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One of the hardest things about being a completist, of any
artist’s body of work, is never being able to escape the worry that there’s some
gem out there, eluding even the most diligent collector. Fans
of Bob Dylan have long been dedicated to searching out the man’s marginalia, from the
Basement Tape recordings to his sessions with Johnny Cash. Super-fan
Joel Gilbert has now put out a documentary focused on Barry Feinstein, Dylan’s
official tour photographer for his 1966 world tour and his 1974 return to the road with
The Band. Unfortunately for Dylanologists,
Gilbert is more interested in his own story than the man whose photographs he seeks out.
Unable to garner official
licensing permission to use Dylan’s music, or at least unwilling to try, Gilbert
calls upon his own moonlighting persona—as frontman of Highway
61 Revisited, the (self-proclaimed) world’s only Bob Dylan tribute
band—to lend weightless cover accompaniment to Feinstein’s photos. Anyone who’s seen footage from Eat the Document, Dylan’s aborted 1966 film of
the European leg of that tour (his first to feature electric live shows) knows how
energized the music was. Feinstein’s photos
capture that raw energy. He follows Dylan in
his most prolific phase, as amphetamines and Carnaby Street fashions lead to the skewed
perfection of Blonde
on Blonde and, eventually, Dylan’s fatigue and seclusion. Gilbert travels to Woodstock, NY to find Feinstein and
his cache of photos, many of which haven’t been shown publicly before. Decked out in Dylan drag, Gilbert stops along the way to
scour the former hippie haven for burnouts, and in one particularly caustic and offensive
scene, he leads one such strange tripper to believe he is in fact Bob Dylan.
Of course, the photographs speak
for themselves, and Gilbert smartly uses the same 3-D imaging that’s popped up in
recent photo-documentaries like The Kid Stays in the Picture and In the Realms of
the Unreal to give the snapshots of Dylan an added kinetic touch. Good thing too, since Gilbert and Feinstein don’t
exactly generate legendary discussions of their content. As
they peruse them, Gilbert asks questions like “Did [Dylan’s] hair look the same
in the morning as it did in the evening?” Feinstein’s responses tend toward the
vague, as when he describes some Dylan lyric as being “some kind of sign of symbolic
something of the times.”
The film jumps to life when
Gilbert travels to Manhattan to interview A.J. Weberman, founder of Dylanology and a noted
kook who started a fad of going through Dylan’s trash in the early seventies. It’s unclear why Gilbert seeks out Weberman,
except to bridge the two sets of tour photos with some extraneous biography, but it’s
a welcome respite from the shabby recreations of Dylan’s motorcycle accident in
Woodstock. If Gilbert is a low-rent Dylan
knock-off, Weberman invented Dylan exploitation. A
rapid-fire ex-Yippie paranoiac, he’s a legitimate kook who shows up Gilbert’s
hokey simulacrum. Infamous for selling his
bootlegged phone conversations with Dylan, later provoking Dylan to assault him, Weberman
comes off penitent and punchy, like the Rupert Pupkin of Bleecker and MacDougal.
Gilbert’s film returns to
Feinstein, ultimately, in a look at his color photos of the 1974 tour (documented as the
live album release Before
the Flood). His camera again finds an
artist whose continued explorations in songwriting and persona make him one of the most
enigmatic pop culture figures. It’s not
surprising that Gilbert’s documentary does little to change this.
- Jesse Paddock
