February 17, 2006
Immortals
With the first fifty years of the rock era now behind us, I'm wondering: Is any of it going to be listened to and revered a hundred years from now? My sense is that, if nothing else, people of the 22nd century will still be digging two things: The Beatles and Bob Dylan. I've always been a big Dylan fan and a big Beatles fan, even before I came to know how powerfully innovative and influential they really were, and still now, the more I learn, the more I like.
To gain a proper appreciation of their creative brilliance, I'd recommend two films to fans and doubters alike: No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's four hour Dylan documentary now out on DVD, and Anthology, the Beatles' ten hour autobiography. Yes, they're both long, but in recent weeks I've watched through both for the first time, and found them gripping as period pieces, and highly revealing as documents of artistic growth.
Anthology covers the Beatles entire career chronologically, and intersperses interview clips, mainly retrospective, with uncut studio and concert performances. Never mind the Ed Sullivan show or Shea Stadium -- For me, seeing the four of them in the studio working through early versions of tunes from Rubber Soul through Abbey Road left me awe-struck. And to follow them around is to be all the more impressed that in the eye of their hurricaine of superstardom, they remained continuously creative and fabulously prolific.
No Direction Home covers Dylan in his early twenties, from the beginning of his musical career up to his 1966 motorcycle crash. Dylan remains an enigma through it all, becoming the central figure on the folk scene while confounding reporters and fans with his indifference and opacity. 
As the film builds toward its climax with Dylan brazenly "going electric," fans loudly boo him night after night and call him a traitor. And there we see Dylan, and it seems that the more they boo, the more he likes it, and it feels like he's imbued with the most potent mix of self-confidence and absolute artistic integrity: He'll make the exact music he wants, when he wants, and people can take it or leave it.
Dylan's a genius, a conduit to something rare and true, and he's spent a life with the spigot on, letting it run. In the film we have Allen Ginsberg saying that he himself watched Bob at times become "a column of air" -- and then we see clips of Bob on stage, absolutely riveting.
It's interesting to note what a pivotal year 1965 was for both The Beatles and Dylan: The Beatles recorded Help in early 1965, a solid album, but then proceeded in a new artistic direction, leaving the simple boy-girl love songs behind, and embracing a new musical and thematic complexity with the recording of Rubber Soul in the Fall. It was a turning point for the band (and for popular music), and an instant classic.
Dylan recorded my two favorite albums in 1965. The half-electric, half-acoustic Bringing It All Back Home was laid down in three days in January, and released in Spring. In June, he showed up at the Newport Folk Festival, and in one of the defining moments in rock history, debuted "Like A Rolling Stone" to what he surely knew would be a hostile audience (a scene depicted in the film). The camera then joins Dylan in the studio that Fall for the recording of Highway 61 Revisted, and we are witness to the birth of a new sound, with writing like no one had ever heard before. At a time when "Wooly Bully" and "The Name Game" are at the top of the charts, here's Dylan giving us "Desolation Row" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." He's a man on fire, and if we stand near it, we'll always feel the warmth.