When I was in junior high school, my friend Benny and I went to hear Bob Dylan perform at Ravinia, a summer music venue near Chicago, on June 17, 1964. Dylan was not very well known at that time. In fact, it was early in his career and the legend of the mythical, inscrutable Dylan had not yet been formed. He was known to a few cognoscenti as a young, up and coming New York folk-singer. Ravinia had reserved seat pavilion seating and outdoor lawn seating, which was cheaper. For Dylan’s first Chicago area concert, the pavilion was barely a third filled and the lawn was practically empty of listeners. Dylan sang a few songs before it started to rain. Dylan coyly announced from the stage, "What are you doing out in the rain? Why don’t you join us in here?" It took a moment for the polite, well-behaved crowd of clean-cut suburban teen-agers on the lawn to realize that Dylan was giving us permission to jump the fence into the pavilion without paying the extra charge. The ushers, who were all college kids, smiled and stepped aside to let us pass to the empty, more expensive seats. Even so, the place was still not quite half-filled. Dylan spent an especially long time tuning his guitar between each song but the audience waited patiently. Dylan’s extended tuning only heightened the anticipation among the crowd. Finally, Dylan played another song. Before he finished the third song of the concert, Dylan broke the low E string on his six-string guitar. Dylan apparently did not have another string or a second guitar because he asked the audience, "Does anyone have an E string?" With any other touring artist, then and now, at this moment roadies would rush out from both sides of the stage, grab the now dead five-string and hand off a fresh six string, already tuned. At the very least the artist would look to the wings in supplication and a worried flunky would come out and huddle with the talent to discuss the situation. Nobody came out. It appeared Dylan came to the concert completely alone; this was well before he surrounded himself with bodyguards, assistants, and backup musicians. There was a long awkward pause when the entire audience looked around and realized that we might have just heard the end of the shortest Bob Dylan concert ever when Dave Lauterstein, who went to high school, dramatically walked up the center aisle with his guitar strapped along his back and handed his guitar up to Dylan. Dylan thanked him and proceeded to perform the rest of the concert with Dave Lauterstein’s guitar. To be perfectly honest, I was not yet a confirmed Dylan fan. I considered Dylan at this time to be a novelty act: a scruffy young man singing old-fashioned traditional folk songs. I was more interested in Dylan Thomas the Welsh poet.

      Benny and I went back stage after the concert and waited for Dylan. After we knocked on the door, Dylan came out and graciously autographed our programs. (I saved that program for years but it is since lost.) We were the only ones to do so. Both Benny and I were struck by the fact that Dylan did not seem much older than us. He was actually years older but he has always had the rare ability to both appear younger than his real age and to never seem to get older, even when he was well past middle age.

     Two years later in 1966, I was hanging out at my friend Paul’s house one afternoon after school. We were seniors in high school. Pop music in those days was either derivative rock and roll, cheesy ballads, or forgettable bubble gum. People did not buy a lot of records because there were few songs worth listening to a second time much less collecting. Paul told me he had a new album he wanted me to hear. I was politely interested but not expecting anything that would particularly strike my fancy as I knew Paul had esoteric tastes that I did not entirely share. He played jazz bass in a group. He also foraged for classic jazz records in the remainder bins at the Jazz Record Mart in downtown Chicago. I asked him about the new record but instead of showing me the cover or giving it a proper buildup, which he usually did when he wanted to share a musical discovery, Paul just smiled cryptically and said, "Wait." I slouched down in a comfortable listening chair as Paul placed a set of expensive headphones on my head and cued the needle on the record. As the startlingly new and powerful sounds of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" from the "Blonde on Blonde" album washed over me, Paul chuckled, pleased with the visible effect it had on me. Paul was a teen-age connoisseur of pop culture and relished the opportunity of introducing what would be a major musical force in all our lives. I literally sat up and took better notice of what I was hearing. This was no twangy folk singer any more and Dylan was not just rock ‘n rolling. He was way out there on the horizon where no one else would dare go. I went out and bought my own copy of the album that same day.

     In the summer of 1967, the summer of love, the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Although I did not see the magazine until later, there was no question that as I was eighteen and traveling through Western Europe by car with two high school friends. the times were a’ changin’. Starting in Paris for a two month odyssey, we drove to Madrid, Seville, Grenada, Barcelona, the Cote d’Azure, Cannes, the Italian Riviera, Naples, Rome, Florence, Munich, back to Paris to ditch the rental car, and then we to London for more touring and in particular, the Windsor Blues festival, (Cream, Jeff Beck, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall, many others). Everywhere we went, the common thread, the one person American, European and British Commonwealth kids wanted to ask about, to talk about, to figure out was Bob Dylan. What’s he really like? Have you heard him play in concert? Have you heard his new album? Does he have a girlfriend? This last was typically from wide-eyed, long-haired girls in jean jackets, miniskirts, and beads, openly emulating Joan Baez’ signature look. Is it any wonder why some of us dressed, behaved, and acted like Dylan?

     In the late sixties and early seventies, Bob Dylan grew in stature until he became the apotheosis of hip and coolness. He was not just a rock and roll role model, someone to look to for style lessons, to model oneself after. He was a rock god who was unique, unapproachable, unknowable, mysterious and endlessly fascinating. Whatever music he created was thrillingly original, sui generis and impossible to copy without sounding false. He was the coolest guy in an era when coolness was hard to acquire and maintain, given the vast numbers of wannabes, posers, charlatans, and no-talent losers masquerading as pop stars. Even the Beatles, themselves a revered group of rock innovators, looked up to Dylan as the embodiment of authentic hipness and cool. The Beatles may have created the most revolutionary and exciting pop album ever made, Sgt. Pepper, but Dylan was the one musician all the Beatles considered to be The Heaviest Dude of All Time. (They had worked hard to emulate another rock god: Chuck Berry.) George Harrison and John Lennon were pretty cool cats themselves but even they knew that Dylan was the Coolest Cat. John and George wanted to meet Dylan, hang with him, become his friend, because, they, like everyone else in the sixties, knew that Dylan was the coolest guy. Everyone, at that time, was living in Bob Dylan’s dream.

     Dylan’s albums were considered sacred texts, anticipated eagerly for new insights, enlightenment, revelatory statements, and avant-garde musical directions. The first day of a new Dylan record release, we would grab the record from the store, race home, place it on the turntable, and gather around in respectful silence to listen, absorb, and wrap oneself in the Master’s aura. He never disappointed. Each record was a step forward for music, for society and for every one of his fans.

     Dylan almost caused a cataclysmic break with his fans when he started singing and recording Christian songs in the early eighties. Now of course there is nothing wrong about singing Christian songs but it was not the sort of direction that was easily accepted from a revolutionary musical hero. It was thought to be a regressive, unhip, backward direction for a previously progressive, revelatory, even revolutionary composer of music. His fans wanted him to continue to be the advance guard of a hip, sophisticated, musical evolution that was shared by the Band, the Beatles, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, the Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young (CSNY was the first "super group."). Of all those incredibly creative, talented, musically adventurous musicians, Dylan was always the one everyone else was chasing, who was just a little bit further down the road, leading the way. Whether it was that historic, startling switch from folk to electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival or a temporary foray into country with "Nashville Skyline," Dylan did it first. Every major musician and musical group would judge themselves against the reference point of Dylan. It was a demonstration of respect and homage that Jimi Hendrix, a rock god himself because of his inventive, ground-breaking guitar playing but then only slightly less revered than Dylan, covered the Dylan song, "All Along The Watchtower." Hendrix, after all, was a true original himself and didn’t have to cover anyone’s songs.

     Dylan changed and evolved musically over time, embracing various American traditions such as folk, rock, country, bluegrass, traditional, gospel, soul, blues, spiritual, hillbilly, but always re-imagining the music in his own voice. The Woodstock Festival, in July of 1969, attracted so many hundreds of thousands of music fans partly because Dylan was rumored to make a surprise appearance, after spending three years without performing live as he recovered from a motorcycle accident. He was known to live and hang out in Woodstock and so many of his Woodstock neighbors, like Van Morrison and the Band, were scheduled to appear. Famously, Dylan did not appear at the Woodstock Festival, which only fueled his growing legend as a one of a kind rock god. The Last Waltz, the Band’s 1976 farewell concert in San Francisco in which Dylan did participate, was a gathering of equals but Dylan was first among equals. The Last Waltz could have been billed as Bob Dylan and his friends since Dylan was the widely acknowledged headliner and main attraction.

     Inevitably, male singer/songwriters who followed Dylan have had to face criticism for being copycat followers when their only crime was to be both younger than Dylan and his ardent admirer. Bruce Springsteen and Mark Knopfler of the Dire Straits, both singer/songwriters like Dylan, were plagued by unfair comparisons to Dylan. Dylan didn’t seem to object. In fact, he produced an album together with Knopfler ("Infidels," 1983).

     Dylan’s long, fruitful extended career is an anomaly. Legendary rock gods typically die young. Elvis evolved from rockabilly to rock and roll, from young Elvis to Vegas Elvis, from fat Elvis to dead Elvis (at age 42). While other musicians seemed to fade, or immersed themselves in drugs and alcohol, or wallowed in their old hits to ultimately destine themselves for D list reality shows and gigs at Holiday Inns, Dylan never suffered that sad, slow decline. Janis, Jimi, and Jim Morrison all died much too young of drugs and excess. More recently, Ozzy Osbourne, the Beach Boys, and many others are doomed to live longer but to suffer more pain through the embarrassing exposure of their lack of depth. Dylan doesn’t allow for quick analysis. He always took his work and himself seriously. Of the thousands of photographs of Dylan in existence, few of them show him smiling. He seems to be wearing a mask at times. Inscrutable? Yes, definitely. Strange? No, that’s just Dylan.

     When he appeared at the 2001 Academy Award show to accept an Oscar for writing the theme song for Curtis Hanson’s film "Wonder Boys," he was not in Los Angeles like the rest of the nominees but actually on a stage in Australia, performing a concert. The Academy Award show simply beamed him in by satellite. Imagine if his piped-in appearance had set a precedent for actors. "The award goes to Meryl Streep, but she’s not sitting in the front rows of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood but thousands of miles away on a location set in New York. She thanks the Academy but static and interference muffles her voice." Only Dylan, because of his mystique and elevated status as a revered cultural figure, could have been allowed to get away with not actually attending the Academy event to receive an Oscar. One of the ways Dylan protected his mystique throughout his career was to avoid subjecting himself to endless interviews.

     That is, up until recently. The two part PBS documentary that Martin Scorsese directed was eagerly and nervously awaited by both Dylan music fans and Scorsese film fans. Marty was not only a revered master filmmaker, drenched in his own myth, having collaborated with another legend, Robert De Niro for several decades, he had a long history of artfully editing great music and film. His greatest films, like "Mean Streets" and "Good Fellas," are filled with well-chosen pop music gems. He also directed the iconic documentary/concert film, "The Last Waltz." Marty is a longtime friend of Robbie Robertson, the leader of Dylan’s backup band, the Band, probably the hippest musical group after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And how did the Band earn that status? Simply by becoming known as Dylan’s backup band. Marty was even one of the editors of the film of the Woodstock Festival. If anyone could be true to the spirit of Dylan and his legacy, it would be Marty. He could be trusted to make sense of it all. Reportedly, Marty had access to miles of footage never seen before, mainly hours of interviews with Dylan. And this was an authorized biography, initiated by Dylan himself, who preferred a talented filmmaker like Marty to create his definitive film biography. Finally, after an over forty year career, the real Dylan would be revealed with Dylan talking to camera at length. Would this mean that Dylan would be exposed as a manipulator, a charlatan, a faker, the artful copier of other people’s styles? Holy Dylan shattered into pieces?! Please, no, we don’t want to see that, that would be a nightmare! As the air date for the two part series approached, the fear and dread pervaded even Dylan’s loyalist fans.

      With "No Direction Home" airing on PBS and available widely on DVD both Marty’s and Dylan’s reputations come through not only intact but built up, buttressed, and bronzed for the ages. "No Direction Home" both re-mythologizes Dylan and explicates him as well, through his own musings and through reminiscings of his earliest companions, rivals, and associates. Dylan does not disappoint his fans. He does talk intelligently yet as always enigmatically at length about himself and gratefully, does not shatter any of our illusions about him. Dylan is re-affirmed to be an authentic cultural icon. He did write, compose and perform an astonishingly wide-ranging catalog of extraordinarily memorable songs. He did somehow tap into a great shared zeitgeist and create something unforgettable, transcendent, inspirational and as unmistakably American as the flag and apple pie. It’s all true: Dylan is as important now as he ever was.  
--Phillip Koch