I came to Bob Dylan late. It wasn't that I heard and dismissed him, but rather than I started paying attention to popular music at the worst possible time for Dylan. It was the late 1970s, and he didn't have much of a presence on the radio, which was my only real musical vessel. The first time I remember seeing any critical reaction to his work, it was when I was in high school, just starting to read Rolling Stone religiously. There, I read Anthony DeCurtis' review of Knocked Out Loaded. I remember it being more harsh than it really is, though with passages like this -- "Still, Knocked Out Loaded is ultimately a depressing affair, because its slipshod, patchwork nature suggests that Dylan released this LP, not because he had anything in particular to say, but to cash in on his 1986 tour" -- my 20-year-old recollection can be forgiven. Regardless, there was nothing compelling me to check him out.

Somewhere along the way I began to explore. I picked up some LPs discarded by the local used record shop deemed too worn for resale by just right for me, scoring Bringing it All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. The Biograph box came next, even though I wasn't really ready for it's odd mix of rarities and album tracks. Eventually, I assembled what came to be a pretty respectable Dylan collection. Because I found myself suddenly smitten and wanting to fully immerse myself, I acquired everything at once. From the early protest singer to the wizened blues croaker, the wild mercury stage stalker to the whiteface put-on. I traded for bootlegs and downloaded more, thus I often heard outtakes before the released versions. It was an odd way to go, but it fed a desire to experience it all now.

I reminisce because I finally got around to watching Todd Haynes excellent film, "I'm Not There." The format is well known by now: Six actors portray six facets of Dylan, though none answer to that name and only a few are made to resemble the singer. Still, it's a bracing film that has made me think more analytically about Dylan than anything else I've encountered in my relatively short time as a fan. In a DVD extra mini-doc about the making of the film, Haynes said he wanted the actors to not offer an outward portrayal, but rather to capture something within. The collage created by these performances isn't any closer to being Dylan than anything else that isn't the man himself, but it does put one in a frame of mind that makes his contemplation more powerful and more meaningful. Even more than relatively contemporaneous options -- Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home," Dylan's own flawed "Masked and Anonymous" or the reissued "Don't Look Back" -- it gives you an empathetic shot at understanding what it is like to be Dylan. Perhaps only the singer's own words in the memoir Chronicles compares.

The most striking thing about the film is how it portrays Dylan's protean nature, his seeming need to change. Most performers can and do make an entire career out of a particular sound or stance or look, but Dylan made his by constantly evolving. Some of these iterations, in hindsight, did him no favors, but they all became part of the tapestry of his career. Now he adds to the visual arts aspect of his work. His new paintings, gathered in the "Drawn Blank Series," offer yet another facet of his talent. I'm no visual arts critic, simply knowing what I like, but the work is appealing. Some veers toward the amateurish, but most of it feels assured and does nothing to tarnish his reputation. As British critic Mark Hudson writes, "[S]urely the fiercely cantankerous intelligence that produced 'Like a Rolling Stone' wouldn't allow anything into the public gaze that would compromise his carefully developed mystique."

I've been making my way through the exhibition catalog, and it's a fascinating look at another side of Dylan's talent. If I had $7,500 lying around, I probably would buy a print. Instead I'll content myself with the library's copy of the catalog and keep watching, listening and reading, content knowing I'll never fully understand or comprehend everything Dylan is, but that I'll do just enough of both to remain endlessly entertained as I keep trying.

Labels: Bob Dylan