Bob Dylan in "Odds and Ends," The Movie

A Conceptual Compilation Now on PBS Passport

The other night I was looking to see what serial killer show I could binge on: I'm studying how to perform autopsies from TV. Scouting the PBS Passport app, I saw Dylan's Shadow Kingdom music film available. I've seen it twice, posted about it twice, but I clicked on it anyway. Revealed: a Shadow Kingdom supplemental package, listed as "episodes."

Under this rubric, Passport subscribers can watch The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, which I saw at Madison Square Garden in 1992. The concert was in recognition of the 30th anniversary of his debut for Columbia Records, with other artists performing Dylan material. My favorite moment in that show was Lou Reed performing "Foot of Pride." Never, I thought, have a singer and song been so well matched. Another episode on PBS has Dylan's MTV Unplugged, a 72-minute 1994 show, in which the artist and audience were considerably less in sync.

And then there is Odds and Ends. PBS says it is "composed of archival interviews, promotional videos and documentary shorts. It tells the stories of some of the most important moments in the legendary artist's career." It's also got some gags, weird, funny, segments, intermezzos between chapters that focus on individual Dylan albums, most from the “Bootleg” series. Director credits at IMDB go to John Hillcoat, and to Jennifer Lebeau, who also gets writer credit.

The film's best gag is an apparently real promotion called "Stick With Mono" from 2010. The four minute spot is on You Tube:

The promotional film features a white-coated "scientist," in the mode of 1950s anti-drug and sexual abstinence videos, warning kids about how stereo, "by introducing deceptive patterns into the adolescent mind, plays havoc with the still developing tissue of the teenage brain." I must have missed this real life 2010 release of Dylan’s mono recordings.

I was hooked from the start by the character actor who played "Roy Silver," who looked like a rotund version of Groucho Marx, until I realized Roy Silver was a real person, and a character with some claim to being Dylan's first "manager" in Greenwich Village. Silver's ingratiating tales about Dylan's earliest days take us back to the recording of the acetate of "Blowin in the Wind," which led to a song publishing contract with music biz zelig Artie Mogull at M. Witmark & Sons, a sheet music firm started in the 19th century that was bought by Warner Brothers Music in 1929. Silver, who died of brain cancer in 2003 (Mogull died a year later, in 2004), was a voluble storyteller, who says he sold his management interest in Dylan to Albert Grossman, circa 1962 for $10,000. Silver went on to manage Tiny Tim and Bill Cosby, and in Los Angeles opened a well-known Chinese restaurant and music business hangout called Roy's on Sunset Blvd. Dylan, at the beginning of this film, makes a brief appearance to describe Silver as "a kind of fast talker, a hustler," lines quoted in the booklet for The Witmark Demos 1962-1964, The Bootleg Series Vol. 9. Artie Mogull's quotes in the film about Dylan are also verbatim from those liner notes.

Having worked at CBS Records my first job after college, from 1972-1974, I interviewed the new Columbia Records president Irwin Segelstein, who appears in the film, in his first days at work after the 1973 Clive Davis putsch. (The closed captioning totally gets Irwin's name wrong.) I enjoyed seeing the much missed Don DeVito (he died in 2011 at 72), Dylan's in-house pal and producer of some of his live albums and Street-Legal, rhapsodizing about merchandising for Blood on the Tracks. DeVito, at the time of this odds-and-end, was National Director of Merchandising, and his enthusiasm is contagious, whether you care that Buddy Cage of New Riders of the Purple Sage is on the record or not. The New Riders were also a Columbia band. A company man with real passion for both the company and its music, DeVito is credited with bringing Dylan back to Columbia after the brief flirtation with Asylum for Planet Waves and a live album with The Band. I recognized the visual and script style known as "CBS Records Convention" filmmaking. I loved the added elements of Scorsese and Godard and what seem like Monty Python for palate-cleansers.

These are the kind of films rarely seen outside of conventions and marketing meetings. They existed to rally the troops--the marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, and yes, merchandising teams, to get out and promote and sell Bob Dylan albums. The film also operates as a kind of samizdat history of the various editions of The Basement Tapes, which really hit cultural mach one with a bootleg album The Great White Wonder in 1968.  Greil Marcus (Substack: “Letter in the Ether”) describes his acquisition of the cassette version as the equivalent of a drug deal. Go into the Rolling Stone magazine archives and read Jerry Hopkins story about the paranoia of the anonymous distributors and sellers of The Great White Wonder in Los Angeles record stores at the time.

I take it that these interviews in the movie, of Marcus, Clinton Heylin, and Sid Griffin, formerly of the Long Ryders and noted Dylanista, came from a 25 minute promotional video for the 2014 official Columbia release of the six-CD "Bootleg Series, Volume 11," which Ed Newman of Duluth, Minn., featured on his Blogger blog, Ennyman's Territory, on May 22, 2016.

This was many years after Columbia released the album The Basement Tapes, a two LP set of selections from those informal sessions. These had been bootleged so often that even the passingly familiar knew they represented just a small slice of what Dylan and members of The Band had recorded in their little pink clubhouse known as Big Pink in West Saugerties, N.Y. Dylan was recuperating from the draining spring 1966 tour of Europe, in which he was frequently booed for being something other than what audience members had in their minds of who Dylan should be and what kind of music they wanted to hear from him. There are interesting recollections about the chaos of that tour by its sound engineer, Richard Alderson. "The audiences were hostile, and [Dylan and the Band] responded by playing more aggressively." It's worth remembering that in 1966, the rock touring industry was in its infancy, and, Alderson said, there was "no theory on how you mic an electric band."  Paris was a disaster: Alderson said the audience thought "we were a bunch of fascist warmongers," and Dylan pushed back by spending 20 minutes tuning his guitar. Alderson notes that the band's sound and fury was also propelled by the aggro drumming of Mickey Jones, who joined Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson on that tour (Live 1966, The Bootleg Series Vol. 4).

There are trips led by Bob Egan of Popspots.com, to the Manhattan scenes of Dylan album cover shots, with photographers Daniel Kramer and Jerry Schatzberg. Kramer tells us it's Bob Neuwirth holding a camera by the strap  in the background on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. Schatzberg says his cover shot of Blonde on Blonde was slightly out of focus not to send some psychedelic message but because it was freezing cold in the meatpacking district that day.

There is a noir-ish music video likely made in 2015 by Hilllcoat to "Visions of Johanna," made for The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 . This is the one with alternate takes and rehearsals from the Big Three: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Penn Jillette does the voiceover for this section. It's a fun watch.