I don't believe you. You're a liar

There is a third person in my marriage. His name is Bob Dylan. My husband and I share a love and commitment not only for each other but also for the spectrum of popular culture. Actually, the Pet Shop Boys got us together. But it was always Bob that created tension. This strange man of American culture seemed trapped in an endless 1970s of daggy fashion and shaggy hair. The harmonica wire framing his face looked like a dental brace that had slipped. His voice was out of tune, he stretched vowels into two time zones and his political ambivalence and changeability was a tepid leftover and extravagance from a kinder, gentler time.

While I banned Bob from the lounge room stereo, every so often I would catch a sonic bleeding from my husband’s headphones. He was listening to ‘Like a rolling stone.’ Again. I arrived home from work. As I pulled into the garage, I would hear ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’ being ripped off the CD player. Again. I didn’t mention it. Bob always seemed to be with us.

In the last month, I realized it was me – not Bob or the head-phoned husband – who has the problem. Ironically, it was a film that taught me to revalue and reinterpret Bob, his music and his era. It was only a matter of time before the legendary director Martin Scorsese again returned to documentaries and Dylan. His Last Waltz, featuring the final concert of The Band, had Bob as a bit-player in a masterful review of American roots music. His The Blues series shifted our sonic landscape and reshaped and reclaimed archival footage of the early bluesmen. This year has seen No Direction Home complete the journey. It is a three hour, twenty nine minute documentary that is gripping, horrifying and very funny. Original interviews are featured, including Dylan’s review of his own life as told to manager Jeff Rosen. Joan Baez is her usual cool and brilliant self. Forty years later, she is still angry at Bob for – either – leaving her or not sharing her politics. Passion and principles were entangled and confused. Remember it was the 1960s, man.

Scorsese and Dylan never met to make this documentary. Seemingly, they share enough history to make a conversation irrelevant. They understand New York. They understand the 1960s. They understand the blues. They share a cultural language. That dialogue has created great film making. Both are outsiders – abrasive and difficult – who discover alternative paths though the most conventional subjects.

It is the found footage of an impossibly young – and actually handsome – Dylan from 1962 until 1966 that is the gift of the documentary. Surrounded by old, rude and profoundly ignorant journalists, Bob handled so much stupidity by the age of 25 that he even foreshadowed his own Buddy Holly-like exit strategy. The most cringing moment of the documentary is when an incompetent and – frankly embarrassing – British photographer asked Bob to “just suck on your glasses” for a picture. I am glad to report that Dylan did not comply. Instead, he tried to force the arm of his glasses into the photographer’s mouth.

These press conferences featured dreadful journalists asking dumb questions. While we are accustomed to such patter through the endless stream of talk shows and celebrity interviews, No Direction Home is different because Dylan answers back. If he thinks the question is ridiculous, he gives a ridiculous answer. He asks for precise definitions of journalist terms, which they cannot provide. My favourite rejoinder is his angry voice howling “you’ve got a lot of nerve asking me that.” When watching Dylan handle a press conference, we see what sound bite solutions have done to the standard of debate and argument in our bland, blind age.

Dylan, in describing his first great musical model and mentor Woody Guthrie, realized that, “you could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.” Bob has held a similar role. He is defiant, uncomfortable and avoids all categorization. He changes his mind and views at a whim, seemingly to stop the precise pigeon holing of his music, life or views.

Popular culture - when fresh – is riveting and revelatory. Bob Dylan – somehow – became part of popular culture and changed popular culture. Recognizing this influence, Scorsese did something clever and important. He stopped the documentary at 1966 with the footage of the famous concert in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester where a distraught folkie – when semiotically electrocuted by a plugged-in Dylan – yelled “Judas.” The witty reply – “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar” – was fully audible to the audience. He then turned to the band and spat a forthright and punchy instruction about the volume of the next song. A heart-starting snare drum erupted from the stage, commencing ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ So ends the Scorsese documentary.

If there has been a theme to my Thinking Pop columns this year, then it is that we demand too much of our popular cultural icons. If a writer, designer, musician or film maker produces one sentence, motif, song or image that changes our world, then that is enough. To expect these great minds and talents to continue to produce innovation after innovation, revelation after revelation, is unrealistic. It also means that we mortgage our past and present for a cultural future that will never happen.