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THAT WAS THEN: Dylan’s open, direct, funny appearance at Newport in 1963 set him up for the reverence and the hatred that followed. |
Watching the various Dylans that parade and steal and strut and drift through Todd Haynes’s exhilarating I’m Not There, and watching the changes Dylan himself goes through in Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror, which compiles his performances at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1965, you realize that there’s something profoundly beside the point about Bob Dylan covers. Dylan is his own cover band. The way he always reinvented himself and reinvented his songs (anyone remember the squalling, unrecognizable “Masters of War” he unleashed at the Grammy Awards as the first Gulf War was getting under way?) has, with some notable exceptions, stayed ahead of what most artists are able to wrest from his songs.The prize of the two-CD soundtrack to I’m Not There (Sony) is the title track, which Dylan and the Band recorded during the “Basement Tapes” sessions. Not only was it never officially released, but it’s among the scarcest of Dylan’s bootlegs. It’s an amazing performance — steady and plaintive — that holds at bay the drama building up in it, and Dylan’s voice has an almost keening edge. The song all but bookends the album, closing it and also providing the second track, a marvelous cover by Sonic Youth that captures that band’s knack (as on their version of the Carpenters’ “Superstar”) for paying homage to a source while providing their own song — in this case the charged aural drift that they have, over the years, staked out as the territory where they’re the chief explorers.
As with all tribute albums — which is what this soundtrack amounts to — some things work and some things don’t. And some things that seem just fine in the movie, like Richie Havens as a porch-front musician singing “Tombstone Blues,” don’t work so well when you put on the CD and realize you have to listen to . . . Richie Havens. “Ballad of a Thin Man,” done here by Stephen Malkmus and the Million Dollar Bashers (consisting of, among others, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore, and Tony Garnier from Dylan’s touring band), is mesmerizing in the film when it’s coming out of Cate Blanchett’s Dylan. But without the visual, it’s diminished, though Malkmus still captures the song’s murderous essence.
In the spirit of charity, because it’s a pretty imaginative set, let’s dispense with the stinkers. Jack Jones and Sufjan Stevens confirm everything Sasha Frere-Jones said in the New Yorker a few weeks back about the unbearable whiteness of much indie rock. But you wonder whether that’s such a bad thing when you listen to the horror that is Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) trilling his way through “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and, as a musician friend said, ripping off Nina Simone with every note he sings. (If they ever do a Joan Baez I’m Not There, Antony is a cinch to fill the reverse-gender Blanchett slot.) Karen O’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is joky and crass and superior to the grotesquerie and horror of the song in a way that Dylan’s version is not.
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