Movie/DVD Review

Would you believe that Bob Dylan’s first electric band drummer has starred in the most heavily run commercial in television history and even had a regular acting gig on the hit show Home Improvement? It’s been quite a career for musician turned actor, Mickey Jones, as he looks back on his early music years in World Tour 1966 The Home Movies. With a gathering of personal footage, he shares his own 8mm color home movies back from an era when he got the chance of a lifetime…back in 1966, when he became Dylan’s first electric band drummer.

The Dylan 1966 World Tour is more often than not described as a tour that changed Rock and Roll forever. Although the electric part of the two set tour wasn’t well received amongst fans and critics, it’s now deemed timeless. Booing crowds, stomping feet, and perilous reviews all weighed down upon Dylan and his band, “The Hawks,” later to become “The Band.” In response to Dylan trading in his acoustic folk sound for its electric counterpart, many in attendance described the acoustic half as great, until “The Band” came out – hence the always obscure, yet obvious namesake. When Dylan strapped on his Telecaster during the show, he would undoubtedly become a new man on stage, a sentiment expressed by Jones himself.

Home movies are more than the title of this DVD, as a majority of the film shows Jones sitting in a studio, telling his story of becoming a musician, including his stints with troubadour musicians Trini Lopez and Johnny Rivers in the 60’s. Like most home set-ups, it’s hard not to notice the unprofessional set-up of the Q&A session, in which we never see the interviewer asking those rather predictable and barely audible questions.

The quality of the videos are mediocre at best, but then again we’re talking 1966 and 8mm. But worse, the content isn’t much better. As in any vacation montage, the footage is often different venues and world landmarks, with the “and here we are in Australia” commentary. It actually becomes such a personal travel collection, unfortunately, we don’t even get to hear Dylan - the myth, the man, the legend - speak or play at all on tape. To most viewers, this of course is the real reason we’d want to watch these home movies – not necessarily to view panoramas of Big Ben or Hamlet’s Castle.

Aside from what doesn’t role off of Dylan’s tongue, the home movies find other ways to be revealing. One of the particularly interesting scenarios is when Jones reflects to the interviewer about speaking with Dylan’s then manager, Albert Grossman, about the very first conversation in regards to playing on the ’66 tour. Instead of pinching himself and signing on the spot, Jones instead asks, “well how much does it pay?” You’d think any drummer would accompany Dylan for bread and water.

Jones is self-confessional and does a fairly decent job of not holding back. He shares some interesting tour stories, many that a serious Dylan fan might tend to eat up, but as a whole, it’s no more than a casual collector piece. The DVD may serve as a mellow weeknight watch, but like a read of the National Enquirer, it has no staying power. For a much more intimate view of Dylan, D.A. Pennebaker’s classic, Don’t Look Back, is the obvious choice.