Bob Dylan

I can't wait to see the Todd Haynes film, I'm Not There. It's due to be screened at the London Film Festival this week, and it won't go on general release until Christmas, so I'll have to be patient. It's hard to describe, and I'm not going to try until I've seen it, but basically, six actors (I think it's six), portray Dylan at various stages of his career. Only they aren't called Dylan in the film. See what I mean?
I'm looking forward to seeing it because, as I think I've mentioned before, Dylan has played a major part in my life. My earliest memory of him is of hearing Tambourine Man and Blowing in the Wind and becoming hooked; buying a book of sheet music of his songs, and sitting in the front room (I was in my early-mid teens and had been learning the piano since I was seven), and doggedly playing the songs, singing them to myself. I'd never actually heard any of them, as we didn't have a record player then.
I can remember hearing Like a Rolling Stone on Radio London for the first time, one of the pirate stations, to which I listened obsessively - was it 1965? It's hard, now to conjure up a time when Dylan was new, hadn't been analysed to extinction. He was hard - wrote lyrics of a kind nobody had ever written before, and sang them with a passionate menace that was thrilling in the extreme to a teenager who was just beginning to become aware that the world was changing in ways that were only dimly becoming understood. Certainly not by my parents generation. That line - 'something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones', summed up how I was starting to feel about the world. We, the younger generation, were in possession of the world - there were more of us than them, our lives hadn't been blighted by having to fight in a war, and somehow, we felt we were in possession of a secret knowledge - we knew more than they did. I suppose it was our education, something denied to our parents, that gave us the key to all this, but Dylan spoke to us and articulated what was in our heads. HIs appearance in Don't Look Back, which I saw in about 1968, said it all. He treated people in suits with contempt - all the time he seemed in possession of a secret. It was revelatory.
So I'm looking forward with enormous anticipation to I'm Not There: I'll post more when I've seen it.