Bob Dylan Video Goodness

Mark Octo­ber 1 on your cal­en­dar. That’s when Bob Dylan will release a new box set of his “great­est songs.” Now, cut over to the web­site designed to mar­ket the album, and you’ll find a cou­ple notable pieces of video. First up, you can watch the video that accom­pa­nies Mark Ron­son’s remix­ing of “Most Like­ly You Will Go Your Way (& I’ll Go Mine).” (Watch it on the web­site here or on YouTube here.) It’s appar­ent­ly the first time Dylan has allowed a remix of any of his songs, and the song has been get­ting some air­play this week.

And then there is this video con­cept. Back in 1967, D. A. Pen­nebak­er released Don’t Look Back, a well-known doc­u­men­tary that cov­ered Dylan’s first tour of Eng­land in 1965. The open­ing seg­ment of the film has Dylan stand­ing in an alley, flip­ping through cards inscribed with lyrics from Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues. (Also the beat poet Allen Gins­berg looms in the back­ground. We’ve includ­ed the orig­i­nal video below.) Now, I’m men­tion­ing this because the afore­men­tioned web­site lets you re-work this video seg­ment. Click here and you can re-write the cards that Dylan flips through, and then watch your edit­ed ver­sion. It’s anoth­er form of re-mix­ing, I guess.

Last­ly, I want to direct your atten­tion to the trove of videos that Google put togeth­er back when Google Video was a real liv­ing, breath­ing thing. Cre­at­ed to coin­cide with the release of Dylan’s last stu­dio album, Mod­ern Times (2006), this col­lec­tion lets you watch 11 videos in total, rang­ing from unre­leased footage from D. A. Pen­nebak­er’s Don’t Look Back, to Dylan’s appear­ance on The John­ny Cash Show, to his per­for­mance of “Dig­ni­ty” on MTV’s Unplugged. Good stuff, to be sure.