First of the Month has asked a number of writers to comment on No Direction Home — Martin Scorcese’s recent documentary about Bob Dylan’s early years. Here’s John Leland’s thoughtful response to our call…
No Direction Home carries on the staple of Dylan lore that the folkies who cried betrayal when he plugged in at Newport were good-hearted but simple.
For Scorsese, who does not so much re-examine the Dylan myth as dramatize it – and marvelously – these purists make an easy foil. Musically, they flung themselves in front of what turned out to be Dylan’s electric masterpieces, Bringing It All Back Home (1965),Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). Politically, they represent an idealism that is little in fashion these days. In its nearly four hours, as it plays variations on the true believers’ hurt, No Direction Home conveys only in the broadest strokes what they believed they were up to, in John Cohen’s sheepish nod to the “authentic or real,” or what possibilities they felt were lost when Dylan broke from their ranks. With Allen Ginsberg providing benediction on Dylan, the folkies participate in a portrait of themselves as sincere but fundamentally corny boys and girls who were unprepared to find among them a magical being of the age, an adolescent.
Or so you might conclude from No Direction Home. When a fuzzy-helmeted Dylan jolts upright at his piano during “Ballad of a Thin Man,” as if channeling the electricity through his splayed fingers (my favorite clip among many), you can only be grateful that those crushing chords aren’t coming down on you. Like the left with which they aligned themselves, the nay-sayers appear doomed to the past, needing only Dylan to tell them. The alternative was a hereafter of Dylan and Baez reprising their duet of “With God on Our Side,” from which please spare us.
The doc’s other stooges, also a staple of Dylan lore, are the press, who appear as monkeys shouting stupid questions at press conferences, never as the useful influence-peddlers whom Dylan cultivated, like Robert Shelton or Nat Hentoff, and whom he gave long private interviews of the sort he gives Scorsese, no doubt for similar reasons.
The documentary has an odd aroma of finality for a portrait that is, after all, of a living man who is working near the height of his powers. For the folkies, the Dylan they knew is gone, and their part in whatever back-and-forth defined their relationship is almost officially discredited. He became what he did because he rejected their vision for him; there’s no use talking about what they did after encountering him. Having lost the battle, they perpetually have to reclaim their position of 40 years ago. They eulogize him as if he were a dead man – who, through the miracle of technology, can provide creased commentary on their commentary. Time is not kind to belief.
What is missing, because this is Dylan’s movie (and Scorsese’s), is any sort of contemporaneous view that allows that naiveté, collective romance and – to use an archaic term – a moral compulsion might be as valid a response to our world as Dylan’s caustic absurdism. When Dylan reaches the movie’s chronological end in a state of toxic loneliness, withdrawing toward Woodstock, pills and his famously ambiguous 1966 motorcycle accident, the movie in no way connects this with the choice he made, nor throws a bone to the folks who bade him choose otherwise. It simply reminds us that “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” the coldest song in his canon, did not get its impeccable cool from nowhere.
I don’t mean to cede the folkies the moral high ground. Any group that would have Peter Yarrow as a member bears some scrutiny. But in the age of Paris Hilton and “American Idol,” it wouldn’t hurt to consider why a group of people might have valued collective identity and a sentimental fidelity to group ideals over rock’s triumphal individualism – or, as American technology rained death on Vietnam, why they might have found the conspicuous flaunting of power and volume to be distasteful. If we are going to employ hindsight here, let’s concede that the corporate rock culture that Dylan chose over the Village orthodoxies has not delivered the goods it promised. Forty years after Newport, surely we can celebrate Dylan without fossilizing the folks who judged the rock business as a delivery system for consumer vulgarity rather than for the music he had not yet created, and that even he could not sustain. (The contemporary version of the true believers, I think, are the folks who would erase Street Legal (1978), Slow Train Coming (1979),Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) – a life chapter nearly as long as the one covered inNo Direction Home, regrettable not for the incursion of born-again faith but for the tawdry rock clichés and studio hackdom.)
My point here is not to long for Weavers past, but to point out that the Darwinian logic that dismisses the folkies’ objections just because Dylan rendered them corny – in the same way that showbiz has rendered humanism’s – is not the only logic we have at our disposal. It’s just the only one in No Direction Home.
Except, that is, except for one moment toward the end. Al Kooper, reminiscing on the band’s second electric gig, in Queens, says, “When we played Forest Hills, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was No. 1, so when we played ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ they stopped booing and sang along. Then when we finished they started booing again. I thought that was great.” He’s saying that even the true believers had time outside their belief. Which might be a fertile place for the next Dylan documentary to start.