Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

Director D.A. Pennebaker's black-and-white 1967 documentary film Don't Look Back largely chronicles Bob Dylan's tour of the U.K. in the spring of 1965, the last outing on which the not-quite-24-year-old singer/songwriter appeared solo, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. Already, however, he had begun to move toward folk-rock, having just recorded and released his LP Bringing It All Back Home, half of which consisted of arrangements featuring electric instruments. That he is in a transitional phase in his development comes out early, as the film opens with what is in effect an early music video, in which he stands in a an alley holding and discarding a pile of posters featuring words from his current folk-rock single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," as the record plays on the soundtrack. Then begins the film proper, as Pennebaker's hand-held camera follows him from his arrival in England on April 28, 1965, to his final concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 10. Right off the bat, the director's major theme, Dylan's relationship with the news media, emerges in a press conference at which mass-market journalists, skeptically treating him as a phenomenon, ask hostile questions couched in posh English accents. "Do you think that a lot of the young people who buy your records understand a single word of what you're singing?," asks a woman, following up with, "Would you say that you cared about people particularly?" Dylan responds jokingly and good naturedly at first. But later in the film, as he reads or has read to him articles and reviews written about him and continues to encounter journalists backstage, he loses his patience and begins to give as well as he has gotten, and in considerably less calm tones, for example, telling off an unidentified reporter for Time magazine (Horace Judson) in no uncertain terms. It's not hard to hear the songwriter about to turn out "Ballad of a Thin Man" in his remarks. Something similar happens as Pennebaker chronicles the backstage and hotel room gatherings at which Dylan encounters fans and fellow musicians; again, things start out friendly enough, but there are also angry outbursts as too many people, some of them drunk, behave badly around the singer and get tongue lashings as a result. Again, the soon-to-be-written "Positively 4th Street" comes to mind. Dylan's main entourage consists of Bob Neuwirth, serving as personal assistant, and manager Albert Grossman, who does some shouting of his own and is glimpsed negotiating the terms of a television appearance (probably the one Dylan did for the BBC a few weeks later). Pennebaker also provides some footage of Dylan on-stage at various venues on the tour, although this is not primarily a performance film, and no song is performed in its entirety. Others also give impromptu performances backstage and in hotel rooms, including Alan Price, Joan Baez, and Donovan. When it first appeared in 1967, Don't Look Back was an eye-opening look at the tumultuous life of Bob Dylan circa 1965. It only grew in stature in later years, ranking as a classic examination of the world of popular music as it was lived in the ‘60s.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close

×

Bob Dylan - Don`t Look Back (1967)

Close