End of All Music hosted a special screening of a curated selection of archival Bob Dylan footage titled “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center” on March 25. The screening, held at The Lyric, was followed by a Q&A between rock historian and podcaster Elizabeth Nelson and Bob Dylan Center Director Steven Jenkins.
The local music store organized the event with the help of Southern Methodist University-based literary magazine Southern Review. While the crowd was light on University of Mississippi students, the event brought together an enthusiastic crowd of Dylan fans from across Mississippi.
Jenkins introduced the documentary after a brief welcome describing the film as “Dylan in all his glory over a 50 year period.” The film stitches together 12 clips of Dylan, with the earliest ones hailing from the late 1950s through performances from as late as 2016.
The first clip features musician Tony Glover discussing a song of Dylan’s featured in a documentary called “Autopsy on Operation Abolition.” The documentary was made as a rebuttal to the McCarthy-era propaganda documentary “Operation Abolition” made by the U.S. House of Representatives’ un-American activities committee. The then-teenaged Dylan’s voice can be heard playing over the “Autopsy on Operation Abolition” opening credits in one of the first-ever recordings of a Dylan song.
One of the standout segments included footage from the live performance of “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in Newport, R.I., where Dylan famously went electric. The footage captures scattered applause before a steadily rising tide of boos and jeers.
“It’s totally punk rock,” Jenkins said about the Newport performance. “It’s like the Lou Reed thing where if you can get away with one chord, great. Two chords, okay. Three chords, what is that, jazz? And Dylan just locked in on electric rhythms. We can name our favorite guitar heroes, but no one has quite gotten that incendiary reaction that he got on that stage.”
The Bob Dylan Center is located in Tulsa, Okla., and houses an archive of over 100,000 items from Dylan’s career. A curated selection of these items are put on exhibit within the center, with the remainder of the archive being accessible by appointment. According to the center’s website, its mission is to “educate, motivate and inspire” people to create.
The films can be viewed at the Bob Dylan Center along with an entire multimedia library of Dylan-related items.
Maude Schuyler Clay of Sumner, Miss., attended the event as a lifelong Bob Dylan fan.
“These films are just priceless,” Clay said. “We went to the (Bob Dylan) Center when it opened in 2022. They have books, films and even some of his sculptures. … We’re Bob Dylan groupies.”
For Jenkins, the event served as a worthwhile outreach opportunity with a great soundtrack.
“It’s just always a pleasure to take the show on the road with this film program,” Jenkins said in an interview with The Daily Mississippian. “It’s great to get out and show these clips just so that audiences can see them. If folks are enticed to come visit the center as a result of getting a taste of the kinds of programming we have, that’s terrific, too.”
The event was also a success for End of All Music. Store owner David Swider expressed his excitement about Dylan-centered events happening in Oxford.
“I think Oxford should always have this kind of stuff going on,” Swider said. “It’s a testament to what the record store has always tried to do and what the town historically has done to bring events like this here, because Oxford is artistic and progressive and literary and these are the events that continue that legacy. Dylan is the pinnacle of artistic achievement as far as American artists go, so it’s sort of no-brainer, like, ‘Let’s bring the Bob Dylan Center to town.’”
