“Stepping into the Unknown” features rare and previously unreleased footage and special live performances
STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN: FILMS FROM THE BOB DYLAN CENTER
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday, September 2, $15-$17, 7:00
paristheaternyc.com
bobdylancenter.com
My first Bob Dylan show was in September 1978 at the Nassau Coliseum. At one point relatively early on, I could see that my best friend was looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know any of these songs,” he said. “When is he going to play ‘Tangled Up in Blue’?” I hesitated before telling him, “Um, he just played that.”
I’ve since seen Dylan — with whom I share a birthday — about twenty times, with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Forest Hills, the Beacon, and the Jones Beach Theater, with such opening acts as Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, and Lucinda Williams. I camped outside overnight to get tickets to the 1992 Bobfest at the Garden. I was at the 2012 Prospect Park concert where he shared a brief memory about having once lived nearby in Brooklyn. “He knows where he is!” I called out.
During the pandemic, I watched Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, his mysterious concert film that had a wild live chat, questioning just about everything we were seeing and hearing. I devoured his 2005 memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, glorying in the vastly entertaining fictionalization of stories from his life (while understanding that just because he called it Volume 1 didn’t mean there would be a Volume 2). I was impressed by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown and tried not to let all the factual inaccuracies get in the way of a good movie. I can’t hear “A Hard Rain’s a‐Gonna Fall” without remembering the excitement I felt watching the 1976 Hard Rain film on NBC documenting the Rolling Thunder Revue. Heck, I once let the nails of my thumbs grow ridiculously long because Bob’s were like that on the cover of the 1978 tour book.
And then there are the shows on Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, in which he constantly reinvents songs, sometimes making them all but unrecognizable. He stands back from the stage, wearing a hat or a hoodie, in low lighting so his face is hard to see. He doesn’t allow any video or photography and he rarely speaks to the audience except for announcing his band, which lately has been changing without explanation. At every concert, a handful of the uninitiated leave when they realize he’s not going to play many of his most famous songs, and when he does they sound very different. But we faithful love every twist and turn, following the master’s superb vocal phrasings and precise enunciations emanating from his raspier and raspier voice.
Which brings us to the Bob Dylan Center (BDC), his archive that opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 2022. Why Tulsa? One answer is because it’s Dylan, so why ask. But Dylan himself said, “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure. But I’m from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland.”
On September 2, the Bob Dylan Archive comes to the Paris Theater for the special program “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center.” The event, presented by BDC director Steven Jenkins, will feature rare and previously unreleased material and will be followed by a Q&A and a live solo-electric performance by jazz guitarist extraordinaire Bill Frisell, who has recorded several Dylan songs and recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by playing a show at BDC that included tunes by Dylan and Woody Guthrie.
“Stepping into the Unknown” is part of the Paris Theater’s annual “Big & Loud” series, consisting of 70mm screenings and 4K restorations of more than forty classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Elevator to the Gallows to Fight Club and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with such special guests as Sofia Coppola and Isabella Rossellini.
You can also catch “Stepping into the Unknown” on September 1 at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, followed by a Q&A with Jenkins and a performance by Steve Wynn from the Dream Syndicate and the Baseball Project, and on September 3 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville with a Jenkins Q&A and a performance by Traveling Medicine Man with Luke Havranek.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]