Laura Schwartz reviews Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, BBC2
No Direction Home was not about Dylan the man or Dylan the musician, but Dylan the icon. In telling the story of how Bob Dylan came to acquire and ultimately to reject the title of “voice of a generation”, Scorsese also treats him as a symbol — as an embodiment of the tension between art and politics.
No Direction Home was as much about America in the fifties and sixties as it was about Dylan’s life and career. Scorsese set interviews with Dylan and his contemporaries against a backdrop of footage depicting the wider political and cultural upheavals of the period. Dylan’s decision to drop out of the University of Minnesota and travel to New York to become a musician was depicted as coterminous with the beatnik generation’s rejection of the conformist and consumerist values of post-war America.
Dylan’s own account of his early career, playing in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, also bought into this image of him as a child of the times. He described a young man motivated only by a “love of the sound”. All he knew, when he arrived in New York in 1961, was that he wanted to hear more of the kind of music his hero Woodie Guthrie had played.
Later that year he was signed by one of the biggest commercial labels, Columbia records. According to Dylan, his first album consisted simply of the songs that happened to be in his head on the day. Interviews with fellow musicians of that era painted a rather different picture. They portrayed Dylan as a far more determined and ambitious figure, for whom it was not unknown to steal material from other musicians.
Whatever the reality, Dylan’s status as the poet of the protest movement was only confirmed by the subsequent success of songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. Yet even at this stage Dylan denied that he wrote “topical songs” and disliked being labelled as a “protest songwriter”. The left-wing folk singer Dave Van Ronk remembered how he and his comrades had thought Dylan to be hopelessly naive on the subject of politics. And yet, somehow his music was able to capture perfectly the frustrations and aspirations of those far more involved than himself in the activism of the early sixties.
The story of Dylan’s rise to fame was cut with footage from his 1966 European tour, when he ditched his acoustic guitar for an electric backing group. Again and again Scorsese showed us Dylan being booed through his songs, British audiences complaining that they came “to see Bobby — not a pop group”. In the second part of Scorsese’s documentary we saw the chain of events that led up to this turning point in his career. Dylan first went electric at Newport folk festival, where the audience booed him off stage and the folk singer Pete Seeger, one of Dylan’s formative influences, tried to cut the wires to the amplifier.
Dylan had tired of the role of political troubadour. For him it had simply been a part he played during a particular phase of his work, but now it had begun to restrict him artistically. He was sick of journalists asking him to explain the “message” in every song and to identify which political event they referred to.
Footage from the 1966 tour depicted Dylan as an increasingly exasperated interviewee, bombarded with imbecile questions as to what he thought about being the “ultimate beatnik”, who eventually started to refuse to engage not only with the trappings of fame but also with the fans who had made him famous in the first place.
Almost forty years later it is hard to comprehend the passion with which Dylan’s former admirers attacked what we might now see as nothing more than a stylistic shift. But Dylan’s decision to play a new kind of music represented much more than that — it amounted to a political betrayal.
The acoustic Dylan had played at civil rights demonstrations; the electric Dylan asked only, “how does it feel to be on your own?” These were no longer the songs of an optimistic new generation; they spoke instead of the disillusionment of that generation. The outrage directed at Dylan was not directed at him as a musician, but at his failure to continue to remain true to the promise of a better world.
