I'M NOT THERE reviewed

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a preview screening of Todd Haynes' I'M NOT THERE, which has been broadly described as a movie about the many public faces of Bob Dylan. As I've mentioned on this blog before, having always admired Dylan in a sort of half-committed, half-hearing way, earlier this year I set myself the task of learning more about him, throwing myself into a mountain of extracurricular reading (Marcus, Williams, Heylin, et al) and a study of his collected recordings, released and unreleased. So I went into the screening with the feeling of moving toward a graduation, that much of my previous year had been a preparation for this occasion. Considering the profound pleasures I've come to know by opening my heart a little wider to Dylan's music, and my mind to the best writing currently in print about it, it would be hard for any film to live up to that kind of "opening act," but to get anywhere near a proper appreciation of I'M NOT THERE, some kind of preliminary immersion is helpful. Otherwise, "Ballad of a Thin Man" might just as well be aimed at you.

I'M NOT THERE is a rumination on the many public faces of Bob Dylan only on its rambling, rustic, picaresque, picturesque surface. It does indeed cast six different actors as shades of Dylan -- Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody, an African-American child who steals rides in boxcars while toting his guitar in a case marked "This Machine Kills Fascists"; Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a brooding protest singer who eventually withdraws from the music business to become an actor and, later, to embrace Christianity as Brother Jack, the pastor of a pentacostal church in California; Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, a poetically minded commentator on the stories; Cate Blanchett as Jude, whose band turns a battery of machine guns on the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival and vaults into the headier heights of pop celebrity; Heath Ledger as Robbie, an actor whose career and womanizing contribute to the breakdown of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a painter; and Richard Gere as Billy, a middle-aged recluse in a rustic town outside of nowhere, whose need for privacy is disrupted by political wrongdoing that cries out for someone to rally the opposition. These various facets of Dylan (or Dylanesque) blend in and out of one another as the film plays, and we feel like we're watching a river flow. To go into the movie expecting some kind of statement or portrayal of Dylan is to be misled, because there's quite a lot about all of these characters that isn't consistent with the real Dylan, so, we come to realize, the point must be something else.

More meaningfully, I'M NOT THERE uses Dylan as the focus of a lovely and sometimes despairing personal essay whose most pertinent underlying theme is the need for art to be progressive and to not look back. It's a valiant and perhaps quixotic theme to address in an age when Hollywood's raison d'etre is to hemorrhage unnecessary remakes, to (deliberately or not) rob our generation of its own stories and own voice, but key to its process is the telling of its "story" in a catalogue of cinematic techniques that recall specific films from the eras to which those facets are tied: FESTIVAL, 8½, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, BOUND FOR GLORY, SAY AMEN SOMEBODY, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, to name the most obvious -- even the opening shot of PETULIA is recreated at one point. One might say that it looks back in the course of making its contrary point, but it's a brazen stare into the gorgon's face that succeeds because this movie moves cinema forward. The various signature styles on parade are as European as often as they are American, but Dylan is so specifically an American artist -- perhaps the most significant American (no, make that significantly American) artist in our lifetime -- one feels that Haynes is speaking as directly about America as he is speaking indirectly about Bob Dylan, and using this film to bemoan its increasingly scattered and powerless people's desperate need for a folk music, a collective voice for its generation. (Say, what about the Dixie Chicks? Oh... right. Forgot. Sorry.)

I've liked all of Haynes' films but have come away from all of them, save SUPERSTAR, feeling that something was broken about them, something related to casting. I can't tell if Haynes is simply too distracted to bring focus to the task, or if (being an independent American filmmaker -- try counting all the production companies attached to this movie) he simply uses the biggest names he can attract, regardless of how right or wrong they may be for the part, and fills up the rest of the roles with whoever is good, available, or affordable. This problem (as I see it, anyway) is also present here, especially in the sections concerning Ledger and Gainsbourg. Both actors are very good, but wrong enough in the landscape to make its inviting haziness seem merely blurry and the most committed viewer feel confused and restless.

Most viewers are grabbing onto Cate Blanchett's Jude (a hot Oscar contender, they say) like a rock in a raging flood because it's the most recognizable Dylan persona in this celluloid carnivál, being as much an impression of the Dylan of DON'T LOOK BACK as a performance. She's a wonderful gender-bending addition to the movie, and a heroic casting feather for Haynes' cap, but she's a King (or Queen) in the deck rather than an Ace -- close enough to someone real for us to know how close she isn't. The reason for any actor to play any living character is to summon forth and concentrate an emotional truth about that person in one scene of drama that might not be present in many hours of documentary footage, which is why I feel Blanchett ultimately gives us caricature rather than character. At one point, she covers her face in fretful agony -- a studied lift of footage cut from EAT THE DOCUMENT in which Dylan, sitting in the back of a taxi with John Lennon, struggles to marshal the nausea brought on by narcotic indulgence. When I saw the original (which can be found on YouTube), I felt great empathy for Dylan, surrounded by sniggering idiots as he pleads with unwise circumstance to put him back on a safe road to home, but the more one knows about this stuff, the more Blanchett's gesture offers footnote in place of emotion.

My favorite of all the proto- or semi-Dylans herein is Marcus Carl Franklin's Woody, who does his own singing and playing and contributes to a wonderful porchfront performance of "Tombstone Blues" with Richie Havens. Somehow the triumph of a woman portraying a man doesn't seem all that transcendent when compared to what Franklin does, taking us back to the young Bobby Zimmerman who modelled himself on folk troubadour Woody Guthrie and left his home in Hibbing, Minnesota to seek his fortune. In what may be the movie's most wondrous moment, young Woody is knocked off a boxcar as it crosses a bridge and plummets into a river where he's swallowed whole by Monstro the Whale, or shall we say (in deference to Disney lawyers) his reasonable facsimile.

Haynes has said that he made this movie in response to his own exploration of Dylan's work, which in retrospect he realized was a subconscious preamble to making a needed change in his own life. As a fellow Dylan student, I award him only the highest marks for the choices he made in terms of song selection. Haynes managed to include almost all of my favorites (surely "Everything is Broken" belonged in here somewhere), but the sequence accompanied by "Blind Willie McTell" (one of Dylan's most magnificent yet obscure songs), which includes young Woody playing a song that rouses a comatose Woody Guthrie in his hospital bed, is almost unbearably poignant.

There's a two-disc soundtrack for this movie out now, consisting almost entirely of cover versions of Dylan songs, but a good deal of it isn't heard in the film, some of the covers heard in the movie (like "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Iggy and the Stooges) aren't on the soundtrack album, and some album covers (like Cat Power's fine "Stuck Outside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again") are replaced in the film by Dylan's originals. The mercurial nature of all this is only too appropriate, and the soundtrack -- Sufjan Stevens' absolutely horrible reading of "Ring Them Bells" notwithstanding -- is as fine a tribute album as one could reasonably wish. Included on the album is the first official release of "I'm Not There," a much-bootlegged song dating from the "Basement Tapes" recordings of 1967, which Dylan followers (you'd have to be one to have heard it before now) generally hold to be one of his most moving compositions and performances despite it being obviously only half-written or improvised on the spot. It's presented in a weird bifurcated stereo mix that consigns Dylan's woeful voice to the right channel, allowing Garth Hudson's organ to swell to equal volume on the left, making the performance more of a battle than it should be. (Stick to the bootleg mono version.) There is also a cover version by Sonic Youth that captures something of the original's shambolic quality while lacking its gripping air of trauma and tenderness.

Perhaps the best I can say about I'M NOT THERE is that I left the theater feeling deeply enriched by an uncommon experience, a technique one would not be wrong to call virtuosic, and a helpful message that I wasn't expecting; this, and that there isn't anything imperfect about it that cannot also honestly be said of Dylan's own body of work. Don't go expecting a clear-cut or even linear experience. Go with the flow and try to compare what you're seeing to a poem, an essay, or a dream; that'll get you there faster. But that's not really the best I can say -- which is that, even though I wasn't 100% satisfied by I'M NOT THERE, I have no doubt that it's a friend for life and the best film of the year because its depth, its beauty, its ambition, even its flaws stuck to my ribs, reassuring me that cinema isn't dead yet (it's only bleeding).

I'M NOT THERE opens around the USA on November 21, in Canada on November 28, and in Europe next month.

In the Presence of Don Quixote

Last night's Bob Dylan show at Cincinnati's Taft Theatre (where I saw electric Hot Tuna in 1972, Iggy Pop and David Bowie in 1977, and King Crimson's double trio in 1995) might be the finest concert I've seen in my admittedly spotty life as a concert-goer.

The Taft is a smaller auditorium with the look of a moderately scaled movie palace of old. The aisles flow down to the stage, so the likelihood of people standing wouldn't be so much of a problem as it was on the floor of Columbus' Value City Arena, and the seats were more comfortable without being plush. The ticket taker guided us to a pair of seats on the right center aisle, with a more or less dead-on view of the stage; they were slightly pricier tickets than the ones we'd had for the previous show, and they were better seats. We were happy. The crowd was all-ages, from children to geriatrics, but the prevailing mood was one of excitement -- a lot of people were smiling -- long before the lights went down.

Amos Lee's warm-up set was pitched at a more introspective, intimate level than the arena show, which gave me a fuller idea of what he and his band are capable of achieving musically. It was interesting to me, because I was seated and paying attention, but the group took the stage promptly and had to contend with a lot of late arrivals, flashlights in the dark leading people to their seats, incoming folks blocking the view of the stage -- so I had the sense that Amos and company were doing their best to win over a crowd that was often paying only half attention, even if they wanted to pay fuller attention. He left "Careless" -- Donna's favorite song from the previous show -- out of the set, but he added "Arms of a Woman" and saved "Black River," their ace in the deck, for a point when the room seemed most settled and receptive. He closed with an inspired choice, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," which Amos sang in a manner that revealed the extent of Cooke's influence on his own vocal mannerisms. Once again, I thought they were a talented, solid act.

As the lights went up between sets, one of the ushers asked to see my ticket and informed us that we were in the wrong seats. We were shown to our new seats, which were in a short aisle against the right wall of the auditorium, but it turned out that these were also excellent seats. It's a local legend that there is no such thing as a bad seat at the Taft, and it would seem to be true.

Donna brought binoculars, so our already good seats could be additionally enhanced with close views of Dylan and company. The band -- Tony Garnier (bass), George Recile (drums), Stu Kimball (rhythm guitar), the remarkable Denny Freeman (lead guitar), and multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron -- were wearing different suits this night, all of them light gray jackets and slacks and dark gray shirts, inverting the color scheme worn by Bob, which was the same silver-studded shades-of-gray outfit he'd worn in Columbus. The blue feather I thought I'd seen in his hat was apparently a lighting trompe l'oeil; the hat was actually a light gray with a slightly darker band with a few feathers in the band, one of them orange. He was no Doctor Phibes: the pencil-thin mustache worn since "LOVE AND THEFT" was gone and he looked like no one other than Bob Dylan. He attacked the set list with a taking-care-of-business poker face that smiled only briefly and occasionally to lend weight or inflection to his lyrics. Occupying a place of honor to Dylan's right was a gleaming golden object: his Oscar for "Things Have Changed," the song he wrote for the movie WONDER BOYS. (The Grammy he won for "Gotta Serve Somebody" was nowhere to be seen.)

As I suspected, the set list featured a number of songs not performed in Columbus, beginning with a rousing "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and followed by an exquisite "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" accompanied by lap steel guitar and stand-up bass. Dylan once again retired his center-stage stance and electric guitar after "Watching The River Flow" and moved over to electric keyboard for "Love Sick," accompanied by Donnie Herron's electric mandolin. As the music slowed to a bluesy, reggae-spiked mood for this number, the standing crowd took their seats to drink the performance in. Dylan gave a gripping reading of it, and got everyone back onto their feet by the end of it. And they stayed there, for the most part, as they steamrolled into an exciting cover of Hambone Willie Newbern's "Rollin' And Tumblin'." This raucous blues standard (Canned Heat did a great version) has been standard for the current tour, but to witness the two performances I saw was an object lesson in the difference between playing it and meaning it. I could feel the sweatslipping off the notes, and it made me want to work with it, and I found myself clapping my hands through the whole number. "When The Deal Goes Down" allowed the band to catch their collective breath, and the audience response throughout the song showed many attendees were knowledgeable and appreciative of the song's lyrics.

Then came the evening's first "oh my God" moment with a sublime and heartfelt performance of "Blind Willie McTell," with Herron on banjo. After the show, I compared my memory of this performance to an earlier one from Melbourne last August, and -- again -- the difference I heard was the distinction between playing it (possibly even learning how to play it as a unit) and meaning it. Before the song was even over, I knew that this was the finest live musical performance I'd ever seen, of one of the most moving songs ever written. It was rewarded with one of the most enthusiastic ovations of the evening. And what better way to lift an audience from the depths of the heart than to follow through with something as wonderfully wise and whimsical as "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again"? This selection clearly hit a few people in the front rows the way "Blind Willie McTell" hit me, because they stood and danced and waved their arms through the whole number -- and it only added to the show, not impeding anyone's view of the stage.

A righteously crunching "Workingman's Blues #2", followed by another great bluesman tribute "High Water (For Charlie Patton)", and a typically playful "Spirit On The Water" (a song in which I feel the musical spirit of Stéphane Grapelli looms large) followed, with Dylan using the lyric "You think I'm over the hill?" to milk loud audience denial. Then the pace of the show pressed the pedal to the metal with a thrilling "Highway 61 Revisited" that had a number of people thrusting their index fingers into the air and twirling them whenever Dylan got back to "Highway Sixty-One!"

Though a more deliberately paced number, "Ain't Talkin'" -- a song with an alternately poignant and lacerating lyric -- was developed by the band as an absorbing groove that was at once a Sisyphusian parallel to the lyric and also, as with all the best groove songs, seemed to cut deeper and sweeter with each repetition. I remember looking through the binoculars at Dylan during this performance, seeing one of the most famous profiles in contemporary history looming over his keyboard while half-singing/half-speaking the lines "All my loyal and much trusted companions / They approve of me and share my code / I practice a faith that's been long abandoned / Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road." At that moment, I felt that I was looking at the Don Quixote of Rock & Roll, and then I got the even stronger feeling that he just might be the real Don Quixote, too -- or at least the living man Cervantes knew, the inspiration for his immortal creation -- determined to walk that road to the end of his days, telling the capital T truth to every cockeyed windmill town on the map. And when he sang the chorus "Ain't talkin', just walkin' / Eatin' hog eyed grease in a hog eyed town / Heart burnin', still yearnin' / Someday you'll be glad to have me around," I felt every heart in the theater pour open. I know mine did.

The Fifties-style sock-hopper "Summer Days" brought back the spirit of carefree fun before the lights intensified to a pregnant blue for a menacing yet magisterial performance of "Ballad Of A Thin Man," which ended the concert proper. A huge, stomping, howling ovation brought Dylan and his band back for "Thunder On The Mountain" and the evening's second "oh my God" performance, an unexpected band arrangement of "Blowin' In The Wind." No one in the audience seemed to know what was coming, as the band wended its way through the introductory passages, until Dylan leaned forward to sing the song's opening question -- and, at that moment, you could hear and feel the awe coming from the crowd, travelling from one person to the next in gooseflesh. Though Dylan has written countless songs, even countless masterpieces since this early anthem, it somehow remains the quintessence of his being in ways one can't fully appreciate until one sees it performed live by the author. This song carries so much baggage -- and the association of so many other voices from Peter, Paul and Mary to Pete Seeger to Dylan himself -- that it can be impossible to isolate and get at its core importance, but it stands there naked when Dylan is singing it to you, no matter what arrangement it's given.

It can't be topped. Show over. Onward, my Sancho Panzas, to the next town. Which happens to be Dayton, Ohio -- for Show #2000 on the Never Ending Tour.

It was either more than a concert, or my ideal of a concert, in that Dylan treated us to a evening full of energy and joy and sacred emotions, and one that left us standing in the presence of living history. We rose to the occasion, and so did he. The set was a song longer than the Columbus performance, but it was the power and sincerity of the performance -- not the number of songs -- that made the absence of Elvis Costello from the bill a complete and rather amazing irrelevance. Afterwards, I felt terribly guilty about some of the things I'd said in my previous blog, questioning whether Dylan might still have the ability or even the wish to channel greatness in concert. Why should this man have to channel what he already is? Whether he's performing at half power or full power, he's absolutely not to be missed.

My First Dylan Show

As a little summer's end treat to ourselves, Donna and I drove up to Columbus, Ohio yesterday (October 13) to see Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and opening act Aaron Lee, at the Schottenstein Center's Value City Arena.

I love collecting live concert recordings, but I've never been much of a concert-goer. I've seen a number of acts who have mattered to me -- I had a seventh row seat to see Iggy Pop on his IDIOT tour with David Bowie on keyboards, I was once one of maybe 75 people who saw Pere Ubu one rainy night in the 1980s, I saw the original lineup of the Ramones three times -- but I've generally refused to travel very far to see any performer, and it hasn't helped my frequency of attendance that I don't drive, and my wife and I have conflicting musical tastes much of the time.

This year I've spent a lot of time undertaking a thorough self-education in Dylan -- I carry all of his albums, as well as some key bootlegs, on my Creative Zen (think iPod); I've read more than a dozen books about him this year, and seen most of his movies and the Scorsese documentary; and reading Paul Williams' trilogy of books about Dylan as a performance artist has turned me into a compulsive downloader/collector of his live shows from the past four decades. (My present goal is to collect at least one representative show from each live period... but I'm basically grabbing whatever I can find.) So I've been immersed in Dylan for awhile, as Donna well knows, and it seemed the culmination of all this process to actually attend one of his concerts, to see him in the now and hear what he happened to be playing now.

Value City Arena is a big basketball or hockey arena that is converted into a concert hall with temporary flooring and pre-arranged rows of folding (but surprisingly comfortable) chairs, whose only problem is not allowing for much in the way of shoulder room. The sound quality was a bit boomy, given the huge hollows of the arena, but was relatively clear and not overly loud. Amos Lee played for about 40 minutes with his band and was warmly received. He was not the sort of opening act you tune out. Their sound might be filed somewhere between classic period The Band and Dave Matthews, but that's just to give you a point of compass, not a remark on their originality. The songwriting was both heartfelt and capable, and the band itself seemed rehearsed while the music itself remained open to interpretation; they seemed quite flexible in performance, allowing themselves to seize upon moments of inspiration to veer from the charts into undiscovered country. I liked them -- not least of all because they were serious, eager to please, and comported themselves as though still uncorrupted by the record business.

After a ten-minute break, Elvis Costello took the stage, his microphone surrounded by a brace of four acoustic guitars and a table with bottled water and a cup of some other beverage. I was a big fan of Costello in his early years with The Attractions but drifted away after BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE for no particular reason, as I still regard it as one of his finest albums. But as Elvis took the stage, I felt an unexpected flush of happy emotions that he proceeded to earn with a consistently and impressively energetic and passionate performance of songs ranging from the very early ("Radio Sweetheart", "Allison") to more recent songs with a pronounced anti-war theme ("Whip It Up", "The Scarlet Tide"). These songs -- with a few humorous, personable, but pointedly political asides tucked betweeen them -- were torch-bearers for the troubadour spirit of the 1960s Bob Dylan and proved Elvis an inspired choice to share the bill with the original. If only he had launched into "Tokyo Storm Warning," I thought to myself, the Dylanesque resonance would have been complete. On second thought, nothing he was lacking. Elvis Costello was great and fully worth the price of admission.

Bob Dylan and his band took the stage after a somewhat longer break. Donna and I had scored fairly good seats for the show -- the first row of the second group of center seats on the floor -- but, from the moment Dylan took the stage, any benefits of our positioning were queered by everyone rising to their feet -- and they remained that way for 90% of the show. Not because the music was rousing and demanded a steady surge of enthusiasm, because these people in the priciest seats remained standing even during all but one of the ballads, though they could just as well have effectively gawked at the living legend from a sitting position. This caused some inconvenience to me, because I don't enjoy standing in a stationary position for an hour at a time, but even moreso for Donna, who's short and couldn't see much of the show even when standing. So, after driving all the way to Columbus, and paying over a couple of hundred dollars for the tickets and our overnight accomodations, she spent most of the show sitting and listening.

Dylan was wearing a very sharp, dark grey suit with sequins and a broad-brimmed gray hat with a blue feather in the band. He looked like Doctor Phibes, as he would've looked if he had turned up in a later sequel as a riverboat gambler with a Spanish alias. As is his habit these days, Dylan played the first three songs on guitar, then moved over to an electric keyboard for the rest of the show. I didn't mind him playing keyboard, but I minded that he moved away from the forefront of the band to sing and play in the manner of one of his own sidemen. He was seen, from that point on, mostly in profile and it seemed a deliberate cutting-back on the powerful opening impact that he had on the audience. For my money, the concert was at its most effective during the first four numbers -- "Rainy Day Women 12 & 35", "It Ain't Me Babe" (beautifully reinvented and given, in my opinion, the evening's one transcendent performance), "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (one of the irregular numbers from the current tour) and, after the move to keyboards, "Love Sick" (the potent opener from TIME OUT OF MIND that was only recently added to the current tour's playlist).

The rest of the show alternated between flat-out roadhouse rock 'n' roll ("Rollin' and Tumblin'", "Summer Days", "Highway 61 Revisited"), sweet whimsy ("Spirit on the Water"), and dark ballads, including "The Ballad of a Thin Man," which I was especially happy to see performed. That classic song from the HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED album closed the main performance, and an extended stomping/clapping/cheering from the crowd lured Dylan and Company back out for a perfunctory encore of "Thunder on the Mountain" and "All Along the Watchtower." I've heard many different renditions of this song as it has been explored in Dylan's live repertoire, and this performance was not particularly inspired. The lead guitar was Hendrix-like to the point of being overtly imitative and the vocals were so phonetically rendered that Dylan might have been trying to teach the song to a kindergarten class rather than tell a powerful tale of revelation. Despite an extended milking of audience applause, the lights came up -- there was no second encore.

It was strange: the audience seemed to be giving Dylan everything that an audience can give an artist, at least in terms of standing at rapt attention and applauding and whooping like crazy. This was the first concert Donna and I had attended since roughly 1999, and we were surprised by some of the changes made in audience comportment over the years. First of all, no wafting aroma of cannabis. Secondly, we were amused (and a bit horrified) to discover that the cigarette lighters once used to coax encores out of artists have now given way to cell phone screens being held on high. (Talk about scenes that should have been in THE INVASION!) There were hundreds of them -- any one of which could transmit photos or a live recording to a receiving line -- yet people all around me were getting caught with cameras or recorders and being told to turn them off and put them away. Nobody cried "Judas!" either, but Dylan hadn't really done anything to earn such rude treatment -- unless you compare his show to the one he was doing the last time that word was hurled at him. He actually played a very good and entertaining, if a bit by-the-numbers, show, and his band (most of them dressed to the nines as well) was hot, but I believe they left the auditorium a song or two short of satisfied. It was, however, needless to say, a thrill simply to be sharing the same very large space with him, to cheer him, to sing along with him, and to know that he was playing for the two of us and everyone else assembled there.

So there you have it, my first Dylan show. It was neither one of his legendary uninspired shows nor was it one of his legendary great ones, but parts of it could serve as an illustration of both extremes -- so, all in all, a good place to start. I had the sense that he was definitely enjoying it for awhile and giving the audience close to everything he had; his fire is not yet extinguished by any means. But I did sense from the second half of the show that he was deliberately sparing himself from investing his performances with too much pain and acuity or anger -- the very forces that Elvis Costello is still drawing upon to fuel his performances. But they were there in his reading of "Love Sick," which would be a damned hard song for even him to fake.

Reading Paul Williams on the subject has taught me that the show you see is not necessarily the one you hear -- so I'm eager to find a recording of the show and re-experience it more specifically through my ears, away from the smell of the hoagy being eaten by the stranger sitting next to me, removed from all the people standing or milling back and forth in front of us, apart from the raised cell phones -- just the pure, undistracted sound of the music and the receptivity of one for whom it was intended.

Am I coming to Bob Dylan's concerts too late in the game to see a sustained show of greatness? I don't think so, and I hope not. I've got tickets for Monday night's show in Cincinnati -- which I understand to be Show #1999 of the Never-Ending Tour.

Dylan's Buried Treasure: "I'm Not There (1956)"

Those of you who have seen the trailer for Todd Haynes' forthcoming experimental biopic about Bob Dylan, I'M NOT THERE, on YouTube may have been struck -- as I was -- by its musical accompaniment. Though I've been reading a lot about Dylan these past months, and immersing myself in his albums as I read, I was unfamiliar with the fragment, which I found immediately absorbing and haunting. I took lyrics from the song to BobDylan.com's lyric search and drew a blank. The reason for this is simple: the song, which is called "I'm Not There (1956)", has never been commercially released.

It belongs to that mysterious group of 1967 recordings known as "The Basement Tapes," and it was not included among the songs found in Columbia's legitimate release of the alleged cream of the crop. The trailer includes only a 1:58 snippet of the entire piece, which runs 5:08; it's been rerecorded by Sonic Youth for the movie but, as the trailer seems to insist, the original version must be heard.

It's been awhile since a song got its hooks so deeply into me. I heard "I'm Not There (1956)" for the first time in its entirety yesterday -- I was able to find an mp3 here (scroll down 13 short paragraphs) -- and must have listened to it at least twenty times throughout the day, amazed that a song could communicate its emotion so palpably even though the lyrics (mostly improvised on the spot) hovered between incompletion and incoherence, even taking the time to learn the comparatively simple piece on my bass to try to come to terms with it musically. Here is some of what I found written in various sources about this amazing piece...

From THE OLD, WEIRD AMERICA by Greil Marcus:

"There is nothing like 'I'm Not There' -- called 'I'm Not There, I'm Gone' when Garth Hudson wrote down basement titles, later retitled 'I'm Not There (1956)' -- in the basement recordings, or anywhere else in Bob Dylan's career. It was only recorded once; unlike others of the new basement songs, which Dylan rerecorded or continued to feature on stage thirty years later, it was never sung again.

She fell into conversation with the first fat man she saw.
"What do you do?," he said, fitting two potato chips into his mouth.
I go to parties and only talk to the fat guys, she thought.
Owen was home writing. She thought of it as an act of fidelity to talk only to the unattractive guys.
She started to tell him about her jobs. She was talking on automatic pilot, hardly listening to what she was saying -- instead, she was listening to Dylan. Going through the host's record collection, she'd found a bootleg album that included "I'm Not There," a legendary, never-released, never-completed song from the Basement Tapes sessions -- a song that she'd heard just once, the summer after high school, and that she'd been searching for ever since. It came on while she was talking; it was even more haunting than she remembered.
She touched the fat guy's wrist. "This," she said, "may be the greatest song ever written."

"The woman speaking is the heroine of a 1991 novel by Brian Morton called THE DYLANIST, and it's a wonderful thing she says -- because so many people have responded the same way, at the same time realizing that 'I'm Not There' is barely written at all.... The song is a trance, a waking dream, a whirlpool... Words are floated together in a dyslexia that is music itself -- a dyslexia that seems meant to prove the claims of music over words, to see just how little words can do... In the last lines of the song, the most plainly sung, the most painful, so bereft that after the song's five minutes, five minutes that seem like no measurable time, you no longer believe that anything so strong can be said in words."

From composer Michael Pisaro:
"It's almost as though he has discovered a language or, better, has heard of a language: heard about some of its vocabulary, its grammar and its sounds, and before he can comprehend it, starts using this set of unformed tools to narrate the most important event of his life... [Rick] Danko plays [bass] as if he knows that all his life this song has been waiting for him to complete it, and that he will be given only one chance."

From BOB DYLAN: PERFORMING ARTIST 1960-1973 by Paul Williams:
"What's astonishing here is that we can feel with great intensity and specificity what the singer is talking about, even though 80% of the lyrics have not been written yet!... It's as though when Dylan writes, the finished song is not constructed piece by piece as we might imagine, but tuned in; there is an entirety from the first but still out of focus, like the photograph of a fetus, a blur whose identifying characteristics are implicit but not yet visible -- not because they're obscured but because they haven't yet taken shape. 'I'm Not There' is a performance complete in feeling -- 'Dylan's saddest song,' says [THE TELEGRAPH editor John] Bauldie -- achieved without benefit of context or detail. It's like listening to the inspiration before the song is wrapped around it."

With this kind of press, I'm surprised that this forty year old piece isn't better known to the public at large. People talk about the Basement Tapes at length, but this particular song is surely, on its own, to Bob Dylan what SMILE was, for decades, to Brian Wilson. As much as I love what Wilson did when he resurrected SMILE as a solo recording, its availability has taken away from the almost sacred mystery that enveloped the original Beach Boys recordings so painstakingly produced by Wilson, which fans loved to collect, share, and arrange into their own personal visions of what the unfinished album might have been. "I'm Not There (1956)" -- whose attached date is only one of many unexplained mysteries about it -- is of such similar appeal that I'm surprised that Dylan fans aren't out there writing and sharing their own lyrics to complete the jigsaw... but, who knows, maybe they do.

One of the many uncanny things about this piece is that Dylan must have known what he had, but he had the awareness of his own craft to know, despite the incompletion of the piece, that this singular recording had somehow miraculously achieved everything that any completed version possibly could and was wise enough to leave it alone. Its rough-hewn quality also invests it with something that no finished song ever has. In its own way, "I'm Not There" is perfect and there's no need for Dylan to touch it again. It might tempt him to finish it.

It's interesting that Todd Haynes chose this obscure song as the title piece for his film, but it does represent in some ways Dylan's own mercurial, artfully dodging persona, which I take to be one of the film's primary concerns, as it supposedly casts seven different actors as Bob Dylan at different phases of his career. My feeling about Haynes' previous work is that it's always very enticing but somehow always falls short of satisfying me completely. The idea to cast different actors as Dylan is an inspired one, one that qualifies this film as fantastic cinema sight unseen, but I'm looking forward to I'M NOT THERE with equal parts eagerness and trepidation. There is a preview scene from the film on YouTube featuring Cate Blanchett as Dylan, who strikes me in this snippet as playing Patti Smith in Dylan drag. Even so, the casting is inspired and it looks like a film that has winks to offer as well as wisdom. If it only brings this song within reach of more appreciative ears, the effort will have been worth it.

I'm hoping it turns out to be the superhero film of the year.

I'm There Right Now

Robert Blake hands you the phone in David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY.

Have you ever come across a song in the course of your listening that stands in front of you defiantly, like a roadblock, daring you to pass?

For me, recently, that song is currently "Ballad of a Thin Man" from Bob Dylan's HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED album -- and, for some reason, the live version from Manchester 1966 (erroneously released as THE "ROYAL ALBERT HALL" CONCERT) seems even more insistently impassable. I've taken to playing the song every night before retiring, a ritual I've been known to enact in the past with other minor key songs like "Telstar" by The Tornados, "Love Song for the Dead Ché" by The United States of America, "Share a Little Joke" by Jefferson Airplane, and "Swimming Horses" by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

There's a stanza in the song that goes:

You hand in your ticket

And you go watch the geek

Who immediately walks up to you

When he hears you speak

And says, "How does it feel

To be such a freak?"

And you say, "Impossible"

As he hands you a bone

And something is happening here

And you don't know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

It recently occured to me, in the course of this obsession, that if you just change "bone" to "phone," you've got a scene from David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY.

"I'm there right now," says the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), his words unexpectedly poising the scene on the precipice of madness. Which brings to mind the title of Todd Haynes' forthcoming biopic, with six different actors (including Cate Blanchett) playing Dylan: I'M NOT THERE.

Curiously enough, "Lost Highway" is also the name of a Hank Williams song that Dylan can be seen playing to Bob Neuwirth in one of the hotel room scenes in the 1965 UK tour documentary DONT LOOK BACK.

Take my advice, you'll curse the day

You started going down that lost highway.

It was that Hank Williams song, incidentally, that delivered unto Dylan the phrase "rolling stone" and led him to the gunpowder moment of his reinvention.

Highway 61 Meets Route 66

Bob Dylan turns 66 today.

I've been on a Dylan jag pretty much all year, listening to the albums, his wonderful radio shows, reading the books about him and the books about his music (Paul Williams, Michael Gray's encyclopedia, and above all, Greil Marcus). I've been seeing as many of the films as I can find. A current favorite of mine is the song "Changing of the Guards" from STREET-LEGAL, an album I consider underrated as a collection of songs though I am sometimes annoyed by the producer's handling of the songs. "Changing of the Guards" was one of the songs selected by Patti Smith for her new album of covers, TWELVE, and her version may well redefine the song, much as Jimi Hendrix left his indelible imprint on "All Across the Watchtower." Lenny Kaye's acoustic guitar brings out the song's heroism so full-bloodedly, it's full of juice. Smith's haggard but expressive voice grabs onto the lyrics and wrests out all their medievalism, and the progression from one stanza to the next has all the drama of a series of overturned Tarot cards.

I'm up way too late and it's time for my boot heels to be wanderin' -- but I wish Bob Dylan a happy day and a good show tonight as he entertains the folks in Hershey, PA. On those occasions when I lose touch with what it means to be an artist, he's one of the lights who can always be counted on to bring me back on course, and I'm appreciative.

Dylan Times Two/No Limit

DON'T LOOK BACK (1967)

D.A. Pennebaker's classic documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom has been refurbished for a new, deluxe DVD release that, when held in one's hand, has the earnest heft of a Bible. In addition to a digitally restored presentation of the main feature, there's a collection of uncut performances culled from various venues during the tour; an entire second disc of compelling outtakes, including other performances and a guest appearance by Nico; and a reprint of the 168-page book version of Pennebaker's film, containing images and transcriptions of every word spoken in it. When this film was first released to US theaters, some of its strong language was censored, but this was restored for the previous video releases and remains intact here. For a film shot in 16mm with available light, the image quality is exceptional and the sound quality is also improved, but there is something about a document of such historical importance that entices the eyes and ears to dilate, to make the most of what's available. What's especially great about this set is that the uncut performances shift the package's focus from Dylan the charming provocateur to Dylan the artist; it is amazing in itself, in this era of stage teleprompters and song books, to see him stand alone on a stage and call to mind all the imagistic words from these songs, at a time when they were less than a year old in some cases, and interpreted with so much inflection, immediacy, and urgency. At the same time, it becomes easier to understand why audiences were so powerfully drawn to the almost Holy force of the truths he summoned and why they felt betrayed when he chose to diffuse the unacceptable burden of that limelight by sharing it with a band and erecting a wall of electricity and volume between his audience and his vulnerability. Impossible to watch without thinking, "Woe is us, but how blessed we were."

MASKED AND ANONYMOUS (2003)

It's hard to tell whether this film -- co-scripted by Bob Dylan and director Larry Charles -- was intended as a fantasy or an allegory, but I'm inclined to see it as a remake of DON'T LOOK BACK of sorts, and Dylan's own jet-black recrimination of a world that has failed to heed the warnings of his best-loved songs and grown monstrous. Dylan himself, looking like a diminutive Dr. Phibes in Hank Williams garb, plays Jack Fate, a legendary musician caught and imprisoned after witnessing, shall we say, an unsharable political truth involving his father. Many years later, as his father lies on his deathbed, Fate is released and immediately snared by snake-oil agent John Goodman and producer Jessica Langue as the only available musical star for a televised charity event. The nature of the charity is vague, but so is the nature of the heavily spray-painted, multi-racial, brooding, self-interested landscape of the America herein portrayed. Fate himself is no more familiar; a wiry little man no one recognizes, he steps out of his communal prison cell into an America where his once-famous songs (like "My Back Pages") are heard principally in languages other than English, or thrashed out by groups like the Ramones; no one remembers him except a few people who might profit from that memory. Dylan proves himself a better actor than any of his earlier screen work indicated, noble and touching and cypherish, and Jeff Bridges and Val Kilmer have terrific supporting roles as an arrogant journalist and animal wrangler, respectively. Bridges' interview with Jack, which seems to have been improvised and whittled down to its most vicious essence, is one of the film's highlights. Shapeless perhaps, but sprawling and impressionistic in the best sense, not unlike "Desolation Row" applied to cinema. Though it's fairly obscure now, it's bound to gain greater recognition as one of Dylan's major latter-day projects in years to come. Why was this film called MASKED AND ANONYMOUS? Perhaps because AMERICAN GRAFFITI was already taken.