LATE LAST WEEK, in the aftermath of the deluge and destruction in New Orleans and beyond, I discovered a link to a website with a song on it that struck my curiosity. It was a cut by Bob Dylan of the traditional Creole folk song "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." As much as I've been a Dylan aficionado over most of the past 40 years, I had never before heard his version of "The Lakes of Pontchartrain," which was recorded live on June 30, 1988, at Jones Beach, N.
Y., with G.E.
Smith playing backup acoustic guitar. The song has been distributed, like much of the Dylan archive over the past four decades, through an ornate, international bootleg network that once was hand-to-hand but which is now largely facilitated by the Internet. I was stunned by what I heard.
With the haunting opening chords promising a glimpse into what rock critic Greil Marcus has dubbed "the old, weird America," Dylan launched into an indelible and emotional version of the 19th-century ballad that painted a profoundly evocative landscape of the Mississippi Delta, one that invited its audience to engage the dark and rooted psychic undercurrents of the region. And I took the train to Jackson town, my fortune to renew, I cursed all foreign money, no credit could I gain, Dylan's raspy phrasing, with all of his traditional nasal intonations and dramatic emphasis on variant syllables, touched deep into the soul of the song's characters and its setting, defining not only who we are as a people but where we've been. I spent too much of the evening listening to the song over and over again, well into the late-night darkness, just as I had to dozens of other Dylan songs from my adolescence into middle age.
I simply could not let it go. The song, the voice, the lyrics, they were all inside me, providing, in a strange way, a cosmic shelter from the storm, while at the same instant challenging me and feeding an interior anxiety about the world and our fates and our times. At the watershed year of 50, I was still coming of age.
It was an epiphany. That is, of course, Dylan's great interpretive gift and his penetrating, if at times erratic, genius: his ability to condense and crystallize so much emotion, so much sagacity, into a single song or performance; it has been what has made him the most fascinating and compelling musician (and, I would argue, artist) of the past half-century. Perhaps no other figure in the history of American arts and letters and of course, the great ones always transcend those boundaries has defined the life and times of a generation as has the enigmatic vagabond from Hibbing, Minn.
, born into the world as Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941. Over the course of a prolific career that now spans more than 40 years, Dylan has forged an unparalleled body of work that includes more than 500 songs, 40 albums, several films, more than 1,500 live performances, a book of poetry, a bestselling memoir, a significant collection of oil paintings, countless awards and, yes, even a Victoria's Secret TV ad. And that doesn't even include the hundreds, if not thousands, of bootleg releases of his performances.
His iconoclastic 1965 release, "Like a Rolling Stone," was declared last winter by Rolling Stone "the greatest song of all time"; a dozen others were named to the Top 500 list. More than 2,000 other performers have covered his songs, ranging from the Byrds and Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix and Garth Brooks. Over the last decade, Dylan has staged a remarkable comeback, or revival if you will, with two widely acclaimed albums, Time Out of Mind (1998) and Love and Theft (2001), both of which were the recipients of Grammy awards.
Even more recently, he received the Commandeur de L'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, the highest cultural honor bestowed by the French government. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature the past four years. And now, as he is rounding the corner toward his 65th birthday next spring (and, yes, one presumes, ready to collect his Social Security benefits), Dylan is about to be canonized by a series of artistic releases in a variety of media that, while largely focusing on his early years, illuminate the triumphs and simple twists of fate that have marked the entirety of his prodigious career.
The centerpiece of this new treasure trove is Martin Scorsese's brilliant four-hour documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, which will be available commercially on DVD this week and which screens, in two parts, on PBS this coming Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 26 and 27, as part of the American Masters Series, beginning at 9pm each evening. Also being released concurrently with the Scorsese documentary is an astonishing two-CD soundtrack comprising key songs in the film as well as rare and unreleased recordings from 1959 (Dylan's senior year in high school) to 1966 (the year of his infamous motorcycle accident).
The double-disc set is being packaged as No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, Volume 7 of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series, on Columbia/Legacy Records.
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