Withdrawal Symptoms

Well, a week on, and you might be suffering some Bob Dylan withdrawal symptoms. But if you really want to Jones for the Dylan, consider this.

Though he was undoubtedly the coolest person on the planet in 1965-66, for the definitive troubadour, as I mentioned before, the Dylan in 1975 can't be beat. There was something about what he did for the first part of the Rolling Thunder Revue that had a kind of magic to it, and in many ways he treated it as the antidote to the hyperbole created by his tours with The Band in 1966 and 1974.

As the booklet to the 1975 Bootleg Series puts it, the 1974 tour was too loud and intense for Dylan, and he wanted to do something different. You'll read over and over again that Dylan is an enigma, but as I was saying to Andrew the other day, some of the things he's done in his career give the lie to that. The documentary that was on last week, for a start; and his memoirs; and the fact that he made a 4-hour film in which he dramatised, among other things, the breakup of his marriage. Privacy? On Desire he sings "Sara," a farewell to his first wife. And he did that other thing that I haven't watched yet, Masked and Anonymous; and he has made himself endlessly available on the Never Ending Tour.

If you need any more evidence that the Emperor of Rock Critics, Greil Marcus, has no clothes, you only need to consider this. Not only did Marcus slag off Street Legal, which (apart from the saxophone) isn't all that bad, but he also slagged off Desire, which is superb, and - famously - Self Portrait, which is wonderful.

Renaldo and Clara, like Masked and Anonymous, was a self-indulgent, sprawling curate's egg of a film. The Dylan is a genius songwriter and performer, but a director/editor he is not. So sue him. Renaldo and Clara features the absolute best concert footage of Dylan ever filmed - and some of his most incredible live performances. As an artist, he has clearly always just wanted to communicate with his fans, and I think he felt that the big arenas played in 1974 were too large and impersonal. So he set up Rolling Thunder to be a kind of travelling tent show, booking venues under an alias, and then publicising the concerts a week in advance in much the same way that "dance parties" and nightclubs publicise themselves - handing out leaflets to students, stuff like that.

The anecdote frequently told about the recruitment of violinist Scarlet Rivera is illustrative of the vibe. Dylan was about to record the songs of Desire, and he was basically just driving round New York City in a taxi looking for musicians. he spotted Ms Rivera on a street corner, carrying a violin case. He wound down the window, asked if she could play it, and when she answered in the affirmative, he said, like something out of one of the songs on the record, "Hop in."

The shows on the early part of the tour had an unrehearsed, spontaneous feel - mainly because that's what they were. Joan Baez, who was on the tour, has admitted that - to begin with - she would play her guitar really quietly, because she never quite knew what the Dylan was going to do. In the Scorsese documentary, we were left with the impression that Dylan dumped her and that she'd been living with that ever since. But 10 years later, she toured with him again, they performed on stage, and she's in the film.

The dramatised scenes in the film are nonsensical, though you can't help being fascinated. But what Sony and the Dylan really, really, need to do, is release all the concert footage. The 1975 Bootleg Series came with a DVD which had two performances on it: "Tangled Up in Blue" - which features just Dylan's face (inc. whiteface make-up) - and "Isis", which is only 3/4 of a performance really, showing Dylan performing without a protective guitar, shuffling around on the stage like some weird old man (he was - what? - 34?). The bits where you see his blue eyes shine out from the shadows beneath the brim of his hat are visually stunning. More than anything, you see on film what people are going on about when they talk of Dylan as an amazing and charismatic performer.

You saw bits of it in the Scorsese docu, but you also saw him looking drunk/stoned/bored, suffering under a barrage of catcalls or performing to an indifferent audience with their arms folded across their chests.

in 1975, he was already long-vindicated, connecting with his audience in a more intimate way, and putting on a show like no other. At 34, he was at the absolute peak of his powers, playing out in public the personal crisis that would see him convert to Christianity by the end of the decade. Renaldo and Clara, though uneven, was also unfairly dismissed by the blinkered critics of the time (it was released in 1978), who were probably comparing him to Debbie Harry and the Clash. Self-indulgent 4-hour films were just not fashionable in 1978.

The great fear I have - evidenced by the missing beginning of "Isis" on the DVD - is that, like the footage of many of these things (like The Who's The Kids Are Alright, for example) Renaldo and Clara has been allowed to rot away in someone's shed - which is why it's never been put out on DVD. There was even a 90 minute edit (mainly concert footage), which would be lovely to see again. But - you know it, don't you? - that the film footage of the most vivid performances of the most exceptional songwriter and performer of modern times has probably been allowed to decay into celluloid soup.

Please tell me I'm wrong about this.