When He Was on His Own

So many singers have imitated him that it’s hard to realize how weird Bob Dylan sounded on first hearing–when the gods of show biz must have wondered, Who let him in? A slight figure with voluptuous lips and a hawk’s hooded eyes, he hid behind his guitar and his neck-brace harmonica and emitted those torturous barnyard vowel sounds. Yet almost immediately, people got it. The imagery was so rich and cascading, the urgency of his outrage so compelling and contagious that listeners pretty quickly adjusted their long-held definition of what a folk song–or a pop song–was or could be. And if he had to sing that way to write that way, then sing away, Bob.

Much of his magic was achieved in the years 1961-66, newly illuminated in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, the 3-hr. 29-min. documentary that hits DVD racks Sept. 20 and will be shown on PBS a week later. First Dylan reconfigured the folk song into a political statement as personal as it was universal, writing instant anthems like Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’. Then he amped up his surreal postromantic ballads and became a rock star.

Did he understand what he was creating? Of course. “I was in a certain arena artistically that no one else had ever been in before, ever,” he tells the documentary’s offscreen interviewer. “Although I might have been wrong about that.” No, that’s about right. The musical exploration went according to his plan. What he hadn’t expected was the stardom. He says of his first idol, the folk poet Woody Guthrie, “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.” Dylan’s fans found the same home truths in his work.

A master documentarian as well as a prime picturemaker, Scorsese uses interviews with dozens of important figures from the New York City folk, poetry and blues scene–Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Allen Ginsberg, Al Kooper–to recreate the impact when Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., hit town in January 1961 on a pilgrimage to visit the ailing Guthrie. Dylan went right to work, sponging up all manner of folk influences, spending days in the library reading U.S. history, ingesting every book of poetry he found in the apartments of friends who let him sleep over.

But it was his gift for synthesizing that sent him into the depths of the forest and allowed him to bring it all back home in teeming poetry set to ancient lays. As he says in the documentary, “I’d taken all the elements that I’ve ever known to make wide, sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was the essence of the spirit of the times.” Where the poetry came from–the epic, apocalyptic vision of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, the piercing simplicity of Blowin’ in the Wind–well, that’s a secret.

Dylan was a sensation in the small folk world as soon as he started writing his own stuff. Turned down by Baez’s label, Vanguard (“We don’t record freaks here,” the bosses supposedly said), he caught a wild break when legendary producer John Hammond signed him to the ultraconservative Columbia Records. In less than two years, Blowin’ in the Wind was a smash for Peter Paul & Mary, and two years later, Like a Rolling Stone was a top pop hit.

When Dylan went electric, the folkies reacted as if they had been electrocuted. In the documentary, Seeger still seethes at the memory of Dylan’s set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. “I said, ‘Goddammit, it’s terrible,'” he recalls. “‘If I had an ax, I’d chop the mike cable right now.'” Some old fans felt the same. In those days the second half of a Dylan concert, when he worked in front of a small band (later known as the Band), was frequently punctuated by audience cries of “Traitor!” and “Judas!”

You won’t find out much about Dylan’s private life from this film, on which his manager, Jeff Rosen (who also conducted the main interview), served as a producer. But 40 years later, who cares? The good conversation and the plethora of clips from Dylan’s archive are revealing enough.

And by the end, when Dylan is 25 and exhausted by the touring, the hostility and the inanities of the press–“Could you just suck on your glasses?” one photographer keeps asking–he’s starting to see a Buddy Holly–style fate looming before him. “You end up crashing in a private plane in the mountains of Tennessee. Or Sicily,” he says backstage. “I just wanna go home.”

He went home, was seriously injured in a motorcycle crash and stopped being Bob Dylan for a while. In truth, he was never that Bob Dylan again; the past four decades have been a fascinating coda to the brief musical miracle this documentary captures.