A Few of My Favorite Things: Bob Dylan by Richard Avedon

Bob Dylan in Central Park, 1965 by Richard Avedon

I finally watched Don’t Look Back, the cinema vérité documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. It’s a fairly fascinating glimpse at the in turns surly, sarcastic, and earnest young artist. He meets Donovan, Joan Baez is there and then she is not, two British schoolgirls stand on the street outside his hotel, sighing, “Isn’t he lovely?” when they catch a glimpse of him; he challenges a frankly befuddled writer for Time magazine, he gets into a drunken, high argument about someone throwing glass in the street; he gets called an anarchist. He is thin as a rail, a waif of a man, with hollow cheeks, surely the result of amphetamines, and in every hotel room, the framed illustrations of birds are crooked in exactly the same way.

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