Everyone is talking about the Dylan documentary.
Part one of "No Direction Home," the epic Dylan documentary by Martin Scorsese, was not a disappointment! It's one thing to be a genius, and Dylan is, it's another altogether to be forever remembered as the voice of a generation.
Rolling Stone has a decent review. Here's a snippet:
The film, which airs tonight and tomorrow night on PBS and is also available on DVD, combines unearthed archival footage and fresh interviews -- with the likes of Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger and Dylan himself -- to illuminate the first and most trailblazing part of Dylan's career, beginning with his Hibbing, Minnesota, childhood and ending with his 1966 Woodstock, New York, motorcycle accident. No Direction Home shows Dylan evolving at an unfathomable pace: In a span of just four years, he conquers the Greenwich Village folk scene, becomes the artistic voice of the civil-rights movement (Dylan is seen on the podium before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech) and then abandons it all to reinvent rock & roll with "Like a Rolling Stone" and everything that followed. "It's an artist at the absolute peak of his talent," says Nigel Sinclair, one of the producers. "The challenge was making a film worthy of the subject."
Dylan himself sat for ten hours of unusually relaxed and open conversation with Rosen in 2000; he even smiles when reminiscing about a couple of high school girlfriends. "Both of those girls brought out the poet in me," he says.
The film and its accompanying soundtrack, No Direction Home: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7, are packed with previously unheard studio outtakes and rare live tracks, including Dylan's first live electric performance: a thunderous "Maggie's Farm," backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
You can see a clip at PBS.
Serious Dylan fans should check out Peter Kirstein's review of Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962, which was released a few weeks ago: "Gaslight is a release that is a significant remastering of perhaps two performances that Dylan gave at the Gaslight, a café in Greenwich Village, the mecca of beats, folk singers, poets, cultural pioneers breaking away from traditional pop culture."
Bob Dylan No Direction Home Martin Scorsese Dylan documentary video Live at the Gaslight
