DISTANT THUNDER
Martin Scorsese and Bob Dylan get together to relive a key moment of an era they defined, with the Netflix movie ‘Rolling Thunder Revue: a Bob Dylan Story’, writes
In 1975 Bob Dylan, the reluctantly labelled “voice of his generation”, was 34 years old. His marriage to Sara was in its death throes and he had endured the jeers of folk fans who labelled him a Judas for daring to venture into the world of electronic music in the late ’60s.
He’d survived a near-fatal motorbike accident in 1966, after which he had taken a seven-year hiatus from music. He was slowly returning to public attention and new acclaim with a series of albums beginning with the soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s seminal Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – in which he’d also had a cameo. Then he’d released a series of eerily oldschool but newly created American songbook-writ new jams with The Band for The Basement Tapes in 1975 and followed that up later that year with
Blood on the Tracks, a compilation of bittersweet, heart-wrenching ballads, which his son Jakob would later describe “as the sounds of my parents talking”.
The man who had always shown a keen appreciation of the American songbook and troubadour traditions and a wily aptitude for spectacular reinvention decided for his next trick to once again confound expectations and spit in the face of the ideas his fans had of who he should be and what he should deliver. Towards the end of 1975 and through the US’s bicentennial celebrations the following year, Dylan assembled a ragtag group of like-minded creative spirits including Glam rock guitar hero Mick Ronson, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and Ramblin Jack Elliott — the self-invented son of a Jewish doctor turned mythical troubadour — for a small-venue tour across the US dubbed The Rolling Thunder Revue. In the post-Vietnam, Watergate and
Richard Nixon era, Dylan’s latter-day reimagining of the carnival shows of the Western frontier era offered a chaotic tonic for uncertain times.
Along the way the revue picked up some old Dylan friends and collaborators — his former mentor and flame Joan Baez and his shaman and praise-singer Beat poet Allen Ginsberg — as well as some new bearers of the torch that Dylan had ignited in the early ’60s, like Joni Mitchell and proto-punk high priestess Patti Smith.
Perhaps sensing that there was something going on but what it was might not have been so clear, Dylan hired two film crews to follow the tour
and produce footage of the performances and behind-the-scenes clips that would be released in 1978 as the strictly-only-for-Dylan-acolytes film Renaldo & Clara.
In that same year a young director named Martin Scorsese released The
Last Waltz, a documentary of Dylan’s former backing group The Band’s supposed final performance — featuring cameos and appearances by some of their former employers, including the man himself. Scorsese was too busy shooting his seminal film Taxi Driver in 1975 to see The Rolling Thunder Revue in person but he would return to the subject of the US’s greatest living mythical music man for his seminal 2005 biographical film No Direction
Home, a five-hour epic, mostly straight life story of the transformation of Midwestern Jewish boy Robert Zimmerman into mid-’60s voice of his generation Bob Dylan.
Now with a Pulitzer and a Nobel for literature under his belt, Dylan reunites with Scorsese to produce a documentary about that 1975 moment of madness, passion and dedicated spitin-the-face-to-audience-expectations that’s a subtle mix of fact and fiction that serves to show that the two old dogs have plenty of tricks up their sleeves and a lot of things to teach everyone young and old about how to do self-mythology, following in the footsteps laid by Dylan in his brilliantly truth twisting 2004 autobiography Chronicles.
Watch this film not only for the vibrancy and raw energy of its live performances, in which a sweating, white-face-painted, ole-time-medicineman-incarnated Dylan delivers all-ornothing performances of songs such as
Isis and Hurricane, but also for its depiction of a one-night-in-your-small town-only magic trick of a group of creative people in a moment of uncertain but unbridled freedom.
Watch it also for the cunning use of fictional techniques, interviews and characters who all gleefully and willingly participate in the mythmaking so key to Dylan’s identity as a cultural figure and his influence on generations, and finally watch it simply to comprehend the profundity of the statement made by a baggage handler at the end of the film, that you only have one life and you should, “go and make it for your own eternity”. ● L S.