"If I'd knowed how bad
you treat me, honey I never would have come" - Man of Constant Sorrow,
traditional
The first time I heard
the name Bob Dylan was at a party in Los Angeles in 1961. Someone put on
a record of some guy with a twangy voice strapped to a harmonica. He was
singing songs about death and dying and I wondered why a young folk singer
would be singing songs about dying at age twenty. But it really moved.
It didn't just sit there. It got up and moved and I remarked to people
at the party that I never heard of this guy but it was really going and
I didn't know where it was going to take me. He was singing "I'm a Man
of Constant Sorrow" and how could a boy of twenty be a man of constant
sorrow, but I felt it deep in my being.
Martin Scorcese's documentary
No Direction Home brought it all back home and allowed me to relive
those heady days when the world seemed ready to turn the page on the fifties
fallout shelter mentality and embrace a new morning.
No Direction Home
follows the career of Bob Dylan from his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota
to his motorcycle accident in 1966, highlighting the most creative years
in his life and offering previously unseen footage of Dylan as a young
man. It brings to life the promise of that period that belonged to us and
Bobby and Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger and Dave van Ronk, and Woody and Cisco
and Leadbelly too and it also brings back the sting of its failure. There
is great music in the entire film and it is uplifting and wonderful but
may be remembered only for its opening act, the act in which Dylan called
us to greatness. He challenged us to wake up and look around and we did
and for that brief period, our word was law in the universe. Through it
all, he articulated our dreams and our sense of loss at the world that
was rightly ours but had been temporarily taken away from us and in the
jingle jangle morning we came following him.
When we gathered to protest
the war in Vietnam, we could hear him telling us about those that "fasten
the triggers for the others to fire", those that "set back and watch when
the death count gets higher". We marched to call attention to those that
would hide in their mansions "as young people's blood flows out of their
bodies and is buried in the mud". He asked, "how many roads must a man
walk down before you can call him a man?" The answer may have been blowin'
in the wind but, until then, few had dared to tell it and think it and
speak it and breathe it. We knew that the times they were a changin' but
we had not seen the direction they were headed in until the civil rights
movement exploded and Martin Luther King told us about standing up tall
and people dared to talk about peace at a time when our leaders seemed
determined to blow us all to smithereens.
During that time when
young people began to open themselves up to the possibility of a more meaningful
existence, he looked out and saw "ten thousand talkers whose tongues were
all broken, guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children", and
he knew that a hard rain was gonna fall and we knew it too but didn't want
to believe it. He was the spokesman of a generation. He now says that he
never wanted to be the spokesman of a generation, but he was and nothing
else seemed to matter. Who cares if Shakespeare wanted to be the soul of
the age? He was and that's all that counted. But a hard rain did begin
to fall as Dylan had said and claimed John as the first victim, and then
Martin, then Bobby and the country began to lose its soul. Dylan followed
after that, perhaps a victim of too much, too soon, a young man without
a strong sense of self who seized the opportunity to reinvent himself but
lost who he was in the process.
Though he gained new converts
along the way, he crashed and burned until he finally became a man who
would stop at nothing to convince us that it was all a mistake. At first
it was the language of rock 'n roll, which at that time meant the language
of commercial "success", the language of the top twenty hits, agents and
producers and big record sales. And we noticed the hour when his ship came
in. We understood but we couldn't relate. We smelled sellout. We felt a
sense of loss, though we knew deep down that whatever he touched he would
raise to a new level. He did but reached the heights without us. Like A
Rolling Stone was a great song, perhaps the greatest rock song that's ever
been written, but it wasn't our song. It didn't speak to us. Dylan had
been a poet of people who cared, now he reflected a world grown cynical,
people who wanted to go it alone, who looked to get in while the getting
was good.
He broke new ground and
was great at what he did, but if Ghandi had become the greatest university
professor India had ever known, we would have looked on in admiration but
it would not have been the same Ghandi that inspired us. For me Dylan will
always be forever young and when he dies his Country period, his Las Vegas
period, his born-again phase, and his other numerous phases will all be
forgotten. He will be remembered as a man who challenged the status quo
when it was not fashionable to do so, who tried to deny his own greatness
but couldn't because we all knew better and when he is buried they will
lower him down like a king.
GRADE: A
Howard
Schumann