In the early 1960s, Dylan became a folk singer and protest hero, then he was a pop-and-rock star, then a rural recluse, then a streetwise drifter, then a born-again Christian, then he embarked on the Neverending tour, then he nearly died of an obscure disease caught from bats' droppings, then he became a grand old man. Now, suddenly, he has become a thoughtful, wry master of the carefully examined life. Dylan's personae, like the times, they are always a-changin'. But from the beginning one thing remains the same: his genius. "If you're interested," says his former lover Joan Baez, "he goes way, way deep."
She was interested and so was he. He wrote the greatest love song ever written, Visions of Johanna, for her.
Being Dylan, of course, he immediately denied it was anything to do with Baez. It was just, you know, some chick. But she knew, and so did we. He'd moved on, as he always does, and always will. Back in the mid-1960s he hurt Baez by not letting her go on stage with him. He smiles now and shrugs. "You can't be wise and in love at the same time."
Unless you're Bob Dylan, of course. He's been wise and in love all his life, going way, way deep since his first album in 1962. He just didn't always know it. Neither did we, really. I, like many others, began to doubt him after Street Legal (1978), but then, in 1997, came Time Out of Mind, a sensationally original album that blew every aspiring grand old man of rock out of the water, and made me realise with what a gigantic figure I was sharing my time on Earth.
Beaming wistfully, the great literary critic and now professor of poetry at Oxford, Christopher Ricks, once said to me: "Isn't it wonderful being alive at the same time as Bob Dylan?" And now we have an autumn of Dylan, a kind of accidental festival, the centrepiece of which is No Direction Home, an almost-four-hour, two-part BBC2 documentary about Dylan made by Martin Scorsese, screened on September 26 and 27. See it. I have, and I wept through both parts — probably, I admit, for my own lost youth, for a timeless moment almost lost in time.
Alongside this comes a soundtrack album, all but two tracks of which are hitherto unreleased. There's an NFT film season around and about Dylan, in central London. September 24 is Dylan day, with buskers in the windows of Foyles's bookshop. The paperback edition of his autobiography Chronicles Volume One is published, as is The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966, a sort of adult pop-up book full of unseen archive and photographic material. What, you might ask, has happened to inspire this sudden wave of Dylanology and Bobmania?
Basically, two things: Chronicles and No Direction Home. Chronicles stunned everyone, me included. Usually, when Dylan commits himself to writing anything that isn't a song, the result is impenetrable. His poems seldom quite work and his novel, Tarantula, lacks structure of any kind. And he has always been comprehensively evasive whenever he has been asked to explain himself in interviews and at press conferences. When once asked what his songs were about, he just said some were about three minutes and some about 12 minutes. But Chronicles is clear, apparently frank, unremittingly serious about his musical influences and exquisitely written. It is, in fact, a masterpiece, as 180,000 buyers of the hardback in Britain will have found.
As if that wasn't enough, No Direction Home is another masterpiece, arguably the greatest documentary about rock music ever made — two other prime contenders being Scorsese's The Last Waltz, which included a Dylan performance, and D A Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, which was about Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain. Not only does Dylan make great art, he inspires it in others.
The creation of this film has been a mysterious, tortuous process. At its heart is a long — apparently 10 hours in total — interview with Dylan conducted by Jeff Rosen, his manager. Other interviews, with friends, collaborators and fellow artists, were also conducted by Rosen. There is also a vast amount of previously unseen archive material, including, crucially, extracts from 60 hours of film of his 1966 tour of Britain owned by Dylan himself. Scorsese does not seem to have met Dylan throughout the process. Instead, he has made a collage of all these elements. The result is a story told partly by Dylan and partly about him. And it is a great story, one even I — a Bob freak since the age of 11, when I pestered myself a sheepskin coat and corduroy cap just like his on the cover of the first album — had not fully understood until now.
Weirdly, though Chronicles and No Direction Home were put together around the same time, there was no interaction between the two. The film people did not even know he was writing the book. Yet they are, predominantly, about the same thing: Dylan's formative period after his first arrival in New York in a blizzard in 1961. He arrived there from Hibbing, Minnesota, where he had been raised in a stable, middle-class household. He invented an alternative biography about working-class roots, an upbringing in New Mexico and hopping boxcars across the country. Less than two years after that blizzard, this compulsive myth-maker was a star.
But, from the beginning, he was a star on the run, fleeing every attempt to pin him down, to label him. This, as his film wends its brilliant way through its encyclopedic range of material, is Scorsese's main theme, just as it is the subtext of Chronicles and the true meaning of the Neverending tour, the continuing global concert series he seems unable to live without. But why, exactly, was he, is he, running?
The broad answer is that he has always believed in the constant state of becoming, that you must always travel and never arrive, and that the road does not lead to the truth, the road is the truth. The problem was, in the critical period on which this current Dylanological wave now focuses, everyone was trying to tell him that he had arrived. All poor, unformed 20-year-old Bob knew was that this must never happen. So he started dodging and weaving like a sub-flyweight boxer, evading every attempt to possess him. He was introduced at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 with the words: "You know him — he's yours." Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was called a folk singer, yet in radio interviews — the best are on a CD included with the Scrapbook — he denied the label. Then, with songs like Blowin' in the Wind, Masters of War and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, he was called a protest singer. This was a label he hated even more. Asked by one dumb reporter how many protest singers there were, Dylan first looked derisive, then deadpan: "136." Pause. "Maybe 142."
