BOB DYLAN'S Indian Birthday

D814 SQUASHED CHAPATIS, LADDU...

First shown on BBC Four on 21 May 2008, this 39 minute documentary tells the unlikely tale of a festival held annually in Shillong, Meghalaya, north-eastern India to celebrate BD's birthday. Here from BBC correspondent Soutik Biswas is some entertaining, informative and just slightly reworked background copy:

DYLAN'S LEGACY IN SAFE HANDS

24 May 2006: it's late in the evening and the music of Bob Dylan is pouring through a nondescript hall in Shillong. On stage, Lou Majaw, the hill town's premier rocker-poet-troubadour, is belting out Dylan standards - a ritual he's been faithfully performing on the singer's birthday for the last 34 years. It all began sometime in 1972 when Majaw began a folk festival to "honour Dylan" at a small auditorium. A few years earlier he had been converted to the legend after hearing the seminal Dylan album Freewheelin'. Since then, the Dylan-fest has played out every 24 May in homes, parks and halls, the set-list regulation '60s/'70s edgy, angry Dylan. "His songs lit up my life and gave it a lot of meaning," says Majaw, "though his new stuff doesn't touch me as much." But that's no reason at all for the 59-year-old rocker they call Shillong's Dylan to stop paying annual obeisance to his idol.

Little Dylan

"Happy birthday, Bob Dylan, wherever you are! God bless you!" he tells the few hundred-strong audience at a gig part NGO-sponsored to help raise HIV/Aids awareness. On stage, Majaw, in impossibly tight, frayed denim shorts, yellow socks, white sneakers, speckled tee shirt and long greying hair flowing down to his shoulders, is the antithesis of frail, diminutive, low energy, near stoic Dylan. Majaw is like a '60s voodoo child, a cross between Angus Young and James Brown, relentlessly stalking his musicians, shaking his head, dancing like a rock 'n' roll dervish, all the while singing the legendary troubadour's classics.


Lou Majaw

As he launches into a surprisingly ferocious version of Forever Young, a three-year-old in the audience cries Papa! Majaw doffs his tambourine to the son he fondly calls Little Dylan. "One day," he says, "I hope Little Dylan will come up and play with me."

Timeless anthems

There's an impressive number of out-of-town performers supporting the fest this year. Father and son duo Anjan and Neel Dutta from Calcutta sing acoustic versions of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and Mr Tambourine Man, the latter's guitar tinged with a hint of Indian folk. Anjan acts in Bengali films, makes English films and sings both Bengali rock and Dylan. Son Neel listens to Buddy Guy and BB King and plays everything. There's the brilliant Liz Cotton, a Delhi-based English singer who raises the roof with I Shall Be Released and Mozambique. Then, as the lights go down, Majaw and his old boys appear, looking more like a band promising to belt out heavy metal rather than timeless anthems. But they run effortlessly through the Essential Dylan songbook, closing another noisy and heartfelt tribute to the singer with a long, languid version of Knockin' On Heaven's Door that might leave even its author astonished. Majaw hopes that someday the legend will grace the occasion. There have been attempts to get through to his management, but to no avail. "I'd love to see Dylan come here," he says, "not as a performer, but as an observer, to check out what we do to keep his legacy alive."

Blown away

Majaw's fateful tryst with Dylan's music began with listening to rock 'n' roll while growing up in a "poor family" in the hills. There was no radio in the family home, nor a guitar. Young Lou would hear Bill Haley and Elvis Presley on friends' radios and strum a solitary guitar in school when it was his turn. And then Bob Dylan happened - he was, he says, "blown away". After playing in groups with names like Dynamite Boys, Oracle Bones, Supersound Factory and Blood and Thunder working smoky Calcutta bar-rooms, Majaw returned home to his obsession. "I am happy in my little kingdom," he says, cuddling Little Dylan.


With Little Dylan

It helps that his kingdom - a once-pretty hill town now home to more than a quarter of a million people - is one of India’s most rock-mad places. Outside it's a balmy night when the rituals end. There are no takers for the Dylan look-alike contest and a young girl attending the fest with her father wins an expensive watch in a lucky draw for sharing her birthday with the legend. Though the show doesn't sell out, it must go on. Next day, a local paper covers the event on its front page. "Some songs were so charged with emotion," it reports, "as to wet eyes in the auditorium with tears." Dylan's legacy is in safe hands in Shillong.

Sad to say, that bit of jobbing copy, slight as it may be, tells you more about Lou Majaw and stakes a better claim to your attention than the rambling, superficial and unsatisfying D814. Bob Dylan's (Indian) Birthday shows us glimpses of Majaw through the five years from May 2001 (Bob's 60th birthday) to May 2006 (his 65th). We learn that Lou's band is called The Ace Of Spades, his wife/ex-wife Tina and young son Christopher Dylan. Lots of time is wasted in transit, backstage and in family homes showing us nothing much at all, with Lou himself coming across as an amiable but talent-free chancer. Though you might expect a doc such as this to include a few context-setting clips of archive D footage, there's not a frame to be seen - presumably because their use costs money and this programme has a distinct air of being slapped together - bad TV, filler TV - on the cheap. Neither can Majaw's interpretations, which amount to a decidedly left-handed "tribute", be recommended. Having said that, the story being told here does hold potential interest - what a shame, then, that the act of its telling manages to squander it in so prodigal a fashion. For has Bob's seed ever sprouted to take tenuous root and shyly bloom in a more unlikely place?

Unlikely? Well, consider. Kristin Scott Thomas was born on 24 May (1960); so too - beauty and the beast - was Eric Cantona (1966). Queen Victoria (Empress of India) was born on 24 May 1819 - and for Lou Majaw to commemorate the birthday of any one of them (yes, even the last) or even all three together, would make as much sense as the outlandish reality. But then when did life ever make sense? Indeed, it's the absurdities and incongruities that, for us lucky ones, make it what it mostly is. Such as? Such as the 67 year old grandpa who trolls compulsively round the world laying mystical benedictions on crowds of devoted strangers drawn, helpless, moth to flame, by his aura.

I think of myself … as a song and dance man (BD, 1965)
Cott: You can't really dance to … your songs. D: I couldn't (1977)

I [still see in him only] a youth of mediocre talent (Ewan MacColl, 1965)
The audience acted as if they were going [to] church (tour manager Fred Perry, 1965)

Dylan is the greatest living poet (Van Morrison, 1986)
I was always a singer and maybe no more than that (Jack Fate, 2003)

It … makes me furious sometimes, how good his lyrics are (Dave Matthews, 1999)
I'm just … plying a trade (BD, 2008)

Such as otherwise sane folks being moved to whoop and squeal with delight at the sight of said grandpa picking up (never mind playing, no matter how aberrantly) a harmonica.

No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us … I once asked him [to tell me how he wrote] all those beautiful songs. [He said] … I've only ever written four songs in my whole life, but I've written those four songs a million times. (John Mellencamp, 2004)

Bob Dylan is to American music what Picasso was to art, T.S. Eliot was to poetry and Martin Luther was to theology: a true reformer. (C S Nielsen, 2008)

We're selling something different besides soap. We don't even buy soap! (BD, 1963)
[All] I've … known to be right has been proven wrong
I'll be drifting along (BD, 2006)

Truth is on many levels (Renaldo, 1975)

Sure - except there's no truth. West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar, from Tokyo to the British Isles, in Newton-le-Willows, Strathaven, Culemborg, München, Hylton Manor, Kristiansund, Bourdettes and Finchley, in Reed City, Lodeve, Ferndale and Lydney, Drogheda, Emerald, Seoul and Okayama - even, it seems, in Shillong, north-east India - there's only Bob.

THANKS Garryd and Massimo
STARS Disappointing fare, under-cooked and insubstantial. Two.

Bob Dylan’s Indian Birthday: Imitation is the highest form of flattery

BBC Four Documentary
Storyville: Bob Dylan’s Indian Birthday
Broadcast: BBC Four, May 21st 2008, 10pm
PAL 16x9, Running Time 38:54
Menu with Chapters at Key points
Captured from Broadcast, transferred and authored by JTT, May 2008


Bob Dylan’s birthday on May 24 is celebrated in many different ways around the globe but perhaps the most unlikely and idiosyncratic of these celebrations is an annual festival held in the North-Eastern Indian town of Shillong – the “rock music capital of India.” Organized by a local musician and lifelong Dylan fan, Lou Majaw, known as “the Bob Dylan of Shillong”, the celebrations include prizes for people who share the same birthday as Dylan, a Bob Dylan look-alike contest, and most importantly, performances of Dylan material by Majaw and his band at local schools and clubs.

Lou Majaw heard his first Bob Dylan song in 1966 and it changed his life. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” he says, “was magic”, and it made him a Dylan disciple. “I definitely want that magic which happened to me, you know, it should happen to other people as well. People must get to hear him, to know him.” With this in mind, Majaw helped inaugurate an evening of Bob Dylan’s music in Shillong in 1972 and over 30 years later he is still touring with his Dylan show and throwing an annual birthday party in Shillong for his idol. “This” says Majaw, “is my way of saying thank you to him [Dylan] for what he has given to the world.”

This documentary features interviews with Majaw and covers several years of the festival and the tour – organization, band rehearsals, traveling, appearances at local schools and club performances, culminating in the very special series of shows he put on for Dylan’s 60th birthday. It also documents the effects of a rock & roll lifestyle on Majaw’s private life. Majaw performs Dylan songs with passion; what he lacks in musical technique he makes up with dedication and seemingly boundless enthusiasm.

As a day-job, Majaw also teaches children about Bob Dylan’s music in Shillong’s public schools. Indeed, two of the most endearing and enjoyable segments of the film are in the schools – Majaw leading a sing-a-long of Forever Young with a hall full of schoolgirls wishing Bob Dylan a happy birthday and a lunchtime playground concert to celebrate the end of exams with Majaw and band in full flight, roaring Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 to a yard full of screaming girls all shouting the chorus whilst a smiling principal claps along!

Comment: Majaw comments that in the beginning only a few people were interested but over the years people have become more and more interested in Dylan’s music. Commentators in Indian newspapers echo this observation and equate the interest in more serious Western popular music like Dylan’s with the rise of a subset of Westernized Indians who feel alienated from the essentially commercial pop music culture and turn to the music of the sixties for “authenticity and meaning and something that speaks to their deeper impulses.”

Interestingly, some Dylan fans in India, equate Dylan’s work with an ancient tradition of Bengali mystics and troubadours that is still active today, called Bauls. The poet Rabindranath Tagore was greatly influenced by the Baul tradition and based some of his poems on Baul structures and themes. The religious pluralism of the Bauls resists easy classification but basically their songs celebrate divine love in very earthy terms and champion the individual quest for God/love/truth/beauty through music, dance, and poetry.

According to writer Hitesh Hathi, for some in India the Bauls have the same lyrical ethos as Dylan:

They sing songs, kind of existential songs about the condition of man. But also songs that protest the basic hypocrisy of human life and its political and sociological arrangements, and ask you to look for a world beyond that kind of hypocrisy. And especially in eastern India in the area around Calcutta where these Bauls are particularly popular, that connection has always been powerful for Indians. You know people always say, “Oh Dylan he’s so influenced by the Bauls.

Thanks: Massimo

Stars: This is a difficult disk to rate. It’s certainly not for everybody but if you have an interest in both India and Dylan obsession then it is an enjoyable watch. It is in some ways comparable to D642 A Visit to the Dylan Shrine, in terms of the documentary being more about the devotee than the object of devotion. Two stars sells Dylan’s Indian Birthday too short; four stars grants it too much weight, so bearing all this in mind, three stars.