Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Legends
Stayed in to watch the Bob Dylan documentary on good ol' BBC 2 last night. Dylan is a pretty enigmatic figure and I doubt he gives a lot of interviews - if you have that much money, why bother? - but when Martin Scorsese is at your door, I imagine one feels a little honoured.
Interesting stuff, with early footage of Dylan performing spliced with a recent interview of the much older, wiser, crinklier folk rocker saying how he wasn't really that political and cutting to shots of him playing a civil rights concert. Saying that he didn't know that Blowin' in the Wind was a great song when he wrote it, though he knew it felt good at the time.
If he can write that song and not be immediately knocked out by it, I think that shows that it's okay to question anything. Nothing is obvious. Anyway, he didn't see it as a political song, I suppose he thinks about things in a broader way.
A radio interviewer asked him if 'Hard Rain' was about atomic rain and he just laughed and said he had never thought of it that way. Under the surface you could see that he had a clear idea of who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. He tracked down the people he wanted to talk to and grabbed the records he wanted to listen to.
He took his dungaree-wearing country boy accent off to New York city because he knew that it was the place where it was all happening. Now that he's famous he can relax and disappear back into the fog of celebrity, but at the time he was really chasing it. It wasn't an accident, he didn't just blow in on the breeze. He payed his dues along the way, he worked the support slots in shitty clubs and coffee houses. He had guys telling him to get lost and he just kept coming back.
Part 2's tonight.
Interesting stuff, with early footage of Dylan performing spliced with a recent interview of the much older, wiser, crinklier folk rocker saying how he wasn't really that political and cutting to shots of him playing a civil rights concert. Saying that he didn't know that Blowin' in the Wind was a great song when he wrote it, though he knew it felt good at the time.
If he can write that song and not be immediately knocked out by it, I think that shows that it's okay to question anything. Nothing is obvious. Anyway, he didn't see it as a political song, I suppose he thinks about things in a broader way.
A radio interviewer asked him if 'Hard Rain' was about atomic rain and he just laughed and said he had never thought of it that way. Under the surface you could see that he had a clear idea of who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. He tracked down the people he wanted to talk to and grabbed the records he wanted to listen to.
He took his dungaree-wearing country boy accent off to New York city because he knew that it was the place where it was all happening. Now that he's famous he can relax and disappear back into the fog of celebrity, but at the time he was really chasing it. It wasn't an accident, he didn't just blow in on the breeze. He payed his dues along the way, he worked the support slots in shitty clubs and coffee houses. He had guys telling him to get lost and he just kept coming back.
Part 2's tonight.
# posted by Name @ 4:27 p.m. 
