Aaargh! A Dylan persona Todd Haynes didn't explore...

I just picked up a nice reissue of If You Saw Thro' My Eyes, the debut solo album by British folk-rock crooner Ian Matthews. For the most part Matthews is a tad on the wet-noodle side for my tastes, but this 1971 platter was made right around the time he split from Fairport Convention, one of my all-time favorite bands (and one to which he made some very fine vocal contributions), and Eyes features multiple contributions from a couple of not-undistinguished former bandmates, the late great Sandy Denny and the ever-great Richard Thompson. (The estimable pianist Keith Tippetts makes a couple of appearances as well.) Anyhow, the collection is largely a bunch of, um, sensitive Matthews-penned tunes, plus two by Richard Farina, the musician and novelist, husband to Joan Baez's sister Mimi Farina, friend to Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan. Farina died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, not before composing a poison pen letter in song to erstwhile pal Dylan, a ditty called "Morgan The Pirate." (This is just the sort of nugget the Dylanologists of Fairport, who once committed a French-language cover of "If You Gotta Go, Go Now," delighted in digging up.)

This kiss-off is one of the earlier portraits of Dylan-the-postmodern-shape-shifter, but where I'm Not There director Todd Haynes finds the reinventing quality salutory (up to a point), Farina...does not.