MOVIE CULTURE INSPIRATION: Chronicles Vol 1 by Bob Dylan

Making a great movie is about more than movies.

It’s about steeping yourself in art, literature, music, history, storytelling, technology, current events, life experience, philosophy, big ideas, little ideas. The odd discovery in the trash. The strange midnight project in the garage.

The songs sung at church. The songs sung at work. The songs sung in houses of ill repute at three am by sailors on leave.

The whole thing.

So every now and then, it makes sense to write about something that isn’t a movie. But that could blow the doors of your mind wide open to how to make great movies.

A twisted key to a lock you didn’t know was there to open a room you didn’t know existed where the best ideas you didn’t know you had were hiding in shadows you didn’t know covered things you needed to discover.

Beloved American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan wrote a memoir in 2004 called Chronicles Volume 1. It details in four acts the genesis of three Bob Dylan albums: 1962’s Bob Dylan (his first), 1970’s New Morning, and 1989’s Oh Mercy. For bookends, Dylan talks about his entrance into the New York Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960’s and pulls the curtain back on some earlier formative episodes from his Minnesota youth.

Folk powerhouse Dave Von Ronk (pictured here with Suze Rolle and Bob Dylan gets name-checked by Dylan constantly in Chronicles as one of the greatest powerhouses of the Greenwich Village Folk scene. Interestingly, the Coen Brothers used Von Ronk as the partial basis of Llewyn Davis in Inside Llewyn Davis. A movie that feels not just a little influenced by Dylan’s Chronicles.

What’s amazing about the memoir is that Dylan is really trying to communicate something about how to write songs.

It’s not a step by step “how to”. In a weird way, Dylan knows that wouldn’t work. Instead Chronicles Vol 1, especially the parts dealing with Dylan’s very earliest years and the music that inspired and formed him, is more a kind of treasure map. If you read carefully, follow the bread crumbs, there’s a powerful message that hits you like the bell at the end of a brutal three minute round.

Just as many moviemakers watch all kinds of movies, so too did Dylan listen to all kinds of singer-songwriters and songs. Studied them. Broke the songs down. Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Dave Von Ronk. Dylan was drunk in his delirium for the dusty backroads of American music. Blues, sea shanties, protest songs, early rock and roll.

One gets the feeling that Bob Dylan’s brain was a non-stop midnight to six am radio show where the 78’s never stop playing.

Blues master Robert Johnson. Did he sell his soul to the devil or did he just study, practice, and work really hard to develop his own voice?

On top of that, Dylan, who bounced from couch to couch in his restless new to New York days, also outs himself as a voracious reader. It’s no surprise then that in his 2016 Noble Prize for Literature acceptance lecture (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/), Dylan devotes the entirety to breaking down three formative novels-Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. His highlighting of Moby Dick in particular is illuminating. For anyone who has read Herman Melville’s strange powerful novel of the doomed whaling ship Pequod’s pursuit of the mysterious whale Moby Dick, it makes sense that Dylan would be hip to it. Moby Dick bounces around and talks about everything from God to how to make candles to arcane 19th century ship obscurities to sailing routes to indigenous tribal customs…

A great Bob Dylan song feels a little like a three minute Moby Dick sometimes.

In a way, many blown away by Bob Dylan in the last seven decades, paradoxically mystify the man. Dylan feels like he’s been on a kamikaze mission from the beginning to de-mystify what he does. He wants you to know it’s simpler than you thought. This all comes from loving a bunch of different music, he seems to be telling us. Dylan even reveals that many of his early songs are taking old folk melodies, approaches to lyrics from the likes of Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson, and changing things around a bit based on a left-field idea or inspiration.

Not that many or even a select few of us could do it or synthesize it the way Dylan did. That’s where genius comes in and well. . .not to be obvious but if genius could be taught we’d at least have a few more folks these days who’d know how to combat the nuttiness of the world.

But genius, whatever it is, and it is something, comes from somehow fundamentally, intuitively, understanding how to synthesize things into something transcendent. It’s craft plus insight plus that je n'ais c'est quoi plus having the ability to be a radio for the universe with the least static and get out of the way of the message when it’s being received.

While the New Morning and Oh, Mercy sections of Chronicles Vol 1 showcase that Bob Dylan is a true writer whatever he’s talking about (and whether he’s telling us the truth or not about these recordings has been contested by some readers), it really is the early years portions of the book that are revelations.

Iconoclastic singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie whom Dylan visited in the hospital frequently when Dylan arrived in New York.

There are a few singer-songwriters of the last sixty years-Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Prince, Stevie Wonder-who are entire underground oceans of inspiration for moviemakers. It’s not that you can learn how to make a great movie by studying them or their albums too closely. But there is something in HOW they approached music, songwriting, album making that could be of real help to the budding or continuing moviemaker.

This writer made a Spotify playlist of many of the songs Dylan name checked as mind blowers for him when he started out. Whole new ways to write characters, scenes, stories feel hidden in these songs. Dylan understood that. And he’s trying to communicate that to us.

Great singer-songwriters and great moviemakers produce bodies of work that can guide those who came after. You shouldn’t try to make your The Freewheeling Bob Dylan or Highway 61 Revisited or The Basement Tapes or Blood on the Tracks. You hope and try to get to your own voice and trust your own instincts and sense of which direction you should move and make your own things. But the twists and turns and pursuits in those albums can act as lanterns on a dark serpentine mountain road to reveal approaches . And then you see the way. And then you start.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club