Direction Home: A Dylan Compendium at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara
An Exploration of Archival Material from the Bob Dylan Center Screens, with Q&A Featuring Director Steven Jenkins and Jeff Bridges
When poetic punk-folk legend Patti Smith played at the Lobero Theatre in 2023, the engaging veteran artist was bringing songs and reminding the SRO crowd that “People Have the Power,” all in the name of a few good causes. The evening was a fundraiser for the Lobero itself, CADA (Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse), the Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation, and a worthy and then newly opened enterprise, the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Smith is part of the vast legions of Dylan fans, in and outside of the songwriter field, proper. The backstory of the Bob Dylan Center, celebrating the great American and now Nobel Laureate songwriter and home to Dylan’s own archives, goes back to his selling the archives in 2016.
When asked about the decision to make Tulsa the designated site, Dylan explained, “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure. But I’m from Minnesota, and I like the casual hum of the heartland.” There is also the fact of proximity to the Tulsa-based Woody Guthrie Center, Guthrie being a central source of inspiration for Dylan (as we know from his familiar origin story and from the popular biopic A Complete Unknown).
The Lobero is again a landing spot for Bob Dylan Center focus, on Friday, March 28, in an evening dubbed Fifty Years in Sixty Minutes: An Evening with the Bob Dylan Center. Director Steven Jenkins, director of the Dylan Center and a self-described “Dylan-ologist,” will screen his hour-long program of short films and videos from the archives, including previously unreleased clips in the studio and onstage.
As an added bonus, a post-screening Q&A with Jenkins also includes celebrated Montecitan actor/musician Jeff Bridges, who also joins Smith and countless others in unabashed worshipful appreciation of Dylan’s gifts and mythos. Bridges also worked with Dylan, in actor mode, on the quirky Larry Charles–directed 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan co-wrote with Charles.
The half-century-spanning presentation arrives in a propitious moment, as a fuller career picture of the formative Dylan days gone public in A Complete Unknown. At present, Dylan is less unknown than ever, yet still ever the mystery man.
Fifty Years in Sixty Minutes: An Evening with the Bob Dylan Center takes place at the Lobero Theatre (33 E. Canon Perdido St.) Friday, March 28, 7:30 p.m. For tickets and more information, see lobero.org.
