According to Nik Cohn’s Pop from the Beginning, Bob Dylan killed pop’s golden age stone dead. After Dylan nobody could get away lightly with “yeah yeah yeah”, and music split into pop and rock, the Man v the Underground. The Brill Building style of pop writing that had given us such dumb, beautiful songs as Da Doo Ron Ron and Louie Louie became outmoded overnight and its practitioners either switched sides (Carole King, Al Kooper) or sank (just about everyone else).

Dylan has resorted to pulling apart the barricades, while keeping his mystery caged and withering one-liners intact. Last year there was the Chronicles autobiography; now we have the Scorsese documentary and this companion soundtrack.

Dylanologists — such as A. J. Weberman, who picked through Dylan’s dustbin searching for “clues” — have made the man’s music seem like a mystic maze ever since to the casual passer-by. A friend said recently that Dylan’s catalogue is so deep and spiritually fulfilling that he could imagine never listening to anyone else. This kind of nonsense only puts up barricades to a dope like me who can happily listen to Madonna’s Like a Rolling Stone followed by Like a Prayer. Sometimes, I’m with Nik Cohn all the way.

Yet when his most influential period is condensed on to just two discs, it’s frightening and undeniable how fast, hard and perfectly brutally Dylan worked, how quickly he switched from Woody Guthrie disciple to — whether he liked it or not — pop guru, influencing the Beatles, the Stones, everyone. You can’t help but be impressed.

Most of these 28 tracks are familiar, just not in this form. Visions of Johanna is a song that can stand any amount of reshuffling of the pack. This unreleased take, with a skittering, almost Spanish rhythm track feels more metallic than the Blonde on Blonde version; a smidgin of harpsichord, even, sneaks in like a musical snigger halfway through. Still, it is not as eyebrow-raising as the slow blues take on Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, which includes two previously unheard verses.

Fine for completists, but where No Direction Home really wins out is in its vivid depiction of the changes the singer went through up to 1966.

For starters there’s his first original recording, a straight blues scrap called When I Got Troubles, recorded by his high-school friend Ric Kangas in 1959. It doesn’t even reach the 90-second mark yet has the ghost of electricity whistling through it, as thrilling and oak-aged as any Alan Lomax field recording. Then there’s a shy, sincere, non-anthemic take on Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land from 1961, recorded at the intimate Carnegie Chapter Hall. Bashful Bob, you warm to him at once.

Compare this charming piece with a recording from just five years later, the “Judas” version of Like a Rolling Stone.

Ground down by freaks and folkniks who saw him as a traitor to the civil rights movement simply because he’d hired a red-blooded rock’n’roll band to back him, Dylan sounds furious. He also sounds tired beyond belief, a man on the edge of a personal apocalypse. Why were there grown men going through his garbage? How the hell had he become this soothsayer?

No Direction Home, most significantly, bypasses the acres of codswallop written about Dylan for the real deal. He gave pop honesty and intelligence, even a whole new way of singing. If it lost its naivety and screaming sense of fun — if it meant we lost Big Girls Don’t Cry but gained Five Leaves Left — that’s hardly Dylan’s fault. He encouraged everyone to leave their stepping stones behind and start anew. These few fast years are where rock’n’roll, part two, began.

(Sony/BMG)

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