"What do you mean you haven't seen the new Dylan movie?!"

"What do you mean you haven't seen the new Dylan movie?!"

My friend was incredulous, and understandably so.  If anyone had seen this movie, I might seem like the kind of person who would have done that.  And actually I think of myself as the kind of person who would have done that, too, but I haven't. 

I just smiled, and had no verbal response to my friend's outburst, when he learned that I hadn't seen it yet.  I probably will get around to seeing it.  But, at the risk of coming off as a complete narcissist, my avoidance of this movie -- and to be sure, that's what it is -- seems worth exploring a bit.

Having had a night to sleep on this question, why haven't I seen this new movie about this artist I love that has been so widely praised, this morning when I asked it to myself, the immediate response that sprang from my head was this is like asking a Christian why they haven't seen the new movie about Jesus.

The biggest reasons I haven't seen the movie yet are probably the least relevant and the most mundane.  Nobody invited me to go see it with them, and left to my own devices, I tend to just spend another evening hanging out with my kids when I'm home.  When I'm on tour, I'm often too busy to see movies.

Another big one that has to do with movies about musicians generally, rather than about this one in particular, is every one of them that I've ever seen tends to have lots of snippets of songs along the way, almost none of which are ever played to completion.  When I'm hearing a song I love that's often being rendered brilliantly by some great musicians playing it in the course of one of these movies, the last thing I want is for it to get cut off, but that's all they do in these films.  They're never about the experience of the entire song.

But even as I'm thinking about these excuses for not seeing the movie, I can feel how my reticence is about so much more than that, while at the same time not necessarily being about anything in particular.  This is definitely not a review of a movie which I haven't seen, but I'll explore these feelings a bit anyway.

Anyone who has ever been part of a real grassroots mass movement will tell you that music is the beating heart of any social movement.  This was most definitely the case with the overlapping Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's, and for so many people who were active during that period, Dylan's music was at the center of that beating heart.

Folks I've known who were active during that period (and I know a lot of them) are often easily able to quote Dylan lines that are relevant to any number of topics we may be talking about.  If someone says something that inadvertently includes a Dylan quote (whether or not they know it), these people will recognize the song it's from, as a matter of course.  For a lot of people, Dylan's poetry narrated the period they were living through, particularly at that time, in the 1960's.

Although all of this is very much true, at the same time, the musical/social movement scene that Dylan was immersed in from a very early age -- that the teenage Dylan grew up in, came out of, lived within -- tended to claim him as their own.  Not exactly in the possessive sense, but in the sense that there was a widespread recognition that Dylan and other brilliant musicians active during the time were as good as they were because they were in every important way informed by the waters they were swimming in.  They and their music were viewed as part of a greater whole.

This may very well all be part of the movie's plotline, for all I know.  And whether it is or not, any storyteller, be they a filmmaker or another kind, naturally has to choose a focus.  You can't just do a film about everything.  But Dylan came out of a time and a scene, and any movie about Dylan would probably need to focus more on that than on the individual artist, if the actual relevance of the artist is to be truly understood.

Looking back at the period from the present-day perspective I think it's very hard for many people to grok the reality of the time -- a time during which the word "grok" was very popular.  If you were part of the scene, you drank of it and you were part of it, and in the thinking of many self-described "freaks" of the period, there was in important ways no real separation between the artists and the audience, or what we today might call the content creators and the content consumers.

Maybe that idea was a big part of the movie, but most movies that focus on a particular artist just focus a lot on the artist, and give the impression that what was most important about them was them, rather than the world they emerged from.

What happened with Dylan was just an exceptionally successful rendition of what happens generally in the music industry, since its inception.  The star-making machinery went into operation and turned this brilliant artist into a global phenomenon.

When this happens to an artist it has all kinds of impacts, of course, aside from lots of radioplay.  Other brilliant artists who were Dylan's contemporaries and were overlooked for stardom, to one degree or another, spent their careers in Dylan's shadow.  Which wasn't Dylan's fault, but the reality of Dylan's rise also involved so many other artists coming to terms with so many hard truths.

It's entirely possible that I'm sort of handicapped as an artist, and unable to just appreciate a lot of things because of that.  For example, many people tell me how much they enjoyed the movie called Once, about two musicians in Ireland falling in love and playing music together.  I did enjoy it, but not as much as they did, because I found the scenes where things happen that just would never happen with real musicians or in a real recording studio to be distracting.  Like when the engineer started acting like a producer, which engineers tend not to do, and told the artists to listen to the click track, which didn't seem to exist.

If you're another artist, in order to enjoy a movie like that, you have to be able to suspend your disbelief, which can be very hard to do.

I can deeply appreciate Dylan's brilliance, his songs, the lyrics, the storytelling, the metaphors, but at the same time, if I'm not taking in a song, but thinking about the man's artistic career, and his launch to stardom from the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, then thinking about his meteoric rise tends to remind me of the career trajectory that Phil Ochs never experienced.  A career trajectory for which Bob Dylan was most certainly not responsible.  But that's where my thoughts go -- not necessarily when I hear Dylan's wonderful songs, but when I think about the idea of making another movie about one of the most famous people who ever lived.

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but there are inevitably other die-hard Phil Ochs aficionados whose minds wander in this direction when they think about Dylan's rise to fame.

Especially at the time that Dylan began to become a huge phenomenon, so early in his career, he was writing what we later learned were to be called "protest songs."  They were some of the best of that or any other time -- "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Masters of War," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," and so many more.

We live in the world we live in, with the past it's had.  In this reality, it's easy to imagine Dylan being tremendously famous, and it's even easy to imagine a songwriter receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature -- now that these things have happened.  It's hard to imagine an alternative reality where someone like Phil Ochs had instead been adopted and invested in massively by the major-label star-making machinery.

The reason this is hard to imagine, I surmise, is because the music industry has, for whatever reason, so rarely taken an artist who consistently writes very specifically topical songs about the world around us, and made them famous.  There are only a certain number of artists who the industry determines to occupy a certain genre who the industry wants to promote at a given time, for optimal return on their investments.  That being the case, along with whatever other, more political factors, if the industry invests their vast resources in a political artist, they will generally be an artist on the vague end of political commentary, that is more open to interpretation, and less confronting.

Could songs like "Is There Anybody Here," "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" or "One More Parade" have become as ubiquitous as so many Dylan songs became?  We'll never know, because we don't live in that world.  We live in this one.  I'm glad it has Bob Dylan in it.  I'll probably watch this movie, too, eventually.