Bob Dylan by Andy Gill

Author:Andy Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carlton Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

Things continued to move fast for Dylan. After the release of Bringing It All Back Home, he played a few more American shows before departing in late April for Britain, for the tour that would be featured in Donn Pennebaker’s revealing documentary Don’t Look Back. At the time, Dylan was far more popular in Britain than he was in America, and the film captures the adrenaline rush of fame better than any subsequent attempt.

“I wanted to hear him sing, and I wanted to watch him with people,” Pennebaker told me. “Beyond that, I had no expectations. It’s the process of being there that’s interesting. The one sure thing in life is that you never know what’s going on in somebody’s head—that’s what the novel was invented for. You can’t point a camera at someone and find out what’s in their head. But it does the next best thing: it lets you speculate. The process of looking, if you look sharply and well, is a stunning process—people make lifetime generalizations based on a glance, and I think in a sense that’s what the camera’s doing with Dylan. And that’s probably the best you can hope for.”

“With Dylan, what you see is what you get,” Pennebaker believes. “And for everybody who says, ‘You really savaged that bastard,’ somebody else says, ‘God, he’s wonderful, I love him.’ It’s clear that people see what they set out to see. And I’m no different—I guess I tried to make that film as true to my vision of him as I could make it. But as a storyteller, I wanted there to be stories in it.”

Pennebaker had been introduced to Dylan’s people by Sara Lowndes, and was immediately intrigued when Dylan and Neuwirth tried out their assassin routine on him. “I recognized instantly, when I met Dylan and Neuwirth, that they had the same sense about what they were up to as we did about what we were up to, which was a kind of conspiracy,” he recalled. “We felt as if we were out conning the world in some kind of guerrilla action and bringing back stuff that nobody recognized as valuable and making it valuable.”

Accompanied by an entourage including sidekick Bob Neuwirth and an increasingly estranged Joan Baez, Dylan cut through the country like a whirlwind, from his first press conference on arrival at Heathrow—where he carried an outsize light bulb and answered the inevitable question about his “message” with the advice, “Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb”—through his none-too-private life at the Savoy Hotel, and on to his concerts in provincial cities like Sheffield, Liverpool and Leicester. Significantly, the brief moments of concert footage are vastly outweighed by the fascinating backstage cinema-verité, which features, a drunken Alan Price opening a bottle of Newcastle Brown on a dressing-room piano; Dylan losing his rag when a glass is thrown out of a window at a party in his Savoy suite; Bob Neuwirth and Dylan ruthlessly mocking Joan Baez; Albert

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