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Folk psychology
Richard Vine finds Scorsese bringing Dylan back home

Richard Vine
Saturday September 17, 2005

Guardian

Don't look back? It's hard not to when there's so much to see. In the last few years, there's been an explosion of Bob Dylan activity. We've had the first instalment of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One; Greil Marcus setting out the reasons for Like A Rolling Stone being the greatest song ever; the return of Dylan the actor in 2003's Masked And Anonymous, which he also co-wrote; and now No Direction Home, an excellent two-part documentary from no less than Martin Scorsese, accompanied by Volume 7 of the ongoing Bootleg series, both tracing his early career up to 1966. And that's not to mention 2001's Love And Theft, an album that's as witty or moving as anything he's ever done, or the still vital live performances he's kicking out on the aptly nick-named Never-Ending Tour.

There's a moment in No Direction Home where, after facing yet another bemused interviewer, an exasperated Dylan drawls backstage: "Get me a new Bob Dylan and see how long he lasts" - a request that Todd Haynes seems to be looking to fulfil on his forthcoming biopic, I'm Not There: Suppositions On A Film Concerning Bob Dylan. He's casting no fewer than seven Dylans, including Richard Gere, Julianne Moore, Colin Farrell, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett, although there's no word yet if any of them will be Victoria Secret's Dylan or Starbucks Dylan.

No Direction Home shows how central this idea of new Dylans has been to his career - and how resistant fans were. The times might have been changing, but they'd rather Bob didn't.

"He's a fake neurotic. Moronic!" "I paid to see a flippin' folk singer. Not a big group." "Bob Dylan was a bastard in the second half ... he's prostituting himself." It's hard to believe the Manchester Free Trade Hall audience is watching the same show that we get to see now - heckling, booing and storming out while Robbie Robertson and the rest of the Band inject an intense fury into his new songs. Scorsese's skill here is to remind us just how potent the idea of Folk Dylan was to his audience in 1966.

He mattered in a way that's hard to imagine any one singer mattering now, performing with Joan Baez after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963; being lumbered with the "voice of a generation" tag the moment he put a record out; being hassled for answers everywhere he went. The earnest old folk guard welcomed someone who'd immersed himself in Woody Guthrie. New folk stars like Baez saw someone capable of giving the civil rights movement its best protest songs. Allen Ginsberg felt he was the man to inherit the beatniks' freewheeling legacy. While No Direction Home puts the infamous "Judas!" heckle into context, it also shows where Electric Dylan was coming from when he unleashed Like A Rolling Stone with the putdown: "I don't believe you, you're a liar." And to the Band: "Play it fucking loud!"