| August 31st, 2005 09:00 AM |
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| UGot2Rollme |
courtesy of Yahoo News:
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Bob Dylan's back pages will open wide in the next month as a torrent of retrospective product precedes the PBS premiere of Martin Scorsese's documentary about the celebrated and heretofore inscrutable singer-songwriter.
"No Direction Home," Scorsese's two-part, 3 1/2-hour film, airs September 26-27 as part of the public television network's "American Masters" series. The feature includes revealing new interviews with Dylan and a bounty of rare and unseen historical footage.
Paramount Home Entertainment will issue the film on DVD on September 20, six days before the first airdate; the package's second disc features 45 minutes of additional footage.
Two Dylan albums reached stores Tuesday. Columbia/Legacy's "No Direction Home" soundtrack -- the seventh volume in the label's "Bootleg Series" of archival Dylan releases -- is a two-disc set; 26 of its 28 tracks are previously unreleased. A separate collection, "Live at the Gaslight 1962," will be sold exclusively at Starbucks. These much-bootlegged early performances have never been issued officially.
Right after Labor Day, two Dylan books arrive from Simon & Schuster. "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966," the official companion to the Scorsese film, contains a wealth of memorabilia and a 45-minute CD of vintage and new interviews with the musician. The publisher is simultaneously issuing the paperback edition of "Chronicles Volume One," Dylan's best-selling 2004 memoir.
Coattailing these releases is Capitol/EMI Music Marketing's boxed set "The Band: A Musical History," due September 27. The box includes eight cuts by Dylan and his long-running backup group, two of them hitherto unreleased.
"No Direction Home" is PBS' fall tentpole event. The two-night broadcast, which focuses on Dylan's maelstrom of shape-shifting musical activity from 1961-66, keys a week of '60s-themed programing. Other shows include "Best of the Beatles," a two-part documentary about the Fab Four's early years, seen through the eyes of original drummer Pete Best; "Get Up Stand Up: The Story of Pop Music and Protest," a celebration of "message" music that encompasses Dylan's work; and "The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation," a two-hour look at the decade's political and cultural tumult.
The network has high expectations for the Scorsese film. PBS senior vp programing Jacoba Atlas said: "Very rarely do you see interviews with Bob Dylan. Very rarely do you see this footage. We think it will be a big draw for people who know Bob Dylan but also people who admire the work of Martin Scorsese. . . . We fully expect (it) will bring a great many new viewers to
PBS."
Scorsese's astonishing picture, a kind of intimate epic, is essentially narrated by Dylan himself, who sat for extensive new interviews with his manager and archivist Jeff Rosen. The film focuses on Dylan's mercurial '61-'66 mutation from Woody Guthrie acolyte to uneasy folk-protest icon, from poetic singer-songwriter to chart-topping rock 'n' roll impressionist. A running narrative thread is the musician's tumultuous 1966 world tour with the Band (then known as the Hawks), in which his new electric music was greeted with noisy outrage by folk music fans. It climaxes with Dylan's July 1966 motorcycle accident, which began a period of self-imposed exile.
The feature incorporates a wealth of jaw-dropping footage from Dylan's personal archives and interviews conducted during the past 20 years by Rosen with such witnesses as Joan Baez, Al Kooper, Pete Seeger and the late Allen Ginsberg and Dave Van Ronk.
Co-producer Nigel Sinclair of Spitfire Pictures said that Scorsese -- who was at the top of a shortlist of prospective directors, thanks in large part to his work on the 1978 Band documentary "The Last Waltz," which featured Dylan -- was given free rein to shape his tale. Sinclair said: "We gave Marty all of the material we had and said, 'What would you make of this?' He found the story he wanted to tell and the journey he wanted to make of this."
"American Masters" executive producer Susan Lacy, who pursued Dylan and Rosen for 10 years in the hope of mounting a documentary, said: "I felt incredibly honored to be the first broadcaster approached. . . . We knew it was going to be an original film and a big film that had a lot of components to it."
Like other high-profile PBS music shows such as Ken Burns' "Jazz" (2000) and Scorsese's own "The Blues" (2003), the DVD release will precede any airing of "No Direction Home." Paramount's second disc includes seven full-length Dylan performances from 1963-66 and versions of Dylan songs by Baez, Liam Clancy, Mavis Staples and Maria Muldaur.
Advance retail response for the DVD has been extremely positive, said Chris Saito, vp marketing at Paramount Home Entertainment.
The DVD and the two forthcoming books are being promoted by cards included in Columbia/Legacy's "No Direction Home" soundtrack. The album also will be marketed in 2,000 custom bins for CDs, DVDs and books at major chain outlets.
Legacy Recordings executive vp Jeff Jones said: "We wanted to maximize the opportunities for each of these projects. It's been very much a collaborative effort with all these companies."
Produced by Scorsese, Rosen and Legacy's Steve Berkowitz and Bruce Dickinson, the "No Direction Home" album is a trove of unissued recordings, many of which are not heard in the film. Tracks range from 1959-60 home recordings of the teenage Dylan to a dozen alternate takes from his Columbia sessions. Some of the material is so obscure it has never been bootlegged -- quite a feat, since Dylan is probably the most-bootlegged artist of all time.
"They really went through and researched every single song and tape and looked at each individual album," Jones said. "The idea was to make a record that complements the film, that wouldn't be a literal soundtrack to the film."
Jones said that such major retail chains as Trans World, Tower, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Best Buy have offered "terrific support" for the soundtrack and its partner products.
In addition to selling the "No Direction Home" album, Starbucks, which operates 4,600 coffee outposts in the U.S. and Canada, will exclusively market "Live at the Gaslight 1962" for 18 months. The titles will be positioned in custom spinner racks in the majority of the chain's company-owned stores.
Sony BMG is manufacturing the $13.95 title, which comprises 10 intense live Dylan performances recorded at the Greenwich Village folk mecca. The coffee merchant has paid a premium price for its exclusive; a knowledgeable source said that Starbucks bought 150,000 units of the "Gaslight" album and 150,000 copies of the soundtrack.
Starbucks Entertainment president Ken Lombard said: "We were able to convince both Dylan's management and Sony BMG that this was a perfect project for us. . . . We think (they've) done a terrific job of doing a total Bob Dylan promotion. It will be a win-win for everybody involved."
Simon & Schuster is anticipating huge interest in its two Dylan titles, and is shipping appropriate numbers. "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook" -- a unique interactive collection priced at $45 that includes detachable facsimiles of handwritten lyrics, posters, concert tickets, photos and even a page from Dylan's high school yearbook -- boasts a first printing of 200,000 units.
"Chronicles," which spent five months on the New York Times best-seller list, will bow in a paperback edition of 250,000 copies. Simon & Schuster executive vp/publisher David Rosenthal said of the printing, "It's big, but with 'Chronicles' we have sold close to half a million copies at this point."
Capitol/EMM is hoping that the high beam on Dylan will reflect onto its elaborate Band box. The five-CD, 111-track collection, which also includes a nine-clip DVD, comes packaged in a hardbound book with a cover painting by artist Ed Ruscha and voluminous liner notes by Grammy winner Rob Bowman.
Herb Agner, EMM vp catalog marketing, said the timing of the release -- coinciding with the "No Direction Home" premiere and the flood of Dylan product -- was accidental. "I'd like to say it was by design, but I wouldn't be truthful," he said. "We're happy there's going to be a lot of focus on the bigger picture, and the connection with Dylan is going to shed some light on what we're doing with the Band."
The Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson, who executive produced the boxed set, is seen frequently in footage of the riotously received '66 electric tour in Scorsese's film. He noted with amusement that history has placed those controversial performances in perspective.
"In '66 when we were playing that music, people were flipping out with anger at that music and hated it," Robertson recalled. "Then we're doing it a few years later, and people said, 'This is the real deal, and we knew it all along."'
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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| August 31st, 2005 02:11 PM |
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| ListenToTheLion |
Thanks. |
| August 31st, 2005 03:18 PM |
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| time is on my side |
Thanks for the information |
| August 31st, 2005 03:20 PM |
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| glencar |
I gotta get around to reading "Chronicles"... |
| August 31st, 2005 03:23 PM |
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| time is on my side |
quote:
glencar wrote:
I gotta get around to reading "Chronicles"...
Great read- strongly recommended. You don't have to be a Dylan fan to enjoy it. It's also a quick read if your pressed for TIME.
[Edited by time is on my side] |
| August 31st, 2005 03:25 PM |
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| glencar |
I post here 10 hours a day. I have time to read it. Just have to summon up the interest... |
| August 31st, 2005 03:54 PM |
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| GimmeExile |
Interesting how the DVD comes out before the PBS broadcast...and you get 45 extra minutes of footage. I just picked up the No Direction Home soundtrack yesterday. |
| August 31st, 2005 04:10 PM |
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| Gazza |
to the best of my knowledge the DVD of "No Direction Home" comes out shortly after the film is shown on TV (well, it does here, anyway - the DVD release is October 3rd..in the US it seems to be different)
..and thats not all
http://bobdylan.com/ndh.html
If you buy the soundtrack and the scrapbook, you get an exclusive 6-track CD taken from Bob's 1963 Carnegie Hall show (some of this show, taped for an unreleased live Columbia album, has been released on Bootleg Series Vol. 1 and has appeared on various bootlegs, but the songs on THIS Cd have not, to my knowledge, previously even been bootlegged)
"Uncut" reviewed the movie (and the album) in its new issue and raved about it. The album isnt a soundtrack to the movie as such, but more of a companion piece to it as it features material that wouldnt have been filmed.
So next Monday, I have new releases by all three of my favourite artists. The Stones, Dylan plus the Springsteen "Storytellers" DVD. To be honest theres so much Dylan stuff being released or broadcast in the next few weeks that I'm genuinely finding it hard to keep track of it
[Edited by Gazza] |
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