Boom Boom Baby Blue
I'm doing it in reverse. A week ago I watched Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. An ok flick, but it mostly made me curious. So a couple of days ago I also watched Dont Look Back, the famous documentary directed by D. A. Pennebaker that covers Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England. Before he goes electric, but as he's already tiring of the "folk" label and messianic aura he's constantly burdened with. Handheld, nervously shot on gritty 16mm film with grain the size of mothballs, it's widely considered to be the first "rockumentary", defining a genre basking in the language of New Wave and Cinéma vérité. An all-access pass full of fragmentary performances and endless waiting rooms. Pretty great, actually.
“After Dont Look Back was rejected by every legit studio in town, an adult film distributor famously told the director that they liked the movie because it looked and sounded like a porno. Pennebaker loved telling that story, I think because it gets to a larger idea behind the movie’s appeal: It feels like something we’re not supposed to be seeing. ”
Dylan's a kid, twenty-four I think. A burning genius of a kid. I mean, wow: the vision, the words, the hubris, the spunk, the cocksure intensity intermixed with the frailties and often stupid stubbornness of youth. Obnoxious as fuck but impossible to dismiss.
The last scene is fantastic. He's in a car with Bob Neuwirth and others, speeding away from the crowds after a triumphant performance at the Royal Albert Hall, when Grossman—Dylan's mercurial manager—mentions how "the papers" are now labeling him as "an anarchist". Because you don't offer any solutions, he says smiling. Dylan feigns outrage but he's clearly flattered and the movie ends with him asking for a cigarette: "Gimme a cigarette...Hey! Give the anarchist a cigarette!". A mischievous look illuminates his face and he laughs.
Credits.
I watched the film on Criterion so I followed up with a short Patti Smith interview from 2015, speaking about Dont Look Back and about Dylan. An idol of hers, she knew every line from the movie. She recalls meeting him at a club (the Bitter End), after one of her very early shows. This is before getting signed. Before becoming Patti Smith. Her own cusp of greatness, her own chrysalis phase. It's a touching and funny tale, but also an origin story of sorts.
Later in the day I browsed Apple Music and read a blurb about Dylan's 1976 album Desire—apparently inspired by his meeting with Smith and the burgeoning NYC proto-punk scene. I can’t say I hear it, really, but how interesting. Energy circles. Like waves.
Anarchists.
I sit here reading about Grossman, The Band, that whole music scene, the tragedies, the lawsuits, the darkness and the elation.
I sit here unable to move and lost in a meteoric sea of half-sketched ideas of my own
debris floating
can't quite grasp anything
none of it coalesces
all dust and vapour clogging lungs t'il breath is gone
choked up
i sit here and pretend it's a brainstorm
necessary
art on the verge of art
words on the verge of meaning
but it's really just sinking
more sinking
to the depths we go
Richard Manuel hanging from a bathroom ceiling
full of coke and booze
while his wife sleeps in the motel bed
i sit and wonder about the weight of a starless sky
boom boom boom
baby blue.
A cruel scene. Donovan's trying to impress a small crowd gathered in Dylan's hotel room, singing a vapid folk ditty full of prancing prettiness. The song is sweet but ultimately sickly so. Like a page out of a teenage girl's diary, candy-coloured, with sparkles and horsies. The group applauds and Dylan offers a compliment—Nice song! But there's a toothy grin across his face, predatory and suffused with power. He picks up the guitar and Donovan asks him to play It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Dear god. The poor thing is a lamb begging for slaughter. Dylan starts strumming, the room falls silent, and every word out of his mouth is a massacre, each one a high-beam shining on Donovan's irrelevance. This is Kerouac laying bare the fury of America after a kid's reading of a birthday card he just scribbled to his mom. And it's all there, unfolding, not only visible but painfully obvious: Donovan's eyes sinking into panic and self-doubt, Dylan's sparkling with bloodlust.
I like Donovan. But in 1965, in this one terrifying moment, he's weightless.
“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue”
2018.
I'm in an art gallery in Brighton and the walls are filled with Bob Dylan's paintings—a retrospective, all of it on sale at fairly eye-popping prices. The guy at the desk believes me interested. I am, but not the way he hopes I am. I must be giving off a vibe or something.
Dylan's aura had paled significantly by the time I discovered his music, so I merely skimmed it. Some artists you easily know without needing to, their work like wallpaper, rolls and rolls of it filling way too many rooms. Filling car rides with your parents on local AM radio. And then one day you stop and listen and hear a turn of phrase you'd failed to notice, and the myth is suddenly there, tangible, fully revealed.
“It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.”
Some of it is, though.
Some of it shines.
