Five years that shook the music world

IT was just five years, 1961 to 1966, but it feels like a lifetime, with events occurring on a scale that was, as Bob Dylan himself puts it in a new documentary on his early career, Olympian.

There are many absorbing individual scenes in the 3 1/2 hours of the Martin Scorsese-directed “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” but the overwhelming impression it leaves is how much action was packed into such a short time.

In the five-year span that the film concentrates on, Dylan plunged into the artistic ferment of the times and transformed himself from an average teenage folk singer into an underground hero and then arguably the dominant force in all of popular culture. He also hit the rapids of audience expectations and media pressure and turned from a baby-faced innocent into a twitching mess.

His path was twined with monumental social upheavals, and Scorsese’s film -- which came out on DVD last week and will air on PBS’ “American Masters” series Monday and Tuesday -- assembles vivid, visceral footage of the civil rights, free speech and antiwar activity that roiled America’s streets and campuses. This “turbulent ‘60s” rubric is familiar fare, but it’s essential to Dylan’s art and career, and it propels this story like the rhythm section on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

As far as Dylan himself goes, “Odyssean” might be the operative term. He says he was born “very far from where I was supposed to be,” and he introduces the Homeric image himself: “I set out to find this home that I’d left a while back, and I couldn’t remember where it was but I was on my way there.” His story is framed as a voyage full of triumphs, temptations and perils. In the documentary’s interviews, Dylan describes himself as a perpetual outsider and someone without a past, and he calls himself a “musical expeditionary” -- a designation that he apparently felt gave him license to steal records from the home of musicologist and writer Paul Nelson, who recalls going to retrieve them accompanied by a large friend armed with a bowling pin.

Scorsese defers completely to the material in “No Direction Home,” recognizing that its inherent drama doesn’t require the embellishment of excessive technique. Instead he focuses on efficient pacing and a straightforward structure, with just a couple of chronological shifts.

He also makes obvious but effective use of the songs to comment on the saga. In one crucial period, Dylan faces the first waves of confusion and discontent in his audience and sings, “All I really want to do is baby be friends with you.” A little later, in his famous “Dylan goes electric” appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he tells the audience, “It’s all over now, baby blue.”

A screen-filling presence

DESPITE Dylan’s remoteness and elusiveness over the years, the basics of his life and the nature of his art have been exhaustively documented and analyzed. The big draw of “No Direction Home,” in addition to generous doses of studio and concert performances, is the presence of Dylan himself talking about it all, his screen-filling, battle-scarred visage at once reassuring and forbidding.

He’s done a few TV news-show interviews in recent years, but he has rarely seemed as comfortable as he does in the footage that’s woven in with the film’s many other talking heads -- comfortable enough to be alternately feisty, playful, philosophical, thoughtful and ornery.

Of course, that’s what you’d expect from any decent interview subject, and these crumbs of lucid conversation being so eagerly anticipated by his audience attest to the rigor with which he’s maintained his mystique for decades.

And for all that is revealed, you never forget that this project is a cooperative venture and that Dylan is very much in control of the flow of information, careful that he’s never portrayed unflatteringly nor pressed into a corner on difficult issues.

His most enlightening comments are those describing his artistic goals -- remarks that underscore the inevitability of his break with the politically active topical-song movement that had canonized him for such songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War.” Dylan had been a good comrade in the cause, and by depicting that world in depth and at length, Scorsese shows how monumental and traumatic Dylan’s decampment was.

“I felt that I needed to press on and get as far into it as I could,” Dylan says of his music in one segment. And in another: “An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere. You have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming.”

It’s left to friends and colleagues to fill in aspects of his personality and to grasp for the images that would capture Dylan’s otherness.

“He was Charlie Chaplin. He was Dylan Thomas. He talked like Woody Guthrie,” marvels singer Liam Clancy, likening him to the shape changers of Irish myth. “He changed voices. He changed images.... He was a receiver. He was possessed.”

Another Greenwich Village crony, singer Mark Spoelstra, zeroes in on one of his friend’s more pragmatic traits: “He was able to adopt a kind of theater about himself, and that was good, because you can go anywhere when you’re somebody else.”

The media influence

DYLAN would soon be somebody else entirely, and not somebody of his own choosing.

The booing and the shouts of “Judas!” from the audience, being branded a traitor and a prostitute for writing dazzling, kaleidoscopic lyrics and playing them with some of the best rock bands ever assembled -- he might have been able to handle that. He certainly used it to stoke the defiance that fuels many of the concert sequences in the film’s second half.

But even Dylan’s iron will and supreme confidence were no match for aggressive media that challenged his independence and, increasingly, his dignity.

“Things had gotten out of hand,” Dylan says in one of the current interviews. “Just being pressed and hammered and expected to answer questions is enough to make anybody sick, really.”

If that sounds overly sensitive, wait until you see the witheringly inane press conferences that Scorsese strings together with merciless persistence. Sometimes Dylan tries to answer the questions with a little humor -- his famous line about considering himself a song and dance man came from a San Francisco encounter -- but he quickly retreats from the assault by becoming evasive, surly and defensive. Things reach a humiliating low when a photographer asks a visibly astonished Dylan to suck on his sunglasses for a picture.

The five-year story is almost over, and in footage shot backstage and on the road in England with the musicians who would become the Band (including outtakes from D.A. Pennebaker’s classic 1967 documentary “Dont Look Back”), Dylan is fidgety, arrogant, antagonistic, hyper.

This makes him a compelling figure in the concert scenes, a rock-star poet whose every slurred wail and biting enunciation hurls a challenge at those who would confine his art.

The achievement of “No Direction Home” is that it humanizes the enigma without demystifying the artist, and it gives us a person to care about. At the film’s end we’re actually relieved to hear that he’s had that motorcycle accident that would take him away from it all for many years.

When he returned, he’d continue to fascinate and frustrate, and then drill deep into his peers’ bones again in his mid-’50s with the brooding ruminations of “Time Out of Mind.”

That 1999 album won him his first Grammy and revived his reputation, but in contrast to those early years it didn’t galvanize a generation or resonate far beyond the defined borders of the music world.

This is supposed to be the era of free-flowing, instant information, but in a way the cultural superstructure has become more rigid and fragmented than ever. Until its divisive grip is broken, “No Direction Home” can serve as an epitaph for a convulsive time when one man’s voice called the tune and the whole wide world was watching.

Contact Richard Cromelin at calendar.letters@latimes.com.

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‘American Masters: No Direction Home: Bob Dylan -- A Martin Scorsese Picture’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to11 p.m. Monday (Part 1), 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday (Part 2).

Ratings: TV-PG L (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisory for language).

Director: Martin Scorsese. Co-producers: Nigel Sinclair, Susan Lacy, Anthony Wall. Executive producer for American Masters: Susan Lacy