I finally saw D.A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back", the documentary about Bob Dylan's 1965 English tour. It's not a film I'd blindly recommend to the "VH1 - Behind the Music" generation -- there's no narration or storyline to speak of, just a fly-on-the-wall look at a couple weeks in the life of Bob Dylan. I guess the VH1 Style has become so commonplace that I was taken aback by the first few minutes with the lack of explanation as to what was going on. I guess we're all used to watching musicians on film and hearing the blow-by-blow gossip in juicy, hindsight-is-20/20 detail. Of course, it wasn't always like this. Sometimes, as is the case with "Don't Look Back", you have to read between the lines by yourself.

It's said to be a film about an artist at the brink of exhaustion. Dylan historians know this to be the truth, but I don't think that's what is depicted in the film. He doesn't look exhausted. He looks stressed from the incredible attention he gets from city to city and the weight of expectation from his sizeable entourage and fanbase. He looks bored from having to play his then-current single (to English fans) "The Times They Are a-Changin'" every night despite being considerably more excited about the newer material he'd preview for Donovan and Joan Baez while backstage. He appears to genuinely enjoy verbally harrassing reporters during interviews, turning their questions back on them and matching them in a battle of wits that few has come prepared for. Or maybe he didn't enjoy it, maybe it was the stress and frustration of answering the same questions every day and the boredom of not having anything better to do with his time.

The major thing which we now take for granted is the intense scrutiny given to songwriters and their songs. Watching the film in 2003, we know that "Bringing It All Back Home" was his first foray into electric music, he was becoming rapidly bored with the purist folk scene, and "Maggie's Farm" isn't really about a farm. Today, we always look to interpret a musician's work. We try to understand the artist by reading into the lyrics, or looking for clues in interviews. In 1965, this was just not done. "Bringing It All Back Home" had been out for a couple of months at the time, but nobody considered what it meant for Dylan's maturity as an artist because a) rock and roll was so new that the concepts of maturing, developing as an artist, and evolving one's style didn't exist yet, b) the album format was so new that nobody yet considered the full-length album as an artistic statement. Nobody was asking him about any of this stuff because Dylan was stiff in the process of helping to invent all of it. Thus, we shouldn't ask ourselves why these journalists were asking such silly questions about religion and fame instead of inquiring about the (now more obvious) meaning of lines such as "I got a head full of ideas / And it's driving me insane / It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor / But I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more". The best part about "Don't Look Back" is watching it forty years later, knowing how to look for the telltale signs of an artist in flux, and thinking about how in 1965, nobody knew how to do that.