Bob Dylan's No Direction Home
By Fred Muller
February 2006
Bob Dylan: Bootleg Series #7: No Direction Home
It’s as if Dylan had died.
There has been a deluge of Bob material recently: beginning with the major exhibit at Seattle’s EMP centre in September 2004 and the publication of Greil Marcus’s book Bob Dylan at the Crossroads in mid-2005, the pace has quickened with the paperback edition of Chronicles bundled together with an exclusive six-track CD, Murray Lerner’s Festival! on DVD for the first time, the Japan-only release of a 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, the 1962 concert at the Gaslight being made available only from Starbucks (which caused the Canadian HMV chain, in protest, to remove all Dylan’s Columbia releases from their racks) and the publication of the Bob Dylan Scrapbook with its facsimiles of lyric sheets and concert flyers and an interview-only CD.
As if that weren’t enough we can now also buy The Concert for Bangladesh, remastered and expanded, with one previously unavailable Dylan song reinstated, the ultra-lavish The Band: A Musical History which includes, across its five discs, two Dylan songs released for the first time, not forgetting the History Channel’s American Troubadour documentary on DVD.
The centrepiece is, however, Martin Scorsese’s four-hour documentary No Direction Home and the accompanying double CD which isn’t a soundtrack as such but rather complements the film with a slightly different song selection. 
Both vividly and compellingly illustrate Dylan’s astonishing trajectory – he describes himself as a “musical expeditionary” in the film – from Woody Guthrie wannabe via the acoustic headlines-as-songs phase to his re-inventing the way popular music would be made as he took to the road with the Hawks, alienating many along the way and culminating, as this release does, with the legendary “Judas!” performance of Like A Rolling Stone in Manchester in May 1966.
The first disc commences with two amateur recordings made by friends in 1959 and 1960. I wouldn’t have picked Dylan as the singer on the former, a brief When I Got Troubles – there’s an anonymous charm here and I’m reminded of Elvis Presley’s first recording, My Happiness made, allegedly for his mother, at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios in Memphis a year or so before his first official session. Following these are alternate studio or concert recordings of Dylan standards. Preferable to the studio take of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue would have been the live recording from Newport as seen in the movie.
Disc two leads off with a beautiful She Belongs To Me in which Bruce Langhorne’s guitar augments the familiar version. Little wonder that John Cale recently picked this song as his ultimate Desert Island Disc. Then we hear Peter Yarrow introducing Dylan – “who only has a limited amount of time” – to the crowd at Newport in 1965 and the breakneck Maggie’s Farm with Paul Butterfield’s band. Much has been written about this set: how the crowds booed, how a horrified Pete Seeger wanted to chop through the guitar cables with an axe as Bob contaminated the “folk” festival and so on. Fact is, Dylan’s appearance with a band was a last-minute change to the line-up and only three songs had been rehearsed; the displeasure of the crowd was more likely to have stemmed from the brevity of the set rather than that he had “gone electric”. This track comes from a “newly found source tape” and is a revelation – please, can we have the complete Newport 1965 soon?
The remainder of the second disc comprises alternate studio takes from the Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde albums and give us a glimpse into Dylan’s modus operandi: Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat loses two verses between the take heard here and the final version while a completely overhauled Desolation Row could almost be Dylan backed by the Velvet Underground! Most of these have eluded even the most ardent of bootleggers: Visions of Johanna as heard here with The Band and Al Kooper, wasn’t known to exist.
This creative surge couldn’t last: something had to give. And it did. In July 1966 Dylan came off his motocycle in rural New York state and to this day the extent of his injury has been the source of much speculation. 
Al Aronowitz often visited Bob as he recuperated in Woodstock and he isn’t letting on. What we do know is that Bob withdrew from the public eye, took to being a congenial family man as Elliot Landy’s pictures reveal and made impromptu recordings with the Hawks in Big Pink. Save for contributions to a Woody Guthrie tribute in 1968 and the Bangladesh fundraiser, a brief and rather sloppy Isle of Wight concert in 1971 and a guest slot at The Band’s Rock Of Ages shows at the end of the same year, he didn’t tour again until early 1974.
Beginning with the 5LP set Biograph in 1985 and continuing through the Bootleg Series, Dylan has acknowledged that he is the most pirated artist and the packaging, lavish and exemplary as always, includes many previously unseen pictures including outtakes from the photo sessions for album covers. Mistakes still creep in, though: Richard Manuel’s piano contribution to Like A Rolling Stone isn’t acknowledged. There are also in-jokes such as the change to the car number-plate on the cover image!
Looking ahead, the Dylan films Masked and Anonymous and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will be re-issued on DVD in coming months, both as double sets, New Zealand director Niki (Whale Rider) Caro’s next film North Country features a new song Tell Ol’ Bill, and to tie in with Dylan’s tour of the UK a download-only CD single will be made available in mid-November.
Bob Dylan’s road crew records all his concerts – there have been over 100 per year since 1988 – and many are also filmed, meaning that Columbia’s vaults are awash with unreleased Dylan goodies. I won’t live long enough to experience them all.
Dylan hasn’t died. It’s us that have gone to heaven.
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