In the late summer of 1968, a few hundred people crammed into a small auditorium at the National Film Theatre in London for the first British showing of the Bob Dylan docudrama, Don’t Look Back.
In the words of one of Dylan’s songs, the film had been a ‘long time coming’, especially as it had been out in America the year before. Don’t Look Back was D A Pennebaker’s first major documentary. In 1967, he had made Monterey Pop, the classic sixties rock film, which helped launch Janis Joplin.
In 1968, Don’t Look Back as a title was already ironic – a seeming admonishment to Dylan as well as his audience – and has become more so over the years, especially now as Dylan’s 70th birthday approaches on May 24.
Dylan: Rock’s Most Revered and Most Enigmatic Icon
For many of the sixties generation, Dylan’s music has been the soundtrack of their lives right down to the present day, and his influence on popular music second to none. The archetypal seasoned troubadour, he’s become rock’s most revered, and most enigmatic, icon.
By 1968, Dylan had moved on a long way since Don't Look Back was made during his British tour three years before. There had been the volatile 1966 world tour, which saw him booed around the globe for ‘going electric’, the three astonishing albums central to his canon – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, the motorcycle accident, the subsequent bucolic retreat, and the Basement Tapes, bootleg recordings of which were starting to appear at the time of the film’s release.
So much happened to Dylan in those few years that, by 1968, Don’t Look Back was already an anachronism, yet a deeply fascinating one, and so its premiere in the UK was a major event for Dylan fans, not least myself – and not least because I was (am) in the movie.
Dylan and His Entourage Flew in from New York
As a teenager, I went to Heathrow Airport on the May evening that Dylan flew in from New York to start the tour. I met an older friend who was a reporter and we were able to go airside – security was negligible in those days – to meet Dylan and his entourage as they left their aircraft.
Howard Alk, with his handheld camera, followed Dylan and his friend Bob Neuwirth as they crossed to the terminal building singing ‘London Bridge is falling down’, and in this sequence in the film you can see my friend and me watching them from a few feet away.
A few minutes later, as Dylan paused in a doorway amid a scrum of fans and well-wishers, we pounced for the briefest of conversations. Here, the camera tracks tightly across our shoulders, moving from right to left behind us, keeping Dylan in centre- hot, and you can see me clearly, though fleetingly, in profile.
Dylan’s Put Downs of the Media Were Merciless
Dylan was then ushered into a room for a press conference – also seen in the film – in which reporters were mercilessly set up in the usual way.
I remember the clapping and cheering which greeted Dylan’s put downs of the media in the film – it was the first time I’d heard applause in a cinema – and the scornful laughter at the way it depicted the ‘straights’. Dylan, after all, was the King of Cool.
It wasn’t until 1986 that the movie was shown on UK television, resulting in mass taping by fans, and it was another 15 years before the video was available in Britain on import. The ‘book of the film’, a transcript of the dialogue with many stills, had long been a collector’s item.
Throughout the film, shot in graphic black and white and in cinema verité style, the charismatic image of the 24-year-old Dylan remains strangely timeless while all those around him are quaintly rooted in the period.
Dylan Signed Copies of his Albums at the Airport
When Dylan flew back to the States at the end of the tour, I was at the airport again, and this time I was much luckier. I caught him alone at the check-in desk on the main concourse, and we chatted. He was approachable, polite, and, generously, he signed copies of his albums that I had brought along. They remain among my prized possessions.
But again, irony -- for two of the albums were already autographed by Joan Baez. I'd got her signature at that press conference at the airport a few weeks before. Little did I know, when I asked Dylan to sign, that their relationship had ended during the tour, and the 'King and Queen of Folk' were no longer an 'item'. Dylan didn't bat an eyelid.
Geoff Ward - Geoff Ward, MA Lit., is a British journalist, media consultant, author and lecturer/tutor in literature and creative writing
