The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is said to be based on Dylan Goes Electric!, a 2015 book by the accomplished musician and prolific writer Elijah Wald. On the eve of the film’s release in December, Dylan himself posted a rare comment on X praising the acting of Timothée Chalamet (who plays the lead role), and extolling Wald’s book as “a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport.” Notably, Dylan did not extol the film itself. Instead, the post ends with “After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”
I’ve done both, and if I were James Mangold, the film’s writer-director, I’d go easy on the comparison. A Complete Unknown traces the period from January 1961, when 19-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman trekked from Minnesota to New York City in search of his vagabond folk-singing hero Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy), to July 1965, when now-music star Bob Dylan shook up the Newport Folk Festival, ostensibly by playing with an electrified blues band. It is necessary for biopics to simplify, but that can be hard to do when faced with a firmly entrenched myth.
The myth, in brief, is that by plugging in a Fender Stratocaster and playing his famous put-down song “Maggie’s Farm,” Dylan stormed the Bastille of postwar America and sparked the revolution of New Left politics and late-1960s counterculture. Elijah Wald, who was six years old at the time, has said in an interview that “myths are marvelous things, the keys to understanding a culture.” But keys can be used in different ways. A Complete Unknown uses the keys to lock in the myth and lock out the real story.
To give Mangold credit, the film’s period detail is admirably authentic. For example, the production crew took great pains to recreate in Hoboken, New Jersey the look and feel of late-1950s Greenwich Village. The sound engineers found just the right vintage equipment to replicate the sound of the music. And because no original recordings were used, Chalamet as Dylan, and Ed Norton as the folk guru Pete Seeger, worked long and hard at their mimicry. Chalamet in particular has won kudos for capturing the look and sound of Dylan in his early twenties.
The results are pleasing to the eye and ear. And if you assume the myth is true, the characters and plot also work like a charm. But if, like me, you find serious fault with the myth, then the film is less charming. And because Dylan is a towering figure not just in America but throughout the world, it’s worth trying to set the record straight.
The Voice of a Generation?
Dylan always scorned the moniker “the voice of a generation,” but he also earned it with such early songs as “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “The Times They Are A-Changin.” The former contains the refrain: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” The latter is more explicit:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.
In this spirit, the film makes a big deal of Dylan’s youthful defiance of a vaguely defined group of grey-haired elders calling the shots at the Newport Folk Festival.
But who were those elders? They fell into two groups. First were the veterans of the first American folk revival in the 1930s, who also led the second revival in the 1950s and founded the festival in 1959. The most prominent of these were the late Pete Seeger and his colleague Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz). For these elders, Dylan was destined to join Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) as the young faces of a gathering of traditional folk musicians in the bucolic setting of Newport, Rhode Island that sustained itself by donations, and by hosting public concerts by well-known performers. Everyone was paid the same fee ($50), and the extra revenue went to covering the expenses of the participants from low-income rural and blue-collar backgrounds.
The second group of elders were the commercial movers and shakers who had already turned folk music into a popular genre and saw the Newport Folk Festival as a potential venue to showcase new talent. These included Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), depicted in the film much as Wald describes him in his book: “a folk world insider, but…also a brilliant and gleefully rapacious businessman who enjoyed distinguishing himself from the homespun Bohemians with officious displays of wealth and power.” Another was Harold Leventhal, a veteran of Tin Pan Alley whose folk clients included Seeger, Guthrie, Baez, and many others. The film portrays Leventhal (P.J. Byrne) as a clueless, glad-handing rich guy—which is ironic, given his youthful membership in the Young Communist League and lifelong support of left-wing causes.
Which brings us to the obtrusive fact that all of these folk elders—Leventhal, Guthrie, Lomax, Seeger, and his father, Charles (an ethnomusicologist), and stepmother, Ruth Crawford (a modernist composer), were all deeply committed to the Old Left. Throughout their lives, they embraced socialist ideals and supported the radical labor movement. And in their youth they fellow-traveled with, and on occasion belonged to, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). And they used folk music as fodder for their cause.
For example, in May 1941 a new folk group called the Almanac Singers issued their first album, Songs for John Doe, which in shameful obeisance to Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, urged America to stay out of World War II. To create the album, Guthrie, Seeger, and two others took old folk tunes and added lyrics attacking Franklin Roosevelt for being a warmonger and a capitalist. A month later, Hitler invaded the USSR, and that album was pulled faster than you can say Blitzkrieg, and replaced with another, Dear Mr. President, urging sending U.S. troops to “lick Mr. Hitler.”
These gray-haired elders remained loyal to the Old Left, but the American folk music movement cannot be reduced to that. Its origins go back to the 1870s, when Alan Lomax’s father, John A. Lomax, was a young boy in central Texas listening to the songs of the Anglo, Mexican, and African-American cowboys who worked his family’s ranch. Those songs stayed with Lomax as he came of age, but it was not until 1907, when on a fellowship to Harvard, he met the Shakespeare scholar and folklore enthusiast George Lyman Kittredge, who encouraged him to, as Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell record in The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992), “Go and get this material while it can be found. Preserve the words and music. That’s your job.”
The Job of Cultural Reclamation
Starting with those cowboy songs, John Lomax embarked on a lifelong exploration of the deep aquifers of vernacular music in America. Most famously, he and his son Alan spent the 1930s driving through the West, South, and Midwest, recording and taking notes on spirituals, work chants, lullabies, laments, breakdowns, blues, and ballads, sung by farmers, laborers, lumberjacks, housewives, muleskinners, prisoners, cooks, and many others. They amassed over 10,000 field recordings, now part of a priceless collection at the Library of Congress. They also published three volumes of detailed compilations, the third and finest of which, Our Singing Country (1941), begins with this arresting image:
At the crossings of many of the rivers on the cattle trails from Texas to Montana, there are little wind-blown graveyards—the resting place of cowboys drowned while swimming longhorn cattle across swollen streams. Scratched on one leaning headstone is: “He done his damdest.”
The same can be said of the Lomaxes. They “done their damdest” to enlist private and public support for what turned out to be a massive job of cultural reclamation. Without their efforts, the extraordinary music of ordinary Americans before the electronic age might well have been lost.
But herein lies a complication: Americans never had a folk tradition in the classic European sense. How could we, when we are descended not from peasants who tilled the same soil, spoke the same language, and sang the same songs for generations, but from a myriad of different groups, each with its own folk past? Some scholars, notably the late Gene Bluestein, accepted this fact and argued for a different term, “poplore,” to describe America’s dynamic blend of ethnic traditions and wide-open markets for expressive culture. The term poplore never caught on, but the concept makes sense when we consider how Pete Seeger sought not just to preserve the legacy reclaimed by the Lomaxes, but to make it popular by making it profitable.
In 1936, the 17-year-old Seeger accompanied his parents to Bascom Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina—which, according to Wald, was “a revelation” of “rural music in something like its native habitat.” The key phrase here is “something like,” because the festival’s organizer was a native of the area who was steeped in its traditional music, but also an entrepreneur wishing to showcase that music in a way that would affirm the dignity of the people scorned as “hillbillies” while also meeting the growing demand for commercially recorded “hillbilly” music.
That Volatile Element
Seen in this light, Newport’s mix of preservationists and profit-seekers was not new. What was new was a certain volatile element in Dylan’s performance that, to quote one eyewitness, “electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other.” Contrary to myth, that element was not electricity. Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had all played electric sets at Newport that year, prior to Dylan’s performance. And as far back as 1959, Alan Lomax had hosted a folk concert at Carnegie Hall that included Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim playing electric guitars.
Part of that element was Dylan’s attitude. Fresh from a whirlwind tour of the U.K. during which he got high with the Beatles, behaved indifferently to Baez (with whom he was having an affair), and treated pretentious reporters and squealing fans alike with amused disdain, Dylan carried himself in a way that signaled, correctly or not, that he cared nothing for the scores of down-home musicians who were the festival’s heart and soul. Making matters worse, his presence drew unprecedented crowds with little interest in the rest of the program.
But that volatile element was also due to an aspect of Dylan not mentioned so far, namely his fascination with the writings of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac, whom he never met, and Allen Ginsberg, a friend until his death in 1997. In his book Bob Dylan in America (2010), Princeton historian Sean Wilentz recalls that Dylan met Ginsberg in the apartment above the legendary 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. That apartment belonged to Wilentz’s uncle, Theodore “Ted” Wilentz, who co-owned the bookshop with Wilentz’s father, Elias, who edited one of the Beat poets’ first anthologies. So, when Wilentz avers that the Beats were “nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie,” I’m inclined to believe him.
But this raises a question: if the Beats were so important, why did Mangold erase them from A Complete Unknown? Some reviewers have spotted a Ginsberg lookalike in one of the crowd scenes, but I must have blinked and missed him. My suspicion is that the erasure of the Beats was carried out in service to the myth. If Dylan is to be celebrated as a world-changing revolutionary, then it won’t do to show him playing apprentice to a bunch of bloviating, bongo-tapping beatniks.
A similar erasure can be found in the presentation speech of the Nobel Prize Committee when awarding the 2016 Literature Prize to Bob Dylan. Making no mention of the Beats, who clearly influenced Dylan’s departure from the American tradition of writing intelligible song lyrics, the speech credits him with having “dedicated himself…to 20th century American popular music, the kind played on radio stations and gramophone records for ordinary people”—and then, from that muddy stream of “heirloom and scrap,” “banal rhyme and quick wit,” “curses and pious prayers,” “sweet nothings and crude jokes,” having miraculously “panned poetry gold.”
The Nobel Committee had it backward. Dylan’s inspiration was always the music, and his finest lyrics are in the best tradition of American popular song. As for the Beats, I agree with historian Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1989) that Dylan’s apprenticeship with them “produced nothing which could be anthologized in any first-class collection of verse,” and that his literary output “during that period had already been done better by a whole line of poètes maudits from Blake, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont to his friend Allen Ginsberg.” I also agree with Wald, who stated in a recent interview that he has “mixed feelings” about the Beats, especially “the ‘great’ writers,” whose work he finds “lazy or pretentious.”
But literary merit is the least of it. The Beats’ most significant legacy is an updated version of romantic nihilism that amid the peace and prosperity of postwar America called for the wholesale destruction, not only of existing artistic conventions, but also of widely accepted norms of decency and propriety. The 1950s were hardly paradise, and some (not all) of those conventions and norms were indeed oppressive. But today it is glaringly obvious that the Beat project of freeing body and soul through drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, and a sociopathic lifestyle—especially as magnified and amplified by the late-’60s counterculture—is not liberating but enslaving.
The Myth Debunked
None of this was Dylan’s doing. A glance at his subsequent career reveals that instead of going along with this destructive project, he stood athwart it. He was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, but as he admits in his memoir, Chronicles (2004), “I recovered.” Instead of resuming the life of the globe-trotting rock star, he stayed in Woodstock, New York with his wife and children, and spent the next several months writing and recording songs with his Canadian backup band, the Hawks.
To put this into context, consider that by 1968 rock music was reaching an apogee of sorts, with psychedelic special effects accompanying the drug scene, virtuoso hard rock narrowing to a knife edge in heavy metal, and art rock straining for Wagnerian grandiosity. And for fans enthralled the year before by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, the Doors’ Strange Days, and Cream’s Disraeli Gears, the last thing on their minds was country music. But where was Dylan? In Nashville, working with the finest country musicians on four albums—John Wesley Harding (1968), Nashville Skyline (1969), Self-Portrait (1970), and New Morning (1970)—whose mellow, rootsy sound departed so drastically from the mood of the moment, the rock pundits didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
A decade later, when glam rock, punk rock, and rap were on the rise, a new generation of rock pundits regarded Dylan as a relic, as holy and dead as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. But once again, he took the unexpected path. At a low point in his life, he was drawn to Christianity, specifically the Vineyard Movement with its mixture of charismatic renewal and historic evangelicalism. He began writing gospel songs and, having enlisted the legendary producer Jerry Wexler and renowned guitarist Mark Knopfler, he went south to Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980), two albums that impressed even the most secular pundits.
And so on, through a long career that because of his massive fandom has resulted in a total output that is too much of a muchness. Like Picasso—who when asked if a particular drawing bearing his signature was a fake replied yes, adding that he had produced a great many fake Picassos—Dylan has churned out a lot of Dylan dross. (Have you heard the twelfth take of the eighth track on the 35th bootleg of his 43rd album?)
And now, having “done his damdest” for three-quarters of century, Dylan is still up there on the stage, whispering his way through the Great American Songbook, which is painful to hear but may be performing the good service of reminding his great-grandchildren of a time when popular music was good and good music was popular.
It would be nice to see a film about that.
