No direction home
Still, nobody gets Bob Dylan.
Notes on No Direction Home, 16 years on
Whether Bob Dylan knows this or not (he doesn’t seem to really want to know about these things), his early years of brilliance are still an inspiration. Even just hearing someone else sing one of his songs can cause an emotional episode.
I was sitting next to my wife in Walk the Line, listening to Joaquin Phoenix doing Johnny Cash doing Dylan’s It Ain’t Me, Babe, and it made me cry. I remember being wound up tighter than a tampon. The song softened me up good.
We’re divorced now.
I wasn’t embarrassed at all; in fact I got quite into it. Crying does you good; you forget that. My wife was embarrassed, of course. I had my face buried in her shoulder but I was sending shudders through our row of seats, crying big, noisy man sobs. I wasn’t holding back. I figured the noise of the song was drowning me out, and I thought everyone would be too enthralled to notice me in the glare from the screen, but my wife noticed. There was no explaining Dylan and his effect on me to her, or my sudden realisation that he would die one day and that I would have to deal with it and be dealt with when this happened.
Anyway, here I am 16 years later, watching No Direction Home. I’m alone and I have my notebook. This time I…
