A Pilgrim’s Digression

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

I don’t know what happened to me in college. At a time of life when young people are supposed to expand their musical tastes beyond the top 40, I wasn’t listening to much music at all. I was too wrapped up in this ridiculous dream of being a writer of “literature.” I read Wordsworth and Shelley and Eliot and Pound—I didn’t listen to music. Or if I did listen to music, I listened to then-Alternative Rock. What a snot I was.

Thus it is that I am thirty-two years old and only now discovering Bob Dylan—and I discovered him only within the past three or four months, as if it weren’t bad enough that it’s taken me thirty-two years to catch up to tastes most people acquired in their early twenties.

I work with a fella who plays in a band. They do the club scene here in Washington. He has invited me at least three times to come see them play; I always turn him down. No entanglements with people. That’s my rule. But when last month he recommended I watch this new documentary on Dylan by Martin Scorsese airing on PBS, I decided that was one invitation I could take him up on. I can watch a documentary alone in my room.

I had already been listening to a little Dylan anyway; I don’t exactly recall how I got started on that track. I think I began listening when I checked out “Blood on the Tracks” from the library, amongst a number of children’s folks CDs by the likes of Pete Seeger. I liked every song on “Blood on the Tracks,” so already I was primed for a powerful emotional experience.

When my co-worker mentioned “No Direction Home,” I asked him other what Dylan albums I should listen to. He said “Blonde on Blonde” was his favorite, so I downloaded it via iTunes. Didn’t care for it much the first time I listened. Didn’t care much about it the second time through. Third time through…well, “Visions of Johanna” ain’t bad. Fourth time listening, I’m starting to really get that song “Leopard-skin-pillbox-hat.” After that, I found a new song I liked every time I listened, so now, I like the whole album.

“Ain’t it just like the night / To play tricks when you’re trying / To be so quiet…”

“Visions of Johanna” is my favorite Dylan song now, and I have no idea why.

Somewhere in the middle of this “Dylan Immersion Therapy,” I rented the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous. It would be a terrible movie, except that the soundtrack contains new music by Dylan. In fact, Dylan stars in the movie, alongside John Goodman and Jeff Bridges. So I went back to iTunes and downloaded the soundtrack.

Then one morning last month, before the documentary aired on PBS, I saw that Starbucks was selling the soundtrack to No Direction Home, so I bought that, too. By now, my hard drive is stacked with Dylan, and I have about three more albums in my iTunes shopping cart even as I type tonight.

I can’t remember the last time music had this kind of impact on me. I’m embarrassed to admit that, because most people will just say, “Where have you been?” Lost. Hopelessly lost, I answer.

I rented No Direction Home via Netflix because our PBS station only carried the program on its digital channel, and since we don’t have an HDTV, we only get the analog channel. I know nothing about Bob Dylan except what I’ve learned from this documentary; I know nothing of his history or anything about the various debates that swirled around him in the mid sixties—whether he merely stole other people’s stuff, the whole acoustic versus electric debate—all I know is, I like the music, and this documentary gave me plenty of insight into where the music comes from.

From the beginning of the documentary, where we hear the present-day Dylan say that he always felt he was born in the wrong place, this documentary is a subtle revelation of music rather than of a man, who apparently reveals nothing about himself in a straightforward manner. Yet if he glosses over his childhood, it’s because the childhood doesn’t matter. He was born in the wrong place, up there in Minnesota. Damn, I think I know what that feels like.

And isn’t that the essence of great art? An artist reveals what we have thought or felt, but never been able to express. Wordsworth said something similar, so perhaps all my reading wasn’t worthless after all, if it helps me achieve that simple realization.

Really, so many of Dylan’s lyrics are so obscure, meaning really is derived solely from subjective response. If we learn that “When the Ship Comes In” was written in response to a hotel that wouldn’t rent a scruffy-looking Dylan a room, objective meaning rather detracts from what is a powerful song about the triumph of justice over injustice. Don’t you feel your soul rise up when Dylan gets to that part about “Oh the foes will rise / With the sleep still in their eyes / And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’”?

Perhaps the best thing about this documentary is that it facilitates not so much the apprehension of the music, but the innervation of the soul through music. This is largely accomplished through giving us samples of Dylan’s live performances. Dylan himself says at one point that it is in concert, not on his records, that the music is heard in its ideal form. I believe it. The version of “Maggie’s Farm” Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival in ‘64 is as coldly clean as the best poetry, enlivened even by the sound of boos from the audience who are disturbed by the sound of electric rock and roll marring their folk festival.

The documentary provides no special insight into Dylan’s life. Unlike most documentaries about a revolutionary personage, there are no “chapters” on his childhood development, no gossipy recounting of his love affairs, nothing of the juicy stuff of biography. There is only the music and, occasionally, a choice tidbit about how, when, where, under what kind of stress it was produced.

I can’t find any fault in that at all. In his enigmatic non-existence, Dylan reminds me of those anonymous medieval bards such as Caedmon, whose song became all that was left of them. The music is so beautiful, it does not require that there be any singer. It lives on its own now.