On Monday and Tuesday of this coming week, Martin Scorsese’ documentary portrait of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, will be broadcast on PBS in the United States and on BBC2 in the U.K. The DVD of the show has been on sale for a week now, along with two new CDs, one music taken from the film itself, the other a pair of performances apparently recorded at the Gaslight Café in 1962, plus a coffee table book. I haven’t seen the DVD or book as yet, tho I’ve heard both albums, which are terrific, among the very finest of the “archival” projects that have shot up around Dylan outtakes & bootlegs over the years (the Gaslight performances have been circulating for years, tho never so crisply remastered). Part of what makes the No Directions Home CD so terrific is the quality and nature of the material on it, all taken from Dylan’s early career (indeed, there are some home recording & “pre-Dylan” tapes from Minneapolis included). Most of the songs, tho, are alternate takes from Dylan’s various Columbia recording sessions. By now, of course, people have become used to how radically Dylan can re-envision some of his songs in performance, so that they bear little audible (or emotional) relationship to their first recorded forms. Yet these are versions that were, in many instances, recorded the same day as the iconic performances we all grew up with. Even then, they suggest, Dylan could imagine the same song carrying a very different tone from the one that eventually was released in vinyl.

Like so many male poets my age, I have listened to Dylan’s best songs now for decades, forever trying to fathom how he is able to capture such surreal-yet-accurate images with a shorthand precision that, even after four decades of familiarity, is simply breath-taking:

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim
If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same

What makes that stanza work is precisely the contrast between the convoluted “go back to from where you came” with the utter directness of the last two lines.

It has become something of received wisdom that Like a Rolling Stone is the best single rock tune ever recorded. But there are a half dozen other songs on Highway 61 Revisited that could just as easily compete for “best song”: Tombstone Blues, Ballad of a Thin Man, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – from which the passage above is taken – Desolation Row, the title track itself , and Queen Jane Approximately. That this intensely intimate vision came through such a crabbed & guarded personality at all is perhaps the best argument for Spicer’s concept of dictation, of voices being transcribed off the radio from Mars, that can be made. Beyond the lyrics, part of what makes that particular album work so well is Dylan’s own discomfort with the rock genre itself, to which he was still quite new¹ - he throws in things – organ, police whistle – that were pretty much unimaginable in 1965. It’s gaudier, more carny-like in tone. The end result is the surrealism of psychedelics combined with the paranoia of meth, a poisonous cocktail that captures that era perfectly.

From the CD, I get the sense that the Scorsese documentary ends at this point, or perhaps with the motorcycle accident a year later (a photo of Dylan on the bike is included), and perhaps that makes sense. The hiatus that followed clearly divided the young Dylan from the several other invented versions that began to show up thereafter. And as brilliant as many of the songs are after, say, Blonde on Blonde, none approach this unique combination of effects again.

 

¹ The No Direction CD includes the infamous recording of Maggie’s Farm that was roundly panned by the folk purists at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The performance predates the recording of Highway 61 by just a few months.