Bob Dylan Video:

		List Price: $14.99		Label: Paramount Salesrank: 2889 Released: September 20, 2005
		Our Price: $8.64
		Used Price: $6.00
		MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
The two-part film includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylan’s during that time. For the first time on camera, Dylan talks openly and extensively about this critical period in his career.

Description of Bob Dylan - No Direction Home:
It's virtually impossible to approach No Direction Home without a cluster of fixed ideas. Who doesn't have their own private Dylan? The true excellence of Martin Scorsese's achievement lies in how his documentary shakes us free of our comfortable assumptions. In the process, it plays out on several levels at once, each taking shape as an unfailingly fascinating narrative. There is, of course, the central story of an individual genius staking out his artistic identity. But along with this Bildungsroman come other threads and contexts: most notably, the role of popular culture in postwar America, art's self-reliance versus its social responsibilities, and fans' complicity with the publicity machine in sustaining myths. All of these threads reinforce each other, together weaving the film's intricate texture.

DVD features: This two-disc set of Scorsese's full two-part documentary includes treats such as Dylan working on a song at his hotel during the UK tour as well as performing several songs as in concert or on TV.

More for the Dylanologist

No Direction Home: The Soundtrack	Chronicles: Volume One (paperback edition)	Bob Dylan Scrapbook
Don't Look Back	The Bob Dylan Bootleg Series	The Last Waltz

Bob Dylan - No Direction Home Reviews:
Awesome
2009-10-21 - Loved it. Loved the way it used film footage to show progression of Bob Dylan from early career to when he was just sick of everyone's bull crap.

A fantastic look into the life of Bob Dylan!
2009-05-07 - For you Bob Dylan fans this is a must have. This DVD tells the whole story & then some. I was impressed with the history of music & how Dylan was inspired by the past. His musical genius is incredible and inspiring.

Electrifying!
2009-04-25 - I'm not a music connoisseur so I can't offer any pithy comments about his musicianship or knowledgeable comments about Bob Dylan's place within the broader context of American music. But I well remember the first time I heard his voice over a car radio. It was "Positively 4th Street". I had never heard those kinds of words before, sung by that kind of voice, and in that tone of voice! I didn't know why or to whom he was flinging those bitter, condemning phrases, but I knew in my heart that he was absolutely justified. Bob Dylan(though I didn't know this or anything else about him at the time)was eight years older than me, and in 1965 he seemed like some kind of disembodied messiah to my rebellious teenage mind. I listened religiously to see if I could hear that voice again, for in that time and place there was no such thing as a personal music collection for kids. Soon, I heard "Like a Rolling Stone", another song of renunciation and distancing from conformity and cliques that seemed to me to contain a wisdom and righteous anger that fitted my own mood perfectly. These songs became anthems for me during the mid-sixties, even though they were played but seldom on the local radio station in that rural farm community. Dylan was so little known in that area that the radio announcer always pronounced his name Di-lan, with a long "I". Now, after all these decades, with my memories of that voice and its message receded into the past, I decided to check out this documentary "No Direction Home" just out of curiosity. I'll admit I expected to be disappointed. My God! What an amazing discovery to find that the reality of the phenomenon of Bob Dylan that I encountered in this film even exceeded those long-ago idealizations that I had formed. Not that I indulge in hero-worship any more or think Dylan is some kind of saint. He is certainly not that, as I think the documentary reveals. He was simply an amazing song-writer who had an uncanny knack for wedding his poetry to a perfectly matched musical presentation. It seems obvious from his own comments that he didn't set out to capture the spirit of an age, but he did obviously intend to write songs that contained something real and meaningful. This he did in a unique and masterful way. It is truly astonishing to see the early footage of Dylan looking so very, very young and innocent, but producing this awesome music with such assurance and in a voice of such authority. Of course there are those who don't see it this way, and think he is vastly overrated. These people might as well save themselves the trouble of watching "No Direction Home". Others of us who watch the film will be even more convinced that there was a spiritual element to this music because of the way it made us feel, and that Dylan was a bit of a messiah after all, albeit an unwilling and mocking one.

Best Documentary I've seen
2009-03-12 - This was not just a 2 DVD set focusing on Bob Dylan. This was an overview of the music that shaped his life and music. They cover many different sounds and genres, and show how it affected Dylan's changing sound throughout the years.

Don't expect a 2 hour concert of Dylan. Expect something amazing, a musical history lesson.

His Direction Home
2009-02-24 - Over the past several months or so I have spent some time going over the musical influences back in the early 1960's that had an effect on my political development as I was growing up, or that just caught my ear. Not surprisingly many of those same musical influences still resonate today. Of those early 1960's influences none probably was greater than that of Bob Dylan, no only because he had a different sound but because his super-charged protest-oriented lyrics `spoke' to me. That Dylan could only go a very short distance along that political protest route that others, including myself, had to travel does not negate the important of that influence.

As this very well-done almost four hour in-depth Martin Scorsese documentary makes abundantly clear I was not alone in feeling that influence. Others also felt that Dylan `spoke' to them, if not as the voice of the "Generation of `68" then for a moment. I have previously reviewed a number of Bob Dylan's early albums ("The Free-Wheelin' Bob Dylan", "The Times They Are A-Changin'", "Bringing It All Back Home", etc.) in this space as I believe that those albums reflect both the prime period of his musical influence and, when future generations begin to ask their versions of the social questions posed by the 1960's, will be the music they will be pressing to learn 100 years from now.

This documentary is also formatted to reflect fully on that above-mentioned shared underlying understanding of Dylan's career and place in the folk/rock pantheon. The structure of the film also reflects the now standard method of doing a film documentary. Plenty of clips of Dylan's childhood, youth, the early days in the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village in the early 1960's and plenty of clips of early performances up until that decisive period in 1965 when Dylan decided to move in another direction combining his still thoughtful but by then more personal lyrics with an electric guitar (and band to back that sound up). That changeover gets full attention by having clips of the breakthrough Royal Hall concert interspersed through the film. The film thus has its central focus on this switch-over that is a part of what made Dylan so controversial and upsetting to traditional folkies back in the day.

Additionally, this film also has something that is not always the case with biographic documentaries; the subject himself holding forth on the meaning of it all. Most times that would not necessarily be a revelation as such efforts are usually unproductive. Here, however, the notoriously private and generally unresponsive (to interview questions, at least) Dylan contributes his take on what is bound to be used as a primary source for "the first draft" of his effect on popular music in the late 20th century. Although Dylan generally responded to the interviewers questions here I would argue that for whatever purposes he told no more than we already knew or what he wanted told. Not unusual in the famous but a little maddening here for those, like this reviewer, who happen to be serious looking at the question of "the meaning of the 1960's. But, so be it.

Fortunately another feature of theses types of documentaries helped out on that question. The film is heavily seeded with comments, performances and anecdotes by many of the performers still standing and other interested parties of the early 1960's who personally knew Dylan or had something of interest to say about the times. The list of "talking heads" (to the good here, I usually use this phrase with a little tongue-in cheek") brought into this production formed a veritable who's who of those in or around that folk scene at the time.

Most informative of this crowd, not surprisingly, were the late folk historian, Dave Van Ronk, and the, as of this writing, very much alive Pete Seeger who not only performed music but made it their business to know and keep the folk tradition alive. Van Ronk was especially informative about the competitiveness of the early folkies mainly the male ones, as Joan Baez was conceded on the female side to be the "queen of the hill", to see who would become "king of folk". He also had interesting comments about the commercialization of folk music and the dreaded "selling out to mainstream culture". By Van Ronk's account backed up by other sources I have run across as well, Dylan was intensely interested in that battle. Seeger was strongest on the transition, of which he was a seminal figure, of the folk tradition from the older 1930's Great Depression `lefties' like Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Cisco Houston and Lead Belly to the new kids on the block.

Others of note along the way include the afore-mentioned Joan Baez, at one time also Dylan's girlfriend, with some very insightful comments giving us the "skinny' of what it was like actually living with such a whirlwind and about the strains on their relationship (and her psyche) of her direction toward more political involvement, and his away from such activity. Liam Clancy (of Tommy Makem and The Clancy Brothers) and Maria Muldaur (most noted then for her key role as singer in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band) add some spice to the conversation. There are many others who have something to say about particular events but of that crowd I would select John Cohen (of "The New Lost City Ramblers") as most informative about the history of what was going in those times and the schism between the `purists' and those who wanted to `sell out' for filthy lucre. Again, Cohen is not a surprising choice, as "Lost City" spent much time on tracing the folk traditions (and it included Mike Seeger, Pete's half- brother so you know they were interested in history).

Others have, endlessly, gone on about Bob Dylan's role as the voice of his generation (and mine), his lyrics and what they do or do not mean and his place in the rock or folk pantheons, or both. After viewing this documentary it still seems hard to believe now both as to the performer as well as to what was being attempted that anyone would take umbrage at a performer using an electric guitar to tell a folk story (or any story for that matter). The well-known English Royal Hall performance or that equally well-known three song folk/rock set at Newport in 1965 hardly seem worth getting steamed up about now. It is not necessary to go into all the details of what or what did not happen with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (although this incident gets a full airing by all parties) to know that one should be glad, glad as hell, that Bob Dylan continued to listen to his own drummer and carry on a career based on electronic music.

Note: Although I do not usually spend much time looking through special features sections of DVDs here there are several extras well worth looking at. They include some early performances by Dylan both highlighted in the documentary and others that did not make the cut. Additionally, a number of the "talking heads' that are heard in the documentary , including Liam Clancy and Maria Muldaur, do renditions of some Dylan's songs.