Goodness I have got the blogging bug today, three times in one day! I just watched the final part of the Scorsese Bob Dylan documentary on BBC2 and it was bloody excellant. Dylan was portrayed as a much more sympathetic character in the second part of the documentary and by the end you really feel for him, all the abuse he gets for 'going electric' really seems to start taking it's toll he looks so tierd and almost defeated by the end of his tour in 1965 quite different to the arrogant cocky Dylan we saw in 'Don't Look Back'. I wonder how different things would have been if he had towed the line and stuck to his folk roots, the world would probably be a different place altogether. We'd certainly have missed alot of his best music.
The documentary also showed alot of interviews with the press, I love the way he refuses to play along with the ridiculous questions he's asked, he could have made up aload of bullshit, the kind that people these days are only too good at making up, but he didn't, he may look like he's being evassive or aloof but I think he's just being honest, he really isn't trying to convey some great message in his songs, he was just doing what he does.
I also respect the fact he didn't want to get dragged into the whole political game. I think there is something far more honest about people who refuse to have strict unwavering principles, nothing is ever certain. In the words of Groucho Marx "these are my principles if you don't like them I have others". People got what ever they wanted from his lyrics and this is what matters, they mean different things to different people and if you got some political message from them then all well and good, you could just as likely get something completely different from them. In this way I guess he was a muse as well as a musician.
When I was at school I loved the early folk protest songs he wrote and I got a strong political message from them and even though I wasn't living in the deep south in 60's america I could relate them to life at an all girls school the midlands. I think it's funny now, how serious I took it all, 'but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now' (sorry couldn't resist that one.) Having not really listened to a great deal of Bob Dylan in the past few years it struck me watching the programme how much his song touch me, someone spoke about how he tapped into some collective unconciousness of sixties America, I would go as far to say that he tapped into an eternal universal collective conciousness. I'm not a big fan of his work after he retreated to woodstock, not sure if it's the fact he found 'God' or whether it's just his voice, I do think that that kind of connection has a limited life and is not the sort of thing that can be forced and he some how lost it along the way, probably trying to hard to find it. He still gets there every now and again though, 'A Twist of Fate' is one of my favourite songs, funnily enough I used to sing it as a child, pretty heavy subject matter, I probably thought it was about something else entirely.
But anyway thank goodness for Bob Dylan and thank goodness people recognize his brilliance and make documentaries about him! Time for bed. Good night.