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Media watch: PBS American Masters showed 2 hours of a 4 hour biography of Bob Dylan.
The film was made by Martin Scorsese, and Dylan's work deserves this kind of thorough treatment. Like others of my generation, his songs made an incalculable impact on my life for many different reasons -- articulating them all would make a tremendously long essay that you are NOT about to read here.
I liked that color footage of a parade in Dylan's hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota from 1950. It was right to point out that Doggie In The Window was the most popular song of the 50's, and that young Robert Zimmerman dabbled unsuccessfully in Rock N' Roll before he committed himself to folk singing.
Shots of the early Folk Scene were very interesting -- from John Jacob Niles to Odetta to Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the Lost City Ramblers, the Clancy Brothers, and my favorite -- Huddie Ledbetter AKA "Leadbelly," who died the year I was born. (1949)
I REALLY loved the interviews with the late Dave Van Ronk and Allan Ginzberg -- 50's/60's Greenwich Village was a place and time that rivals post-WWI Paris, or any other era you may choose to name, for creative ferment.
Dave Van Ronk's tale of House of the Rising Sun was pretty funny -- He had to exclude it from his live set because Dylan "stole" his arrangement of the Public Domain song on his first album, before Van Ronk had a chance to record it. The Animals later made an electified version of Dylan's crib, and Dylan himself had to stop singing it after House of the Rising Sun became a massive international hit for them.
Part One ended with footage from the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963 and 64, about when Time Magazine started calling him "Folkdom's Crown Prince," and our whole society was mutating quickly.
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