I finally saw “A Complete Unknown” this past weekend. I liked it, for the most part, and it inspired me to pull up and reprint the following essay from 2022, which I’ve edited lightly.
***
Rewatching “No Direction Home,” Martin Scorsese’s epic 2005 documentary about Bob Dylan’s early career, requires stamina but is worth it. Not only does it contain dozens and dozens of tracks from his concerts in the early sixties, it contains the most extensive interviews he has ever given as well.
If you love Dylan’s music, which I do, the live footage of his performances is priceless. But whether you like it or not, the way he talks about his life and career bring us as close to an understanding of what we as a generation tried to do collectively as we are ever likely to get.
The question is how and why this skinny, scruffy, raspy-voiced poet from Hibbing, MN, emerged at exactly the right place, Greenwich Village and right time, 1961, to issue a series of clarion calls for an entire generation.
He was and is by far our most authentic voice. He wrote and sang like a man possessed of some supernatural ability to channel the emerging spirit of the largest generation of humans to ever crowd our way onto the planet.
Meanwhile, just like many of the rest of us, Dylan has lived out his personal life and his career as a series of acts, changing and adapting to a world that’s never seemed quite as stable as the one our parents envisioned for us. Through multiple marriages and relationships, he’s somehow raised six kids, just like me, while stubbornly staying as far out of the limelight as his superstardom has allowed.
To this day, Dylan’s greatest songs give me chills and make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. His music, more than any other, helps me in tough times remember who I am.
Somehow he became us — or we became him — I’m not sure which.
So you can be in my song if I can be in yours.
I said that.
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