Movie Music
I’ve been amazed at the mostly positive response to the Bob Dylan biopic. Glad, actually, but I’m not sure if I want to see it, having lived it, if only at a distance. I sort of like all those characters keeping their place in my own movie, the one swimming around in my head, the movie in which they shaped my taste in music and my taste for life. Plus, I never much cared to know who was dating whom or how Dylan’s contemporaries felt about him. It was just gossip.
In my movie, I know about Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk and Woody and all the others because the folk music revival came to me via the Kingston Trio and the TV show Hootenanny and I liked the music. And I learned the songs. And I knew they were about social justice and war and poverty. Heck, they were marching in Selma, sitting in at Woolworth’s, the Great Depression was back around the corner, and my friends were dying in Vietnam. That was the social milieu in which I heard the music. It was my real life, thank you.
Of course, I was never a purist about the music and I’m not sure I could have been, given that most of the classics came to me via pop groups like Peter, Paul and Mary or the Byrds. I figured what did it matter how the song was packaged as long as people knew why someone was asking where had all the flowers gone, and if to everything there was a season, maybe there could be a time for peace. As for Dylan, he was my poet, acoustic or electric, and Desolation Row still melts the inner me in a way most people will never understand.