I saw a documentary tonight, “The Other Side of the Mirror”. It is about Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. It covered the years 1963-65. For those keeping score at home, 1965 was the year that Dylan went ‘electric’. The result of that transition was less than the sum of its parts.
I don’t expect a lot of wisdom from people younger than 25. I don’t think they have lived enough to have wisdom, let alone impart it. But there is a line from a Bob Dylan song, “My Back Pages” that I first heard when I was 16, and I have remembered it since then. The refrain, following a lot of not very comprehensible imagery is, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” I like to sing the song in 3/4 time because it has a swing to it. The song is in 4/4 time, but by playing with it a bit, it sounds better in 3/4 time.
Bob Dylan recorded that song in 1964 when he was 23. I don’t know if I really had anything wise to say when I was 23. Perhaps Dylan was exercising found dialog, something writers do. I don’t know.
In this film, Dylan starts as a frail looking young man, aged 22, and is clearly a star in the making. By the end of the movie, he is 24, and has begun to weary of the attention. In December of 1965, he held a press conference in San Francisco, hosted by KQED. It is almost surreal to watch. Here is a link about it.
The questions ran like this: “Since you are the voice of this young generation, what do you have to say to us?”, and Dylan would smirk and say, “I’m just singing my songs.” This goes on for about an hour. I think he probably thought it was very funny. I do now, but the anxiety of the questioners is palpable, as they are trying to decode the enigma that was the time.
This film doesn’t have that footage. But it does have some great footage of the time. The filmmaker, Murray Lerner, did a Q and A session after the screening and didn’t try to correlate songs and years to events. There was talk in the Q and A session about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as though that ended something. The Selma to Montgomery march happened in the spring of 1965. I wished that there had been more crowd shots from 1965. The draft was being ramped up then; SSG Barry Sadler had the top selling song in 1966, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”. How many young men were thinking about what was to come? Could we see it in their faces?
Mr. Lerner tried to relate the meanings of some of the songs, but I think there is a lot of leeway in interpretation. For example, he said that the song “Maggie’s Farm” was about worker alienation. I wonder. Maggie’s Farm, Alabama, was the site of the surrender of the last organized unit of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Did Dylan encounter this fact somewhere and spin a song around the peculiar name?
I saw some footage recently of Bob Dylan singing a song while strumming a single chord on the guitar. The footage is from the early 1960’s and I was struck by how similar to rap music it was. The idea that Bob Dylan could be the godfather of rap is funny, but closer to true than not. The lyric of his song was rhythm based, had oddly joined rhymes and was abstract enough to require translation. Sounds like rap to me.
Too much has already been written about the Dylan decision to ‘go electric’. I think that the only meaningful thing I can add to this discussion is to let go another fart into the wind. At Newport, Dylan was backed by Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper and the rest of the Butterfield Blues Band, sans Butterfield. The guitar stylings of Mike Bloomfield are the stuff of the times. It doesn’t age well.
The movie is a pleasant remove from other concert movies.