Dylan documentary delves behind elusive genius

Despite being one of the most famous musicians in the world, remarkably little is known about Bob Dylan (here aged 21). Picture / Reuters

His career has spanned nearly half a century. He has written around 500 songs and performed live thousands of times. At 64, he is still recording, and touring. In that sense, no artist in musical history has granted the public as much access as Bob Dylan. Yet if you asked most Dylan followers what he was really like, or what was going on in his life, they wouldn't have a clue.

Next week, however, there is an opportunity to see and hear Dylan as never before, courtesy of another giant of American creative, film director Martin Scorsese. Scorsese's 3 1/2-hour documentary about Dylan's formative years - No Direction Home - is released on DVD in New Zealand. The double album soundtrack that accompanies the documentary is already out.

At the end of it all the suspicion is that we may still not really know about him. We know about McCartney, we know about Jagger, and we now know probably more than we'll ever want to about Michael Jackson.

But Dylan, a man who has never tired of putting himself forward if he's got a guitar in his hands and an audience ready to listen, simply disappears once the show is over. A lifetime as the object of frequently obsessive fascination has demanded that he hang on to every last vestige of his privacy. Although that's only part of the explanation.

The degree to which any artist's life informs the product of their imagination is always fiercely debated. For some critics, no song or book or painting can possibly be explained without reference to the day-to-day events that lay behind it. For others, great art just is, handed down by some higher being perhaps - certainly the way Dylan would have it.

He has always resisted those who have demanded to know what his songs were about ("They're about three minutes," he once replied) or who have sought to interpret them in terms of his relationships or other aspects of his personal circumstances.

Such inquiries, he maintains, miss the point, but to accept that you also have to accept the notion that Dylan has spent the past nearly 50 years being two people. There's Dylan the artist who goes into the studio and on stage and reveals himself through the most compelling combination of words and music to come out of the second half of the 20th century; and there's Dylan the individual who has been through marriage, divorce, fatherhood and money worries, and who almost never gives interviews.

This explains the excitement surrounding the Scorsese film. In it Dylan talks pithily about his upbringing in the remote Midwest, his arrival on the New York folk scene in the early 1960s, his rapid rise to fame, his absorption into the protest movement and then his rejection of it, culminating in the seismic "going electric" moment in 1965. It's all marvellous stuff, but there's something missing. Where, apart from a couple of drily witty asides, are the women? And where are the drugs?

The interview's background helps to explain these omissions. It was conducted not by Scorsese but by Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen. They wanted something on record that could one day be released. Then came the idea for the Scorsese film. But one has to bear in mind the highly controlled environment from which it emerged.

So, what is the truth about Bob Dylan? From the moment the young, not-yet-successful musician changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, it was clear he wanted to put some distance between who he really was and who he wanted to be.

Arriving in New York, he made up stories about his background, saying that after leaving Minnesota he'd travelled and worked in New Mexico, when he had done nothing of the kind. It was self-mythologising, and the start of a process of leaving false trails that has continued ever since.

Dylan may have been determined to keep his private life private, but when, in the early 1960s, he fell for the beautiful Suze Rotolo, a member of the New York folk scene and "the most erotic thing I'd ever seen", he couldn't resist including her on the cover of an album. With the folk goddess Joan Baez - "the sight of her made me high" - he formed a partnership both romantic and artistic that turned them into a kind of boho JFK and Jackie.

The cooling of that relationship - at least on Dylan's part - was a central theme in his movement away from an essentially conservative folk scene that he was finding increasingly oppressive, and from the "spokesman-of-a-generation" label that was driving him mad. Dylan was always hungry for experience, and it was all out there, much of it narcotically induced.

By 1965, he had gone electric, and the clamour from his audience - in large part a shriek of dismay - was getting to him. No wonder he kept his wedding that year - to Sara Lownds, a former bunny girl - as low-key as possible. She was previously married and had a daughter, Maria. He and Sara had four children of their own, of whom Jakob has grown up to be a fully fledged musician in his own right.

The period of bringing up young children coincided - not inconveniently - with the years in retreat that followed Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident (which is the point at which the Scorsese film ends). By then Dylan was probably ready for some downtime anyway, and he spent it in upstate New York, experimenting with the new sounds that were soon bootlegged as The Basement Tapes, and producing a series of albums with a reflective, country flavour.

Then his marriage to Sara foundered, and the pain of it was poured into his 1975 masterpiece Blood on the Tracks. You only had to listen to the songs to know what complexities of the heart Dylan had experienced, which is another way of saying that there have always been women in his life. Around this time the urge to communicate directly with an audience reasserted itself and he began touring again, taking up for a number of years with one of his band members, Clydie King.

There were other serious relationships - with Carol Childs, an A&R executive at Geffen Records, and with an actress, Sally Kirkland. Then, in his 2001 biography Down the Highway, Howard Sounes revealed that in the 1980s Dylan had had a second marriage, to a backing singer called Carolyn Dennis, with whom he had a daughter. That marriage also ended in divorce, in 1992. There have been no marriages since.

Dylan is now a grandfather (all the children from his first marriage have had children) who has survived a serious heart scare and probably ought to be living quietly in one of the several properties he owns across the US.

New albums keep coming - those of 1997 (Time Out of Mind) and 2001 (Love and Theft) are among his most acclaimed. Last year he produced Chronicles, a volume of memoirs (now out in paperback) that showed his mastery of prose and became a surprise bestseller, although reading it you would hardly know that he'd had wives and children.

And he just keeps touring. If you want to know what Dylan is really like, seeing him live may well be your best opportunity.

- INDEPENDENT