Bob Dylan Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home

ha, i like eat the document, at least as a glimpse into dylan's psyche at the time. but it just seems like someone could do a really amazing 66 tour doc with all the footage in the vaults. maybe the best of it was used in no direction home, i dunno.

No Direction Home sucked. WHY did they focus only on Dylan in the sixties?? Everybody already knows what happened to him in the sixties. They couldn't have gone into the Self Portrait disaster?? His divorce inspiring Blood on the Tracks?? His teaming up with Jacques Levy and writing "Hurricane" and "Joey"?? His bizarre Christian phase? His godawful '80s albums?? His critical resurgence from 97-now?? Such a missed opportunity. Maybe there'll be a sequel some day.

the clip of Dylan outside the pet store rearranging the words on all the signs always cracks me up

Watched the first half of that last night on VH1C (& loved ^^^ that scene), but couldn't commit to staying up until 2:30 for the 2nd half.

Most songwriters will never pen one song as good as I Was Young When I Left Home, which Dylan put to tape at age 20 and didn't even bother to include on an album.

It's all true.

His trajectory always amazes me. Any artist who could conjure those really affecting performances like "I Was Young When I Left Home" or his versions of "Barbara Allen" and "House Carpenter" or several dozen other songs from 1960/61/62 would have been content to simply perform in that guise for an entire career. And it would have been an important career. But that he went in a hundred different directions from those early years is simply astonishing to me. Such a brave artist.