How does the expression go? What a difference a year makes? Something like that.

Watching <b>Eat the Document</b>, the footage of the Bob Dylan 1966 tour and the documentary that followed <b>Don’t Look Back</b> (the 1965 tour footage) is a perfect illustration of just how relative time can be. For Dylan, the differences between his 1965 young, acoustic, and fresh-scrubbed self and his louder, electric 1966 self show a markedly different man – and one who was not always accepted by even the most true and loyal fans who had shown up expecting a nice, quiet, acoustic show and were met instead with a screaming electric band and a Bob Dylan they did not recognize.

Tours throughout England and Scotland show fans streaming out of concert, commenting for the camera, “That were shit,” and other insightful comments, clearly thrown off balance by the unexpected change they suddenly found in their folk hero. But, of course, as some fans fell away, there were those who embraced this changed man and more, new fans were found and both electric and acoustic Dylan would prevail in the end to become the hugely influential Bob Dylan we know today.

Here was Dylan, knowing full well that there would be many who wouldn’t like the new stuff, that it was harder and more, that it was not how he had made his name so far, and in many ways, the new electric stuff was a risky move. Still, for Dylan, the acoustic songs had grown tired and repeating the same lines, same things night after night would wear on anyone. Dylan was itching to do something new, and more, to do it well (despite what the fans first felt, the electric Dylan would be embraced in due course) and he did, creating some of the music that to this day, remains among the best of Dylan.

With a new sound ringing in his head, Dylan embraced this new side of himself. His new work was edgier, harder, and this too reflected the person that Dylan had become, morphing before our very eyes from the wavy haired boy with the bright skin and shiny eyes to the Dylan that would become so familiar to us, with his unkempt, charmingly unruly dark waves and his caustic, often angry songs with the occasional lilting love ballad.

Eat the Document shows Dylan with his hair overgrown – a brown halo about his head, the ever-present dark and over-sized Ray Bans that became a trademark and that he wore both indoors and outside almost all of the time. In the previous tour, we saw Dylan’s eyes more – here, for the most part, Dylan keeps himself hidden behind those cool, dark shades. He is our thin-legged man, with his jeans that are neither too tight nor too baggy, kicking to the beat of the song, throwing his whole body into his music, and still possessing the same cockiness and sense of humor that he had from the beginning only in this tour, Dylan seems more apart somehow. Less a part of the group than he appeared to be in Don’t Look Back in which the action is centered around Dylan and in which he is quite literally, usually <i>in</i> the center of a swirl of activity.

Eat the Document is different. Dylan may still be the center of things in that, yes, things are centered around him; he is why everyone is where they are, after all, but physically, where Dylan chooses to place himself is another matter entirely. Frame after frame shows groupings of people passing time, chatting, etc. But this time, Dylan is not seated in the middle of the group as much as he had been the previous year. He is more often off to the side of the frame, or perhaps entirely out of the scene and the camera has to seek him out, searching shadowed corners and long hallways for him. Look carefully and you can see it; Dylan has pulled back. Even the huge glasses seem to say, <i>Stay away</i> – a sort of protective wall between Dylan and the rest of the world.

Dylan still has the same issues with journalists; in short, not liking them and not liking the whole interview process that is so important to any musician who wants to succeed. Playing nice with the press is just part of the job, but it was never a part that Dylan liked (and the Ed Bradley interview of more recent times showed us that little had changed in this regard; that Dylan was still not really into the whole interview scene.)

In the 66 tour, Dylan agrees to interviews with the British press (likely his manager had set up the interviews, leaving Dylan not happy but understanding that this was a necessary part and price of fame). Dylan still offers answers that are again elusive, misleading, or in many cases, not answers at all but the same question turned around and fired back to the person doing the asking. One journalist asks, “Are you sincere?” An outraged Dylan suddenly sits forward. He can hardly believe anyone has the nerve to ask him this – would you ask this question of anyone else? He fires back, “Are <i>you</i> sincere?” The journalist seems surprised, caught off guard, unsure and sort of laughs it off before asking next, equally insulting question, <i>‘Are you ever yourself?”</i>

Dylan sits way back, sinking into his seat. He exhales long on his cigarette and lets the smoke drift out easily and slowly. The scene ends, leaving things ambiguous. It’s not that Dylan is being insincere– I don’t think he is. It’s that the question is absurd in the first place. To ask anyone, Are you ever yourself is not only rude, but how do you answer that? If you were not always yourself, it’s hardly like you’d cop to it gleefully and admit, and if you are always yourself, you would be, as Dylan was, insulted. But at its heart, a deeper issue remains; who <i>is</i> the authentic self anyway?

Most of us are myriad selves, and Dylan is no exception. We integrate those selves and who we are is a sort of amalgam of those threads, but at any given time, we may be more or less one way than another, depending on what the situation calls for or who we are with and our relationship with that person, our comfort level, and so on. So the question is a complicated one. Anyone who believes they are always “themself” and who is consistently the same in every situation seems to me rather flat; a dull, uninteresting person lacking in dimension. There is nothing inauthentic about having many sides to your personality or to having conflicting thoughts or ideas, there <i>is</i> something inauthentic about pretending to be consistently the same in widely varying situations or relationships. At its very best, the person who is so flat in this regard is not anyone with any real depth – such a person would give the feeling of standing on a vast and flat landscape, a tundra, that stretches for miles and miles showing nothing but acres of flat nothingness. Give me the fucked up, the complicated, the mercurial, the multifaceted, the myriad, the confused any day over this simple, dull person.

. The real Dylan, no doubt, is much like the rest of us – a complex amalgam of experience, people we’ve known and know, thoughts, morality, and so much more. To offer the sum of who we are in one simple, pat answer seems unlikely for anyone. Just because fans and the press may regard Dylan as the Prophet with all the answers, does not mean that it is a role that Dylan himself is or was ever comfortable in. In many ways, the converse seems to be true and this whole prophet thing is a role that Dylan appears to be trying to shake off, often arguing that he is no different from anyone else.

Did or does Dylan really believe he is or was then no different from the rest of us? And more, is or was he? Of course, there are no black or white answers. Dylan is and was like the rest of us in many ways and more than anything, time will show a man who, in large part anyway, wanted nothing more than to be domestic and ordinary and live a normal and settled life with a family and a wife and all of the trappings that come with that. Yet we know it’s not that simple. Dylan did not become a folk hero or suddenly become the poet-prophet without having any hand in the matter. Yes, some issues were foisted upon him – the fans who expected Dylan to be some kind of environmentalist or nonprofit worker for “the cause” (fill in blank here _______), because they took his lyrics and his songs and saw this green, granola fed boy. They saw what they wanted to see, and we know that people project onto others what they happen to want at any particular moment.

We cannot blame Dylan for not being what others wanted him to be or even what they expected, even <i>if</i> it seems that there was a certain flavor to or message in his songs, the fact remains that Dylan is an entertainer and at the end of the day, like anyone, needed to make a living. Why hold Dylan to some higher or even different ethical standard – why did he have to be this selfless man who sang for the cause and sacrificed his own life in the process. Dylan is not our martyr. With so much pressure on him from the media, the fans, and no doubt, his management as well, Dylan must have had trouble grappling with all of the different strands of self that were foisted upon him as well as the myriad sides of who he really was and knew himself to be. Such self reconciliation is hard for anyone, let alone a young man still learning to manage the dizzying ascent of success.

So, Eat the Document is important not only as a documentary of the tour, but as a documentary for anyone interested in Dylan or even just the toll and price of success and how much things can change in one year. I would even recommend watching Don’t Look Back and Eat the Document back-to-back. Do this and pay attention and the real changes will leap out at you. He’s still our Dylan – as written in my previous review of Don’t Look Back, Dylan is still the great wordsmith and poet and translator of what he sees and saw that we have ever known. Drugs and alcohol have certainly become more of the scene by 66, to be sure, and the effect on Dylan is clear – especially in the scenes with John Lennon in the back of a car, driving through London for what was supposed to be a twenty minute tape reel.

The Lennon car interview is sad, or, to use Lennon’s word of the whole scene and how he felt <i>at the time</i> (recorded for all posterity in the actual footage) when John Lennon says he feels “melancholy.” Dylan is obviously drunk - out of his mind on alcohol or something or a combination of things (who knows, and it’s not fair to guess) of which he makes no secret, begging the driver to take him back to his hotel and threatening the other occupants of the car that he may throw up (“though I don’t usually,” he says). Dylan is queasy, slurring his words, asking a young and chubby-faced John Lennon questions that go nowhere and are barely questions at all.

For his part, Lennon is polite and tries hard to make light of the situation, but as the car-ride goes on and on, the car filling up with smoke from too many cigarettes, lurching slowly forward around the bumpy roads of inner-London, Lennon seems increasingly uncomfortable and sad, and this mood seems to then come back and influence Dylan’s mood – communicating vessels, they play off each other, each man trying to make the situation work. Why Dylan did this when he was so drunk or whatever is unclear – perhaps it was just scheduled and he felt he had no way out. It seems like self-destructive behavior, after all, Lennon was clearly important at the time and though the two were friendly, it seems clear that Lennon is not happy to be in the situation at that particular moment.

Dylan finally just leans forward, pushing his Ray Bans up on his forehead and rubs his eyes with balled fists. He leans directly into the camera like this, rubbing his eyes over and over again. We know he’s not crying – but it looks like he could be. He seems young, almost childlike, vulnerable. The camera stays on him for several minutes, just this shot: the tangle of curly hair, the dark glasses, the eyes hidden, only this time by his hands. The camera stays fixed on him until the tape runs out and that’s that. We are left to wonder how the scene really ended – it just sort of breaks down, comes apart, and ends as described.

Here is Bob Dylan, hiding from us again in plain view of the camera.

Eat the Document cannot be missed if you are a Dylan fan. In actuality, we’re lucky to have Eat the Document - Dylan had tried to edit a great deal of this footage, cutting out many of the most revealing scenes. Eat the Document is the result of that edited footage being put back together, and though of course there are still some edits, we see more than we would have, more than our Dylan would have liked, sorry to say for his wishes – but we are privileged to have yet another rare glimpse into a man who is one of the most interesting, influential, talented and also private (and I think, genuinely shy and introverted in many ways) people we have had and still have the privilege of “knowing” if such a word can be applied to Dylan. Whatever the case, how much or how little we see, a fleeting glimpse, a laugh captured on tape, Dylan in the corner, quietly playing his guitar. All of this is just a small part of who Dylan is and was at the time, and in a broader sense, all of this tells us something of the time – not only of Bob Dylan, but who we really are.

Maybe Dylan didn’t think it was important, but clearly we do. We do.

sadi ranson-polizzotti