Eat the Document opens with a shot of Bob Dylan snorting something off a tabletop then asking, "Have you ever heard of me?”
An ego indulging itself is an appropriate introduction to this film. 🧵
Eat the Document reunites Dylan with Dont Look Back director D.A. Pennebaker, who had free rein to capture that 1965 UK tour.
But for the following year’s return to Europe, Dylan wanted more control over the filmmaking process.
Though Pennebaker shot most of the footage, it was often under Dylan’s direction.
Rather than quietly capturing real events, Dylan wanted to stage certain scenes, like (I suspect) this inane moment of a plate being passed around a restaurant table.
Pennebaker did a rough edit of the footage but Dylan decided that it was too similar to Dont Look Back.
The singer worked on his own cut during his post-motorcycle crash stint out of the public eye in Woodstock, with help from his friend and filmmaker Howard Alk.
A co-founder of the legendary Second City improv theatre group, Alk had booked Dylan for one his first Chicago live shows in 1962.
He then moved into film, helping Murray Lerner to edit the Newport documentary, Festival, before assisting Pennebaker on Dont Look Back.
But Pennebaker had little interest in Alk’s ideas about filmmaking.
Once it became clear that Alk was leading the direction of Eat the Document’s latest edit, Pennebaker quit the project.
While Dont Look Back notably put you in the middle of a scene without providing context, the action and editing allowed you to start making sense of things.
Alk’s idea was to remove even that, instead gives the viewer mere fragments of events, including the music.
In 1965, Pennebaker was more interested in the off-stage antics than Dylan’s live performances. But he understood that in 1966, the action was most definitely happening onstage.
Yet Alk and Dylan’s final edit of Edit the Document hardly reflects that.
The first live performance we see is Tell Me Momma, played against the backdrop of a large American flag.
Yet this short scene fails to convey the noise and intensity of the electric set's wild opening song that you get from the live audio recordings.
Later, footage of Tom Thumb’s Blues is interrupted by a “conversation” between Dylan and a mute Robbie Robertson.
Then we follow the duo as they wander aimlessly through some waste ground.
The show-stopping climax of the live shows, Like a Rolling Stone comes early in Eat the Document.
We only hear the first couple of lines before another sudden cut to those infamous reactions from fans – though the film seems more interested in their faces than words.
The best live footage is of Ballad of Thin Man, whose centrepiece presence suggests that the song has become Dylan’s definite statement about the world as he was currently experiencing it.
After staying close-up on the singer for a mesmerising minute, the film inevitably cuts away to a strained conversation with a French journalist.
When it returns to Thin Man, we see Dylan from a distance, before cutting again to critics, this time more outraged British fans.
Next is a funny juxtaposition of hearing Dylan singing a mighty “ahhh” while the scene cuts to footage of him yawning.
This is the most coherent section of Eat the Document, where its compulsive edits and fractured narratives are used to describe Dylan’s discombobulation.
It may be unfair to criticise Eat the Document for not focusing enough on the music when Dont Look Back did the same.
But the latter made up for it with a great cast of characters. Join me tomorrow to see if Eat the Document has enough personality.
During those frustrating Blonde on Blonde sessions in New York, Bob Dylan tried 14 takes of a song slated as Freeze Out.
Not only was he was still working on the lyrics of what would eventually become Visions of Johanna, he was unhappy with his band. 🧵
Drummer Bobby Gregg’s struggles to land on a satisfactory tempo were especially exasperating.
Dylan diagnosed the New York musicians as the problem.
The first Nashville session that captured the master take of Visions of Johanna suggests he was right.
After a brief harmonica intro, Kenny Buttrey introduces a stuttering snare, which soon settles into a perfectly paced march that keeps the song’s midnight meanderings on track.
Al Grossman didn’t want Bob Dylan to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville and threatened Bob Johnston, whose suggestion it was.
But with Dylan unhappy after the New York sessions, the producer put his job on the line. 🧵
Dylan didn’t believe his New York musicians could help him capture the specific sound he had in his mind.
When Johnston risked the wrath of Grossman by conveying the calibre of the players he knew in Nashville, Dylan was intrigued.
It helped that Dylan already knew one of them – Charlie McCoy, who showed up during the recording of Desolation Row, picked up a guitar and improvised the lush Latin licks that decorate Highway 61 Revisited’s closing track.
Five of the songs on Blonde on Blonde feature a bridge.
By my count, just one song – Ballad of a Thin Man – does on Bob Dylan’s previous two album combined.
Which makes me think Dylan wanted his seventh album to be more of a pop record. 🧵
And it’s not just the bridges. Blonde on Blonde has more sing-along choruses than before and the lyrics are more direct expressions of love, longing and leaving.
The core of Blonde on Blonde is pop music. But this is Dylan, so the result is naturally unconventional.
I Want You is about as conventional as Dylan gets.
Sure, the verses are filled with oddball characters who could be castoffs from Highway 61 Revisited. But the chorus?
“I want you so bad” – jeez, just go ahead and say what you feel Bob.
Before Al Kooper sat behind the Hammond organ during the Like a Rolling Stone sessions, he first tried out on guitar. After all, he was a guitarist, not an organ player.
But then Mike Bloomfield arrived and Kooper abandoned any hope of being Bob Dylan’s new guitarist. 🧵
As soon as Bloomfield started to play, Kooper realised that The Paul Butterworth Blues Band guitarist was streets ahead of him.
So Kooper retreated back behind the glass and waited for his next opportunity, while Bloomfield impressed more than just the hopeful usurper.
Bob Dylan was very excited about Mike Bloomfield.
In an outtake for the unused song Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence, he sings “she ain’t as good as this guitar player I got right now”.
Before returning to the studio, Kooper joined Dylan at the 1965 Newport Festival.
There he endured the boos as part of the band that plugged in to perform Like a Rolling Stone, It Takes a Lot to Laugh... and that dynamite version of Maggie’s Farm:
If Kooper was not an organ player before Like a Rolling Stone, now he very much was.
He recalled how he and Dylan would find records that aped the sound of their song and laugh at hearing seasoned organists attempting to emulate Kooper’s unrehearsed style.
June 16, 1965. Session musician and songwriter, Al Kooper is about to blag his way into rock history by playing an instrument he doesn't even know how to turn on.
Such is the unplanned majesty of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and the album it opens, Highway 61 Revisited. 🧵
Producer Tom Wilson had invited Kooper along to watch the second day of Bob Dylan and his band attempt to record an unusual and awkward new song.
But the ambitious Kooper had no intention of sitting on the sidelines behind the glass and instead sidled in among the musicians.
When Wilson moved Paul Griffin from the Hammond organ to piano, Kooper filled the vacated seat, relieved that Griffin had left the power on.
Despite being unfamiliar with his instrument and the song he was about to play, Al Kooper turned out to be one hell of an organ player.