***Yet Again On The Never-Ending Bob Dylan Express- Don’t Look Back

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Don’t Look Back, a documentary starring Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other lesser known denizens of the 1960s folk minute, 1965

I have probably spent more cyber-ink relating the various aspects of the Bob Dylan experience, now rightly called the never-ending Bob Dylan tour than all the other 1960s folk singers and songwriters combined. (And right behind the tour the apparently never-ending bootleg series as more and more material previously un-released finds its way to the surface.) Strangely that seems right as well given the longevity of his career, the amount of material that he has produced, the effect he had on me personally ever since I first heard him on the local Boston Sunday night radio station, WBZ, in the early 1960s, his place in the 1960s folk minute, and his influence on the generation of ’68 which lived and died by his anthem, Like A Rolling Stone. The documentary under review (in the old days called cinema verite signifying a new way to look at what was being documented mainly its un-scribed nature), Don’t Look Back, is a slice of that 1960s moment when Dylan was at the height of his fame and influence before the motorcycle accident took him out of the limelight for most of the rest of the decade).

The film is essentially a recording of the famous Dylan concert tour to England in 1965 where he played to large crowded theaters and concert halls, and met and mingled with various British musicians, notably Donovan who seemed to be a rival of his in the universal folk world of the time. Mainly the action takes place in the small concert tour world of back stages, performances, and the down time in the hotel rooms. We get to see a fairly young (in his twenties) Dylan interacting (yeah, let’s call it interacting) with his companion of the time, Joan Baez, his roadie Bob Neuwirth, his manager (much maligned later and one can see why in this film), Albert Grossman, the press, the hotel staffs, the fans, and an occasional passer-by.

What we also see is what you get with Dylan from all accounts then (and now). The highlight for me, and something that made me realize that although Dylan is associated with the Village and the urban scene he grew up in the Midwest where country music would be no stranger to the radio airwaves of his youth, is the bars he earnestly sang of Hank Williams’ The Lost Highway. Watch this one if you are interested in a time when we thought the world held many possibilities, we thought we would turn things upside down, we were ready to fight for it, and Bob Dylan was in his prime.