arrived. Because they were such fans of his acoustic set, that when we came in and did the electric set people have said the word to me that he was a “traitor” to folk music, the “pure” music.” And that’s exactly what happened. Eleven years ago Columbia put out a recording of the show Dylan and The Band did in Manchester, England. During the first set, the audience sat in rapt attention, not making a sound and enjoying it. After the band came out, you can hear booing between each song. This was not a happy audience. Between Ballad of a Thin Man and the finale Like a Rolling Stone, you can hear one audience member yelling out “Judas” for Dylan having betrayed his folk music roots. These guys didn’t want to hear “pop” music. So what did Dylan do? He turned around to the band, and you can hear him say “play it fucking loud!” They kicked into Like a Rolling Stone and played such an intense version the audience was stunned into silence. It's all there on film.

During the No Direction Home documentary, Dylan friend Bobby Neuwirth said “the audience came to Bob Dylan.” That’s true. He’s not the “flavor of the month,” his music doesn’t get the airplay it used to, but somehow I was drawn to it. I don’t know exactly when I started listening to lots of Bob Dylan’s music. Liam Clancy said “everybody has a favorite Bob Dylan song. It’s because he’s tapped into the universal soul, the universal mind…” Who am I to argue?