Where in London was Bob Dylan’s iconic ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video filmed?
The documentarian DA Pennebaker was 40 years old when Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, asked him to make a film covering Dylan’s 1965 tour of the UK.
This would have been a wildly exciting and intimidating assignment for a younger filmmaker, but the Chicago-born Pennebaker had already made up-close and personal films tracking JFK through the 1960 Democratic primaries and a young Jane Fonda through her 1962 Broadway debut. There would be no bowing to the cult of personality.
Pennebaker’s Dylan film, Dont Look Back, was released in 1967, and has been a reference point for the past 60 years as one of the finest examples of a rock ‘n’ roll documentary; the kind they used to make before artists started controlling their own narratives in the Netflix era. As Pennebaker recalled to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2007, he wasn’t quite sure, at first, whether Dylan would attempt to hijack the reins himself in post-production.
After the first screening of the completed film, Dylan told Pennebaker that he would need to hold “another screening tomorrow night,” during which Bob promised to “bring a big pad and make note of all the changes we have to make.”
Sure enough, Dylan did show up the next day with a legal notebook and pencil, but when the film had finished, “He stood up, and the pad was empty,” Pennebaker said. “And he said, ‘That’s it.’ We never ever discussed it later.”
Baked into the feature-length film, and perhaps equally famous if not more so, is the pioneering “music video” for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, featuring Dylan holding a stack of cue cards with the song’s lyrics written on them, and gradually tossing each card aside as the song moves along, like an archaic YouTube lyric video. This image of Dylan, aged 24, casually disposing of his own stream-of-conscious rhymes, became the peak of second-gen beatnik cool, and would be mimicked and parodied for decades.
The actual idea for the cue cards had come from Dylan himself, but a key part of the video’s powerful effect, the setting, took some trial and error. The first attempt to shoot took place in a garden behind London’s Savoy Hotel, but it didn’t go well.
“A policeman came up just before the end and started hitting me with his stick,” Pennebaker said, “and [the others] were all cracking up and watching.”
Another attempt to shoot on the hotel’s roof also failed, as high winds sent the cue cards flying before Dylan could do so himself. Finally, the happy-medium set piece proved to be the alley behind the Savoy, which included less wind, fewer cops, and quite an epic but ramshackle sort of backdrop with scaffolding and piles of burlap sacks; stuff that Woody Guthrie would have appreciated. There was also no effort to keep Dylan’s friends out of frame in the background.
“[Road manager Bob] Neuwirth and Allen Ginsberg were just standing there, and I just included them in the picture,” explained Pennebaker, who died in 2019 at the age of 94. “I didn’t think it through at all; I just let it happen.”
The alley from the ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video is still there behind the Savoy if you want to do your own Dylan impersonation. It’s at the intersection of Savoy Hill Road and a dead-end alley called Savoy Steps, leading from the Strand down to the River Thames.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.