The Bob Squad

There's a fascinating section in Bob Dylan's Chronicles where he describes a bookshelf in Greenwich Village, heaving with poetry, revolution, beauty and a million mind-bombs that would come hurtling back out of the Zimmerman imagination at sporadic intervals. Given that the author is the most pored-over bard in the western world, he must have known that this disclosure would keep the train spotters busy for the rest of time.

And here's a DVD that manifests a lot of that. Down The Tracks: The Music That Inspired Bob Dylan is full of earnest Bobcats, stroking their goatees and talking about obtuse guitar tunings, French symbolist poets and banjo players from the deeps of the American imagination. I liked it.

The bonus part is the chance to see footage of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Reverend Gary Davis and various beat pretenders, all relating back to Bob's scheme. And if you want to hear cranky and intense commentary, then Sid Griffin and the Handsome Family are going to deliver something worthy.

Thematically, they cover religion, politics and the Sixties counter culture. They might have added the worlds of painting, drugs and the codes of camp behaviour. Hey, maybe that will emerge another time.

Copyright reasons have kept Bob's music out of the frame, and so Scorsese's No Direction Home is still an essential purchase for the self-regarding Dylanologist. But this enthusiastic little production is a handy bookend.