Bob Dylan

No Direction Home: The Soundtrack – (Sony)

So what is it I can possibly say about Bob Dylan that hasn’t been said a million times over.  Nothing much, really.  I can’t even say much about these recordings that hasn’t been said before, what with Dylan being such a presence in the bootleg market – from people with portable tape recorders right down to the present day mp3 downloaders.

One thing that one can’t help but appreciate about these recordings is their contextual placement with the present day – they’re place in rock and roll history, and the marker they provide in contrast with the modern music biz.  While we often go on at length congratulating ourselves for discovering this band or that band, today’s listener can never say that they discovered a “Dylan” amongst the Sigur Ros’s.  Nothing can compare, and that’s not a subjective statement.  It’s a fact, whether Dylan is your cup of tea or not. Will people pull out their Animal Collective CDs ten years from now?  No.  No, they won’t. Five?  Nope.

This isn’t a reflection of quality necessarily, but a reflection of how the average listener has changed.  Loyalty is there, and can even be very aggressive, but it doesn’t last long.  Artists such as Bob Dylan captivated an audience that was eager to invest in their career.  They wanted to absorb the good records, critique the bad ones, and anticipate what the future would bring.  They were, and are, in it for the long haul.  From “Blowing In The Wind”, Dylan had us.  We threw our arms up and made the commitment.  Whatever he decided to do – go electric, find religion, whatever – was going to be important to us whether we gave it our blessing or not.

The “right place, right time” principle had a hand in Dylan;s career.  His profound influence on an entire generation could not have been possible if that generation wasn’t so thirsty for what Dylan offered more eloquently than anyone else.  Dylan made music for young people a legitimately literary form of expression.  “Words” mattered.  He was thought-provoking to a generation that wanted their thoughts provoked.  The scope of this is clear when you consider Dylan’s popularity at the time, and by that I mean he quite simply sold a lot of records.

A great many of these songs appear on No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, where the theme is to hear alternate or live version of the biggies – a demo of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, a live “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, an alternate take on “Highway 61 Revisited, and so on.  Two things stand out about these alternate versions.  One is that Dylan wrote the kind of music that can translate beautifully from full band versions to solo acoustic and back again.  Secondly. If he wasn’t going to do things by himself he was going to do it with some extraordinary talent, like having Mike Bloomfield join him for an incredibly raucous version of “Maggie’s Farm” (recorded at the Newport festival in 1965).

No Direction Home follows Dylan from his start in music up to the Great Betrayal (you know, plugging in).  A couple of 1961 home recordings appear here in “Dink’s Song” and the moving “I Was Young When I Left Home” that not only saw an extraordinary talent, but demonstrated how quickly Dylan mastered a style, or “his” style.  After recording his good but somewhat uneven debut LP, Dylan immediately went to work, ultimately leading to being able to write the most moving anthems heard since his idol, Woody Guthrie. Mostly heard here in live settings to clearly enraptured audiences. “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, and “Chimes Of Freedom” are remarkable in showing just how powerful an artist can be alone with an acoustic guitar as long as he’s saying something we want, or need, to hear.

The second disc here covers the start of the electric years, ending with the infamous “Like A Rolling Stone” performance in Manchester, England (“Judas!”).  Most of what we have here – the aforementioned live “Maggie’s Farm” being the most notable exception – are alternate studio takes.  Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde are represented here in songs like “Desolation Row”, a great “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”, and show a talent for  surrounding one’s self with top-notch talent.  Michael Bloomfield heard a place for a blues guitar in Dylan’s music, The Band find their place in “Visions Of Johanna, and Dylan found sympathetic players in Nashville as well.  The prolific songwriting and rock solid support came together perfectly, whether the public was ready for it or not.

It’s virtually impossible to overstate Dylan’s place in music history.  No Direction Home succeeds in providing a generous scope of Dylan’s talent and shows just how timeless much of this music is.  Years later, answers are still blowing in the wind, a hard rain’s a-falling, and we’re still looking for a direction home…and we can still look to Bob Dylan’s music to lead the way out.