Long before the ACL Fest,
Dylan electrified a smaller Austin venue

Transcript, photos from September 1965 visit
reveal a loose young icon.

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, September 15, 2007


Imagine what it was like to be Bob Dylan in September 1965.

You were "the voice of a generation" who had slapped the sensibilities of your early fans with an earsplitting rock set at the Newport Folk Festival two months earlier.
You were about to play your first concert in Texas, where they killed the president, with a new touring band comprised of four Canadians and a drummer from Arkansas that would later call themselves the Band. And you were shooting up the Billboard charts with "Like A Rolling Stone," from the all-electric album "Highway 61 Revisited."
With an unorthodox singing voice in direct opposition to the sunny harmonies of the Beatles and a new album that began "God said to Abraham, kill me a son," you were the most intriguing, polarizing figure in pop culture.

You were 24 years old.

And you were in Austin to play the Municipal Auditorium (later renamed Palmer Auditorium).

The day of the show, Dylan held an informal news conference at the Villa Capri Motor Hotel on Red River Street near the University of Texas. American-Statesman photos of that question-and-answer session, recently discovered at the Austin History Center, show a loose and smiling icon. The Statesman's entertainment writer at the time, Jim Langdon, can't name the photographer, but he remembers the meeting well. "There were maybe five or six of us there," Langdon said. "Dylan was pretty cool with everybody." As evidenced in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary "Don't Look Back," Dylan could be a contentious interview subject, but the transcript of the Villa Capri Q&A session shows Dylan to be more playful than acidic in his reluctance to be pinned down.

Asked to classify what he does, Dylan replied, "I like to think of myself in terms of a trapeze artist." Langdon follows that by noting a carnival-like sound on the most recent albums. "That's not a carnival sound, that's religious," Dylan says. "That's very real. You can see that anywhere."

When asked about the inspiration behind "Ballad of a Thin Man," Dylan says it's based on "a fella that came into a truckstop once." Asked to name his favorite performers, Dylan rattles off, "Rasputin, Charles DeGaulle, the Staple Singers."

Has financial success changed his life? "Yeah, I have more money now," Dylan answers. What has he done with it? "I buy things."

Feeding off Dylan's cryptic, off-the-wall attitude, Langdon turned in a "Night Beat" column that contained elements of free verse not commonly found in a daily newspaper — then or now. A close friend and former Jefferson High classmate of Janis Joplin, Langdon quit the Statesman in 1966 to write fiction but returned to the newspaper business. He retired from the Houston Chronicle four years ago and lives in Colorado.

That first Austin show, the first time he'd been backed by Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm, was one of Dylan's favorites of the '65 tour, he said in an interview in San Francisco three months later. For one, it was the first time he'd played electric where he didn't hear boos from folk purists who pegged him as a pop sellout in the aftermath of Beatlemania. According to an account of the show written by Gilbert Shelton (who'd later create "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers"), Dylan didn't get much of anything from a crowd of "mostly high school couples, all dressed up for church, almost ... (who) sat like a bunch of toads, watching Bob Dylan rear back and shout, jump across the stage ... waving around (his) Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar ... "

Noted New York photographer Stephanie Chernikowski, a former Austinite, wasn't sitting on her hands, but screaming in approval. "It never entered my mind — or heart — not to love the electric stuff," she recalled. "Dylan and the Band were stunning. There were moments that felt like you were the only person in the room with them."

Dylan opened with a solo acoustic set, which he'd been doing since the Newport fiasco, playing "Gates Of Eden," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Desolation Row" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." When he brought the Band onstage, they burst into "Tombstone Blues," "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," "It Ain't Me Babe," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Maggie's Farm," with Dylan on piano for that latter tune.

Promoter Angus Wynne, who booked the show after calling "information" in New York City to get the number of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, said of the "in your face" electric segment: "You couldn't really understand the words — quality concert sound systems were nonexistent back then — but you could feel the energy. It was like being knocked over by this huge burst of sound."

Bob Dylan, who closes out the Austin City Limits Music Festival tonight, has long held ties to Austin. Charlie Sexton and, then, Denny Freeman have been his guitarists since 2000. His longtime bassist Tony Garnier came from Asleep At the Wheel. Steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar and violinist Elana James have played with the ultimate rock icon, whose son Jakob's band the Wallflowers is named after a song Dylan wrote for Doug Sahm.

And so the mutual affinity continues. Dylan still plays too loud and you can't always make out the words, but he's come to know, during the past 42 years, that Austin can dig it.

Times have changed, but Bob Dylan still reflects a restless America
By Thomas G. Palaima
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, September 15, 2007

'Folk songs are the way I explored the universe. They were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say, I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could connect the pieces.' — Bob Dylan, 'Chronicles Volume One'

When Bob Dylan steps on stage, he brings America with him. America in song images, shrouded in "darkness at the break of noon" and bright with "silver singing rivers." The beauty, blindness and betrayal of love. Small people up against big forces. Simple women and men lost in a world gone wrong. Russell Lee photos translated into words and melodies.

Bob Dylan is our quintessential oral folk poet, in the original Greek sense, a "maker" of "things that are made." Like the first great Western songster, Homer, Dylan takes from old songs and makes new ones, and then keeps remaking them. In 1995, Dylan said, "I've been working on some songs for 20 years, always moving toward some kind of perfection." He is still changing the words and music of songs lesser singer-songwriters would view as fixed masterpieces.

Oral folk and blues poets reveal our world to us as we would not see or feel it without their songs. Dylan is no different. He sings about users, cheaters, six-time losers; buffalo skinners, made murderous by a bankrupt law; God matter-of-factly commanding Abraham, "Kill me a son"; Hattie Carroll slain by a cane; a clean-cut kid sent off to a "napalm health spa"; a never-will-be lover lamenting, "All the friends I ever had are gone." It's rough out there. High water everywhere.

To paraphrase Dylan some more, this is a burden too heavy to be his. So he changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman to one he got from who cares where. And he has used other names, too: Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Alias, Lucky, Boo, Jack Fate.

As Dylan told Allen Ginsberg in an interview, "Nobody's Bob Dylan." But Nobody was also the disguise-name of Homer's Odysseus, the archetypal wandering jokerman on his own Never Ending Tour. And Homer's name was made up, too.

Dylan has said that he is a spokesman for no one, that his songs are not about or for other people, that the music he makes would be real even if no one were listening.

Let's take him at his word. Still he has a preternatural gift for creating and performing songs in an unequaled range of styles.

When we listen to Dylan's bleaker songs, his empathic voice and the moods of his sounds make the hardness and the longing real. Dylan's lyrics are the third big part of his art. His words can be profoundly simple, like Willie Nelson's. Or they can come at us in cascades of images, like T.S. Eliot on speed. He has seen and felt a lot during a life outside the normal stream.

Dylan's outsider perspective fills his songs with twists that change our take on our own lives. Who else would tell the woman he loves, "(I) like your smile / And your fingertips / Like the way that you move your lips. / I like the cool way you look at me. / Everything about you is bringing me / Misery"? Yet we know how that feels.

One small moment in concert captures for me Dylan's uncanny talent, as an oral poet, to invent in the moment. It also shows that he is, at times, acutely aware of his audience.

Performing in Paris in April 2002, Dylan begins singing "Desolation Row" early in his set. In the third stanza, after the slightest pause for emphasis, he sings the name of the hunchback's cathedral en français, pronouncing Notre Dame to rhyme with "Tom." Two lines later he delivers the coup de grâce, singing "rain," the normal rhyming word paired with "Dame," as "ron," so that they rhyme in Dylanesque French. The Parisian audience completely loses its characteristic reserve.

Dylan's protean spirit can move him on stage to sing the spiritual "I Am the Man, Thomas" and Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" in the same set. In his own compositions, we can hear echoes of Hank Williams, Blind Willie McTell, Woody Guthrie, Charlie Patton, Willie and Ricky Nelson, Doug Sahm, the Stanley Brothers, the Mississippi Sheiks, Little Willie John, Big Joe Williams, Elizabeth Cotten, Jimi Hendrix, Stephen Foster, Joe South, Tom Petty, Paul Clayton, Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, Lightnin' Hopkins and Memphis Minnie.

Dylan's song repertory extends back "time out of mind." His first recordings, in 1959-63, when he was just college age, drew upon Scottish and English folk ballads and American regional folk and blues songs. Thirty years later, in 1992-93, Dylan baptized himself again in those same waters, filling two CDs with heartfelt solo acoustic versions of ignored or forgotten classics. He had just received a Grammy lifetime achievement award that he half took as a challenge, that people thought his significant work was behind him.

Dylan also clearly enjoys playing with a band, whether it is rock 'n' roll with Tom Petty or G.E. Smith, the rural music of Bucky Baxter's mandolin and steel guitar, the eclectic blues, R&B, folk, country, rock, classical and jazz mix of Charlie Sexton or his current stripped-down blues-inflected "cowboy band" with Denny Freeman on lead guitar. Keep in mind where and when Dylan comes from, and his eclecticism does not seem so strange.

'Being inhabited by a god'

'Very seldom you hear real songs anymore. Well, we were lucky to grow up, when you could hear them all the time. All you had to do was switch on the radio and you could hear them.' —Bob Dylan, concert talk Feb. 24, 1986

Dylan was born six months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. His family moved from Duluth to Hibbing, Minn., five years later. What music was the child who was the father to Bob Dylan listening to in the late '40s and '50s?

Big band music. Clinch Mountain Boys bluegrass. Merle Travis' 1946 country hit "Dark as a Dungeon," performed by Dylan in concert in the '70s and '90s, with its searing Dylanesque images of the addictive plight of poor coal miners around Ebenezer, Ky.: "Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine / a man will have lust for the lure of the mines."

Perry Como's 14 No. 1 pop singles between 1945 and 1958, from "Prisoner of Love" to "Catch a Falling Star." Big Bill Broonzy's courageously controversial "Black, Brown and White." Little Richard's hyperkinetic cocktails of boogie-woogie, R&B and gospel. Elvis swiveling through Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog."

Dylan absorbed it all. His transistor radio was pulling in at night blues, folk and country tunes on faraway AM stations. How welcome the emotional heat of all this music must have been in a little Minnesota town where, as Dylan recalls, it was too cold to commit crime.

When the twentysomething Dylan decided hothouse folk protest music would not solve America's social injustices, rock 'n' roll and R&B were also in his tool box for expressing his unique poetic gifts.

Bob Dylan is too big a theme for anyone, even Dylan himself, to take on. His songs reflect America's restless energy, as we lurch onward, trying to convince ourselves that God is on our side and the slow train really isn't coming. Rosa Parks and Joseph McCarthy, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Peace Corps were the real America when Dylan came of age. Things have changed. Dylan's song-poems have changed with them, and they keep on changing.

Socrates thought that ancient Greek poets could not explain their own art because they created their songs through a mysterious process that the Greeks called "enthusiasm."

The word means "being inhabited by a god." That sounds like a good enough explanation for the art of Bob Dylan and other American popular musical geniuses who have enriched our lives, like Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Frank Sinatra, James Brown.

The inspiration behind Bob Dylan's music might be the devil and it might be the Lord, but it serves us very well.

Tom Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, where he teaches war and violence studies. For his Dylanology, go to www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/publications/dylan/dylana.html.


Austin musicians on Dylan
'You listen to Dylan and you say, "Who is this guy and where do these songs come from?" Maybe he writes a bunch of stuff and throws a lot of it out. But what he shares with us, they're all keepers.'

— Carolyn Wonderland


'Dylan is like Barton Springs. It doesn't matter where you dive in. It's great. ... Dylan swims in currents that would drown most artists.'

— Paul Minor


'My favorite song is "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," because of the way he perfectly captures both longing and loss without trying very hard. It expresses a very deep human emotion in a beautifully simple way, making the emotion we are all familiar with much more understandable while not selling it short.'

— Rachel Loy


'I try to write what I would actually say. I like Dylan's "Desire" album. I like its rawness and how its lyrics are conversational.'

— Brian Keane


'(My) favorite (Dylan) line is "They say patriotism is the last refuge / To which a scoundrel clings. / Steal a little and they throw you in jail, / Steal a lot and they make you king." I'd like to have just one line like that in my body of work. ... I still consider "Blonde on Blonde" and "Highway 61 Revisited" masterpieces. They both had the blend of personal/politics/mystery/musicality mixed with that sense of pushing past the boundaries of everything known up to that point in folk rock music.'

— Eliza Gilkyson


' "The Times, They Are A-Changin" is my favorite album. Something about it is so intimate. Full of dread and hope. (It has) a timeless quality.'

— Colin Gilmore


The night Dylan and the Band came to Texas
 

Michael Corcoran
September 25, 2005
Austin American-Statesman
 

Bob Dylan and the Band.  Allusive, majestic, snarling lyrics run through the organic groove grinder. The most important, influential songwriter in pop music history backed by four Canadians and a Southerner whose musical instincts and depth earned them the right to call themselves the Band.  Forever entwined in rock music mythology, Bob Dylan and the Band were a magical combination that debuted right here in Austin 40 years ago. Tickets were $4.

Later they would make enduring music together in the basement of a big pink house near Woodstock, but in 1965, 24-year-old Dylan and his mostly younger backing group were rock 'n' roll guerrillas on an artistic upheaval mission, slinging evil electric guitars in front of audiences who'd felt betrayed by the sound-over-message, trend-over-tradition shift. On Sept. 24, 1965, Dylan opened his first Texas concert, a sold-out show at Austin's Municipal Auditorium (later renamed Palmer Auditorium), with a solo acoustic set including "Gates Of Eden," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Desolation Row" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." After a short break, he returned with Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm -- then called the Hawks -- and launched into a loud, biting "Tombstone Blues," followed by "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," "It Ain't Me Babe," "Ballad Of a Thin Man" and the big hit at the time, "Like a Rolling Stone." Dylan played the piano during "Maggie's Farm," the song that was practically drowned out in boos when Dylan and the earsplitting Butterfield Blues Band opened with it at the Newport Folk Festival just two months earlier.

"It was so in-your-face," show promoter Angus Wynne recalls of the Austin electric segment. "You couldn't really understand the words -- quality concert sound systems were nonexistent back then -- but you could feel the energy. It was like being knocked over by this huge burst of sound."

In Austin, 1965 was the cusp between the beatnik generation and the hippies, but Dylan and the Band were basically playing what would later be called punk rock.

The Austin show was only the fourth time Dylan had played electric, and the first time he hadn't heard boos from folk purists who pegged him as a pop sellout trying to glom onto the Beatles phenomenon.

"It never entered my mind -- or heart -- not to love the electric stuff," says Stephanie Chernikowski, a former Austinite, now a top New York photographer, who was at the show. "Dylan and the Band were stunning. There were moments that felt like you were the only person in the room with them."

Three months later, Dylan cited Texas audiences (he played at Southern Methodist University in Dallas the night after Austin) as among the most accepting of the tour.

But Gilbert Shelton, the "Fabulous Freak Brothers" cartoonist who was then a student at the University of Texas, had craved more life from the Austin concert crowd. In an account printed in the November '65 edition of Texas Ranger magazine, he described the audience as "mostly high school couples, all dressed up for church, almost . . . (who) sat like a bunch of toads, watching Bob Dylan rear back and shout, jump across the stage . . . waving around (his) Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar. . ."

Shelton had met Dylan and the band, which he could tell "had recently joined Dylan because they still had their Canadian haircuts and clothes," at the Villa Capri Motor Hotel on Red River Street the night before the concert.

Shelton describes a crazy scene of "go-go girls" from Dallas who just wanted to touch Dylan, a local beatnik turning up with cheap Mexican rum and a late-night listening session that ended with everyone grooving to "Highway 61 Revisited," Dylan's first all-electric album, which had come out three weeks earlier.

Wynne, a 21-year-old fledgling promoter, had decided to try to book Dylan in Austin and Dallas after repeatedly hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio after its July 20, 1965, release. "I looked at the back of a Dylan album and it said he was managed by Albert Grossman, so I called information in New York and got the number," Wynne recalls. "When I called and made my pitch, someone yelled to the other room, 'Hey, do you want to go play in Texas?' and someone yelled back 'Yeah, sure.' " That's how things went back in the days before big-scale national tours.

Dylan had met the Hawks, the former backing band of Ronnie Hawkins, a year earlier through John Hammond Jr., whose father had signed Dylan to Columbia. They were reacquainted in August 1965, according to Clinton Heylin's "A Life In Stolen Moments: Day By Day 1941-1995," when Grossman's secretary took Dylan to see the Hawks at a club in New Jersey. He hired away guitarist Robertson and drummer Helm, an Arkansas native, to play concerts in Forest Hills, N.Y., and the Hollywood Bowl that would showcase songs from the new album.

To avoid a repeat of the Newport Folk disaster, Dylan rehearsed his new band, including bassist Harvey Brooks and keyboardist Al Kooper, night and day for two weeks before the Aug. 28 Forest Hills Stadium show. He also decided to open with a 45-minute solo acoustic segment, followed by a set with the band, to ease the folkies into the new material. But the audience of 15,000 reacted just as negatively, with an estimated one-third of them booing lustily throughout the electric set.

The Sept. 3 Hollywood Bowl show, although sprinkled with hecklers, was more enthusiastically received. Still, Brooks and Kooper decided not to continue with Dylan. Kooper admitted, in an interview for Martin Scorsese's stunning "No Direction Home" documentary, that he made up his mind to quit after seeing Dallas on the itinerary less than two years after the Kennedy assassination. "If they didn't like the president," Kooper said, with a laugh, "what would they think of this guy?" He had no intention of being Dylan's John Connally.

Dylan flew up to Toronto on Sept. 15, nine days before the Austin show, to rehearse with the Hawks. Three nights later he was back in New York. The Hawks were ready.

Although Helm quit the group two months later, after musical disagreements with the front man (not to mention an aversion to being booed night after night), Dylan and the rest of the Hawks forged on to Australia and Europe with a series of fill-in drummers before settling on Mickey Jones. Most of the audiences were contentious toward Dylan's new musical direction, scenes of which dominate part two of the Scorsese documentary.

Then came Dylan's motorcycle accident in July 1966, which, though not seriously injuring him, gave Dylan an excuse to lay low for a while.

During this period of mental healing, Dylan woodshedded daily with the Band, the informal sessions captured on an Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine. May to August 1967 was a summer of inspiration, as a relaxed Dylan started to get more of a feel for the Band's earthy instincts. And the group had obviously been influenced by Dylan's use of poetic license in his songwriting. The oft-bootlegged sessions (officially released in 1975) were called "The Basement Tapes."

After blaring a hundred frantic solos a night behind Dylan's spitfire lyrics (and the gritty Southern roots of Ronnie Hawkins before that) the Band, off the road for the first time in years, fell into a more unforced approach to collective song making, and painted the masterpieces "Music From Big Pink" (1968) and "The Band" (1969).

When Dylan toured again, almost eight years after his 1966 world tour ended with the legendary concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, his backing group was once again the Band. This time they weren't anonymous sidemen but artistic peers.

Bob Dylan and the Band opened their 1974 tour with two sold-out shows at Chicago Stadium, the Band performing "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down" right alongside Dylan classics no longer burdened with acoustic/electric distinctions. Their hurried debut, on Sept. 24, 1965, in Austin, must've seemed like a hundred years ago.
 
 

Delving into DYLAN

Scorsese's 'No Direction Home' finds the vision and the vitality of an American music icon

Joe Gross
September 25, 2005
Austin American-Statesman
 
 

"He was Charlie Chaplin, he was Dylan Thomas, he was Woody Guthrie. He was constantly moving. . . . It wasn't necessary for him to be a definitive person."
-- Liam Clancy, of the Clancy Brothers, on Bob Dylan, from "No Direction Home"

Ten minutes into the Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" you remember what some merely suspected, some always knew and some poor souls refuse to believe:

There's Bob Dylan and then there's everyone else.

Heck, even other artists admit it. On his latest album, "The Outsider," Rodney Crowell is man enough to sing, "Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan when you're drunk at 3 a.m./ And knowing that the chances are no matter what you'll never write like him." Say amen, people.

Like it or not, whether you think he deserves it or not, Dylan's rambling, singular vision bestrides the rock 'n' roll era like a colossus. His earliest work remains vital, and his most recent albums (1997's "Time Out of Mind" and 2001's "Love and Theft") took his art in intriguing new directions.

Dylan's amazing book of memoirs, "Chronicles, Volume One" was just released in paperback, and he sat down with "60 Minutes" for a brief, appropriately enigmatic interview that aired June 12. He's no longer the brilliant folkie or the trash-talking hipster "No Direction Home" commemorates Monday and Tuesday nights on PBS, but Dylan is still very much with us.

Stuffed with interviews, killer concert footage, wit, insights and culture-changing music, "No Direction Home" (already out on DVD) begins with Dylan's nondescript boyhood in Hibbing, Minn., as Robert Zimmerman. Growing up with average Midwestern concerns (girls, Westerns, atomic paranoia), he vibed on the country radio beamed from faraway stations and distanced himself from the "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" culture of the time.

Songwriters such as Hank Williams and Buddy Holly, then Dylan's more profound discovery of Woody Guthrie, made him "feel like I was somebody else, maybe not born to the right parents or something." He wanted to get out of town, at one point dreaming of West Point but doubted he could get into the military academy. So he moved to New York City after a brief flirtation with college, started honing his chops and building his myth.

"Like a sponge" -- as teenhood pal Tony Glover puts it -- Dylan soaked up mannerisms, accents and songs relentlessly. He had no qualms stealing records from a pal or other people's songs (Dave Van Ronk still sounds a little bitter that Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun" was released ahead of his plans to do so.) But it was the ailing folk hero Guthrie who truly changed Dylan's life: "You could listen to his songs and learn how to live," he says.

The interviews with Dylan are easily the two-part documentary's highlight -- director Scorsese could have given us four hours of him talking to the camera and it would have been utterly compelling. Take Dylan's normal speaking voice: There's no trace of his famous onstage singing wheeze or the Midwestern accent that amplified his arrogance back in '66. These days, he sounds like anybody else, albeit a bit more distant, reserved and, of course, cool.

Dylan makes his mercurial, shape-shifting persona seem as natural as a shrug, and he still has a stellar way with a one-liner. Speaking of the feminine attention his teenage rocking attracted, he looks dead in the camera and says, "Both of these girls brought out the poet in me." He can barely keep a straight face.

The dude's charisma has the strength of a black hole; no wonder an entire generation got sucked in.

"No Direction Home" has choice face time with old squeezes such as the wonderfully smiley Suze Rotolo (the girlfriend on Dylan's arm on the cover of his second album, "Freewheelin"') and Joan Baez, whose Dylan impression is hysterical.

But by the end of part one, of course, Dylan has distanced himself from the "protest singer" crowd and gone, as they say, electric. There's a grimly funny moment where Dylan debuts "Mr. Tambourine Man" at a workshop on "topical songwriting" -- everyone looks baffled. His rock band performance of "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is riveting, with explosive, noisy leads from Mike Bloomfield.

Historians, folkies and musicologists will dig night one, with its explorations of Dylan's roots and footage of the civil rights March on Washington and various music festivals, but Dylan freaks will lose their minds on night two. This part focuses on the moment when Dylan became DYLAN, the suede-jacketed uber-hipster who hung out with Allen Ginsberg, chilled with the Beatles, annoyed interviewers and infuriated crowds with the "pop group" he began using to drive home thunderbolts such as "Tombstone Blues." There's a bumper crop of footage from "Eat the Document," D.A. Pennebaker's unreleased sequel to his groundbreaking doc of Dylan's 1965 British tour "Don't Look Back," and a mess of interviews with hangers-on and tour manager Bob Neuwirth.

Although considerable time-jumping takes place in the documentary, there's an egregious cheat near the end of the film. Scorsese sticks up a title card about Dylan's July 1966 motorcycle accident. Then Dylan is shown backstage making a crack about his being "back from the dead" right before he revs up "Like a Rolling Stone" in the face of a jeering crowd and a cry of "Judas." Trouble is, that concert was May 17, 1966, before the motorcycle wreck.

This is intellectually dishonest, no matter how sweet the juxtaposition looked in the editing room. After the accident, Dylan retreated into family life for several years and shied away from the exhausting, drug-soaked touring "No Direction Home" reveals.

Elsewhere, Scorsese's hand is almost nowhere to be seen. Gone are the split screens of "The Last Waltz" or "Woodstock." Frankly, the talking-heads-and-archives-footage in "No Direction Home" feels as if itcould have been shot by any documentarian in the "American Masters" series.

But at the end, it's the music we're here for. The DVD, which was released Tuesday, is filled with extras, including full-length performances of songs such as the aforementioned "Rolling Stone" (and a jagged one from the 1965 Newport festival) and a staggeringly lovely "Chimes of Freedom." There are also bonus clips of other artists: Liam Clancy's take on "Girl From North Country" and Mavis Staples' "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

In lots of ways, the soundtrack double CD (released last month) is its own animal with its own performances. There's an intentional air of "out take" about it; the booklet is full of unused photos from various album sleeve photo sessions, while the discs are a mix of alternate recording takes and live versions of chestnuts.

Disc one leans on the folk years -- Dylan records an early tune called "When I Got Troubles," turns "This Land is Your Land" into a wistful hymn at Carnegie Chapter Hall in '61 and takes an early, slower run at "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliot backing him up. Disc two is all juiced-up, no-prisoners rock, from that blazing "Maggie's Farm" to alternate takes of smart bombs such as "Tombstones Blues," "Highway 61 Revisited" and the still-jaw-dropping epic "Desolation Row." "Visions of Johanna" is the only real revelation, a radical rethink of the song with a martial beat and fleshed-out sound.

Like the DVD, the CDs are a must-have for Dylan fanatics and a compelling side street for more casual consumers. (Also of interest is "Live at the Gaslight 1962," available only at Starbucks, which captures an interesting set by a transitional Dylan. The highlights are an epic take on the ancient English song "Barbara Allen" and a half-formed version of "Don't Think Twice It's All Right.")

It might look and feel like a conventional documentary, but "No Direction Home" is far from it, simply because this is Bob Dylan we're talking about. He looked his era straight in the eye and dang near embodied its tensions, conflicts and constant change. And just to make many of you feel even worse, remember that this material ends when Dylan is all of 25.

Rodney, what's beautiful despair again?
 
 
 

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