During the second half of No Direction Home one of the musicians featured throughout the film (I think it was Dave Van Ronk, but I’m not certain…) said something about how Bob Dylan had absorbed, like a sponge, all the music and styles that he was exposed to and then invented himself as something new. The movie documented Dylan’s metamorphosis into a near god-like pop star with interviews, photos, movie clips, and archival footage of performers that influenced him.
During the first half of the show, there were some great clips of old folk and blues artists like Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Billie Holiday, and Odetta, who scared me (in a good way.) But the one clip that I thought was the most interesting was of a freaky old guy sitting to play a guitar on a table with a few people standing around listening to him as he sang with “Lon Chaney” like facial expressions in an operatic folk style. I had no idea who the guy was until today when I visited this site (Thanks Reid!) and found out it was John Jacob Niles.
The weirdest scenes in the second half of the film are the Dylan press conferences. Do pop stars have press conferences these days? I can’t recall any recent interviews with pop stars that were even remotely like what I saw in the film: Dylan sitting at a table in front of dozens of reporters asking him very stupid questions about the meaning of his shirt or why he sings.
Anyway… It was a great documentary of Dylan’s life and career through the mid sixties, and I must highly recommend it to everybody-Dylan fan or not.
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