It is hard to imagine what can be said about Bob Dylan that hasn’t
already been said or written or explicated before in one fashion or
another. Even the great movie maestro Martin Scorsese, in his
remarkable new four-hour filmic biograph (to use a Dylan word), doesn’t
dare try to re-invent poet-icon. And yet he comes remarkably close.
Although “No Direction Home” contains no new material – indeed, the
most recent track stems from 1966 – the soundtrack, like the
documentary itself, presents Dylan in such startlingly new contexts
that it almost seems like we are seeing and hearing him for the first
time. So many songs from Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on
Blonde, of which every wacky vocal whirl and sarcastic intonation is
etched in our consciousness and in the marrow of our memories, are
presented here in new versions, with often markedly different tone,
words, melody and rhythm, even meaning sometimes.
Lennon,
Marley, Garcia, Van, Neil – of all the icons of the rock music era,
there is no poet that has touched the core of the collective
consciousness like Dylan; from Blake to Whitman to his namesake Thomas,
there is no more shining symbol of populist possibilities; from Chaplin
to Woody to Ali, was there ever such a man of words who was such a man
of the people? Dylan said it like it was, yet his words had the imagery
and impressionism of Rimbaud and Van Gogh – “To dance beneath the
diamond sky with one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea/Circled by
the circus sands with all memory/And fate, driven deep beneath the
waves/Let me forget about today until tomorrow…” Whew, enough said. A
master at work in the prime of his powers: you simply must experience
it for yourselves.
Hearing these original songs in
versions anew kind of puts you off your axis. As with the Beatles’
Anthology, did we know there were other possible versions of these
indelible tunes? It’s like everything you’ve ever known is different
now.
Sound
Sound? You ask about sound. That’s like asking if Bob has a nice
singing voice. As it happens, the tapes, like the footage, much of
which have been secreted in Dylan’s vaults all the while and never seen
before, have been meticulously restored and mastered, and are just a
joy to behold.
Because the album is pretty much, although by no means completely, the
soundtrack to the documentary and it is all from the ‘60s, there are
therefore no extra DVD features nor 5.1 sound manipulation. However,
the mastering of these alternative versions to the indelible recordings
is clean, clear and faithful – Bob on his own against the diamond sky,
one hand waving free. “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in
yours. I said that.”
Like this article? Bookmark and share with any of the sites below.