 
Bob Dylan's Back Pages
Highway 61 Revisited was already out, but I bought Another Side of Bob Dylan (my first album through the Columbia Record Club), mainly because it was the one I was least familiar with. Over and over, I’d play “To Ramona” and “All I Really Want To Do” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Chimes Of Freedom.” I liked his protest songs, but this was poetry, sung by a man with a guitar and a raggedy voice that sounded nothing like The Byrds, The Turtles, or anyone else who covered his material. Over and over, my mother would yell: “turn off that yowling cat!” I asked my parents for permission to go to see Dylan perform at Philharmonic Hall on Halloween. They refused and said I was too young to take the bus into NYC. This concert was recently released as part of the “Bootleg Series.” Listening to WMCA (one of New York’s three major top 40 stations) one afternoon and hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” for the first time. It was like nothing else on the radio at that moment. I bought the single and discovered that the B-side was more of the same for another three minutes! My life was never the same again. Walking into Teaneck, NJ’s only record store one afternoon and finding Blonde On Blonde in the new release rack. I hitchhiked three miles home, got some cash and hitchhiked back again. I thought my head was going to explode when I discovered it was a double album. January 1968: A Tribute To Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall – his first appearance since the mysterious motorcycle accident and we had great seats! Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Tom Paxton and Bob sat on folding chairs and one by one, stepped to the mike to sing a song of Woody’s. That is, all except Bob. After about a half-hour, the curtain closed, but this wasn’t intermission. Ten minutes later they re-opened and there was Dylan and The Band in full-tilt mode launching into their three-song set of “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” and “I Ain’t Got No Home.” They tore the house down, but no one ever talks about the fact that audience members booed him for performing electric while everyone else played acoustic guitars. It was like Newport all over again. 1979: The Slow Train Coming tour plays the Warfield. The born-again image and new songs did not make me happy, nor did the gospel choir backing him up. I left during the second set, disgusted and incensed! I’m not the only one with stories like these and this latest wave of Dylan-mania goes a long way towards explaining why. Looking back now, I can see how the last few years have been building towards this moment. It began with 2003’s Masked & Anonymous – a bizarre and difficult film whose saving grace was the live performance segments. The following year, fifteen cornerstone albums were remastered for Super Audio CD systems and Chronicles was released. Planned as the first of three books detailing his life, Dylan was prosaic and generous with words and detail – the two things he had kept closest to the vest for over thirty years. Here’s a man who had fans begging for any sort of insight into his life and then casually mentions that he was really into metalwork for awhile and also sailed around the Caribbean with his family. It was great to see and hear interviews on NPR and 60 minutes, despite the fact that they were terse and not all that informative, but the real motherlode was soon to come: No Direction Home, the documentary directed by Martin Scorsese was recently released on DVD and ran on PBS in the States and on the BBC in England. The “soundtrack” to the film (volume 7 in the “Bootleg Series”) was actually more of a companion piece and contained a great deal of alternate material that’s been floating around for years, but in superior audio quality. Starbucks snatched the rights to a rare, 1962 acoustic performance from the Gaslight in New York and a huge, hardbound book - Scrapbook 1956-1966 hit the shelves. It was almost too much to digest, but no one was complaining.
From the bits and pieces revealed about the making of No Direction Home, we know that the interviews with Joan Baez, Maria Muldaur, Pete Seeger and others were recorded over a period of 15 years. Allen Ginsberg died in 1997, Dave Van Ronk in 2002 and word has it that Dylan’s on-camera musings were filmed in 1999, so it’s clear that a long-range game plan was being considered. Scorsese was given access to hundreds of hours of archival footage and allowed to assemble the pieces any way he desired. He and editor David Tedeschi began by looking at the interviews to determine how to not only tell the story of Dylan’s life, but to place it within the context of Greenwich Village in the ‘50s and ‘60s and the civil rights movement. Of course, watching Bob speak at length about the intimate details of his life is in itself an event and Scorsese’s placement of these clips alongside footage from D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, Murray Lerner’s Festival and the many other bits and pieces is masterful. As with (most of) Chronicles, No Direction Home is centered around 1961-1966 - the years when a skinny, Jewish kid from Hibbing, MN arrived in New York to visit Woody Guthrie, became the voice of the protest movement and changed the face of rock and roll forever, before a motorcycle accident provided a convenient way to retreat from the whirlwind of media and attention that followed his every waking hour. In those five years, Dylan embarked on a sharp learning curve. Musician Tony Glover comments that in the two months between the time Dylan left Minnesota to visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital and returned, he was channeling his hero and Van Ronk and had learned to finger-pick and play harmonica. Bob jokes that people thought he had been to the same crossroads as Robert Johnson and made a deal with the devil. Izzy Young (owner of the Folklore Center) recounts how after a great deal of pestering, he came to think of Bob as a promising young talent and eventually brought him to several of the “intellectual” folk labels for an audition. They kicked him out and branded him a freak, but it wasn’t long before John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records and he vaulted over many of his peers who continued to struggle in the coffeehouses and clubs. His self-titled debut album was released in March of 1962 and failed to make much of an impression sales-wise. On Live At The Gaslight 1962 we’re given a rare glimpse into the period between that first album and Freewheelin’, released in May of ’63. It contains the earliest recordings of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and an unfinished “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” alongside eight traditional folk tunes. Aside from the two originals, the most striking number of the set is Dylan’s interpretation of “John Brown,” a harrowing tale of a young, idealistic soldier who goes off to war and returns home crippled and disillusioned. The intensity of the performance made the hair on the back of my neck snap to attention and its relevance in the context of the current conflict in Iraq is undeniable. If anyone tells you that Bob sold out by licensing this disc to Starbucks, ignore them and buy it anyway. 1963: The cold war is reaching its zenith; there are riots in the South over civil rights; a nuclear conflict seems inevitable; Bob Dylan finds his muse. He writes “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Masters Of War,” to, as he puts it, “sing songs in a language that I hadn’t heard before.” Allen Ginsberg said the first time he heard “Hard Rain” he wept, because he knew the torch had been passed to another generation. 1964: Dylan’s voice continued to overshadow his contemporaries with the release of The Times They Are A-Changin,’ containing “The Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” “ With God On Our Side,” “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” and “Only A Pawn In Their Game.” Ironically, he insisted that he was not a political person and rejected the labels (“spokesman for a generation”) that the press tried to foist upon him. In June of ’64 he returned to the studio and in one night, recorded Another Side Of Bob Dylan with only Tom Wilson at the console. Released two months later, this was to be the link between his past and his future. There were no protest songs and no rants against the government - just personal tales of love and poetic experiments that sounded raw and rough. The Byrds transformed “Chimes Of Freedom,” “All I Really Want To Do” and “My Back Pages” into jangly pop anthems, bringing Dylan’s music to Top 40 radio and an audience who may have only been familiar with Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of “Blowin’ In The Wind.” Dylan was now a full-blown pop star, selling out shows around the country and in Europe and everything was about to change...forever. In March of 1965, he released Bringin’ It All Back Home. In July, he made his third consecutive appearance at the Newport Folk Festival backed by the Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan goes electric; Fans freak out; His lyrics become more abstract and rhyme gives way to prose; His shows become divided events: the acoustic portions are cheered, while the electric second halves are booed. In August, only five months later, Highway 61 Revisited hits the shops and “Like A Rolling Stone” tops the pop charts. In February of 1966, Dylan travels to Nashville and records Blonde On Blonde. In July, two months after completing another European tour with the Hawks (later to become The Band), he falls off his motorcycle in Woodstock and goes into seclusion. The mystery begins. Throughout No Direction Home, Scorsese intercuts his narrative with scenes from the ’65 and ’66 tours, as if to say, “everything you’re seeing is leading up to this moment.” We’re treated to a jaw-dropping acoustic version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” from Newport, as well as the moment he plugs in a year later and rocks the house with “Maggie’s Farm.” Bob and Johnny Cash duet on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Bob tours with paramour Joan Baez but doesn’t invite her to join him onstage. Bob fields inane questions from the press. Towards the end of the documentary he’s sitting on a couch, high on speed (?) and telling the man on the other side of the desk, “I don’t want to go to Italy, I just want to go home.” Scorsese does a fine job of placing everything in its proper context, so as to give the audience a broad picture of what influenced Dylan and how he grew creatively to be one of the definitive voices of the era. Performance footage of relatively obscure artists like John Jacob Niles and Cisco Houston, along with the more familiar Clancy Brothers and the Weavers offer a brief but educational look at the evolution of the folk movement. Scenes from the ’63 March on Washington, lunch counter sit-ins in the South and the Kennedy assassination in Dallas reflect the dark mood of the U.S. at the time and signaled the changes in lifestyles and attitudes that were about to shift dramatically. Most of all, we’re able to chart Dylan’s growth as an artist, from a hungry kid in search of his muse, to an fully-realized musician with unstoppable creativity, who finds himself in the right place at the right time. On the companion CD, we’re treated to some of Bob’s earliest recordings, demo sessions, live performances and alternate takes of his most enduring material. Although avid collectors will already own most of these tracks, there are several gems that have never been bootlegged and the ones that were, have not been available in such high fidelity. The accompanying liner notes are rich with detail, especially Al Kooper’s recounting of the sessions that produced Highway 61 and Blonde On Blonde. But wait – there’s more: prepare to fork over $45 for Scrapbook 1956-1966: a 64-page, large format book that treads much of the same ground as No Direction Home. Beginning with a look at Bob’s early days in Minnesota, subsequent chapters are devoted to the years 1961-66 and each of the albums released during that period. No big deal, right? Wrong. Nearly every page contains reproductions of memorabilia housed in custom sleeves or that fold out to full length. Here’s a partial list: a page from Dylan’s high school yearbook; hand-written lyrics to “Talkin’ New York,” “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “It Ain’t Me Babe;” flyers from Gerdes Folk City and The Gaslight; a backstage pass from the March On Washington; Columbia Records’ marketing letters; a program guide from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; a miniature promo stand-up from Bringin’ It All Back Home and more. So, let’s review: a four-hour documentary/DVD, two CDs and a book, plus the autobiography, re-released CD catalog and a weird-ass movie, all in the space of two years. A calculated marketing strategy to keep the Bob Dylan brand alive and fresh? Possibly. A long-overdue examination of one of the most important artists of this century? Definitely. It’s possible that pop music would be very different today were it not for Dylan’s music and his influence on other musicians. “Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside.” Bob Dylan – December 2004.
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Some
of my earliest Dylan memories: 
I
attribute this tsunami of memorabilia to Dylan’s brush with
death in 1997 when he was stricken with a rare form of Histoplasmosis
– a fungus that is commonly found in the south-central region
of the U.S. and carried through the air in spores. This caused swelling
in the sac (pericardium) surrounding his heart and he was hospitalized
with severe chest pains. Following his recovery, he resumed his “Neverending
Tour” and in December of that year, undertook a five-night run
at L.A.’s intimate El Rey theater. I was lucky enough to attend
two of those remarkable shows that rank among the best I’ve
ever seen. He appeared transformed – he smiled, he winked at
the girls at the front of the stage and duck-walked like Chuck Berry!
His voice was strong, the set list was deep and the band incredibly
tight. It seemed like he knew he had been given a new lease on life
and was determined to make the most of it.