Learning to live

I watched the first part of No Direction Home last night, which--I'll tell you as though I'm the first person to say it--is fantastic. It hasn't necessarily changed my feelings about Scorcese, but it's a beautiful movie. Dylan's story is the kind that makes you think that if someone had written it as fiction, it would come off as exaggerated and too fairy-tale to be plausible.

There were two great revelations in part one. The first one was the song "Let Me Die In My Footsteps", which sounded so immediately good that I assumed that it was a traditional song. Nope: a Dylan original, and an outtake--an outtake!!--from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The man puts out four classic albums of mostly-originals in two years, and he has outtakes that sound like this?! It's SICK. It's beyond "talented" and getting more into the idiot-savant/channeling realm.

"Let Me Die In My Footsteps"


The other revelation was the non-Dylan music in it, which sadly doesn't seem to have been compiled anywhere. There were amazing songs by Odetta and John Jacob Niles that were immediately powerful. I wish someone had the foresight to put all of those songs together, because if we can all agree on anything, it's that my convenience is priority one.

Last on this topic is that, as the film was rolling on (or, more appropriately, as the disc was spinning still), I thought of my favorite Dylan song, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", and why it's my favorite. When I was re-learning guitar at the age of 19, my mom picked up the guitar and started playing this song, one of the tunes she still remembered how to play from her folky college days, though she sang it with the slight melody change of Joan Baez's version. The chord changes absolutely killed me, and she taught me the chords and it's still one of my favorites to play to this day.

"Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"