'It's a Dylan Thing': PART 1
A few words on 'A Complete Unknown' and the power of songcraft | january11.2025
By Douglas John Imbrogno | january11.2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com
I adore the new Bob Dylan mini-biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” The movie is hyper-focused on an early slice of Dylan’s storied, still-ongoing career at age 83. It stars a wonderful, if Dylan-mumbling Timothee Chalamet (I need to watch it again to grok everything film-Bob says), as it opens on Bobby ‘Dylan’ Zimmerman’s 1962 arrival in New York from Minnesota, battered guitar case in hand. It follows him as he tracks down an ailing hero, truthspitting folk legend Woody (‘This Machine Kills Fascists“) Guthrie, and then turbo-launches his career in Greenwich Village folk clubs, up through his fan-befuddling turn strapped to an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
A routine web search will reveal the astonishing depth of macro-cosmic and micro-cosmic Dylanology out there. Among so many epic career benchmarks, Bob Dylan is, after all, the only singer-songwriter ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (he didn’t show to claim it). At the micro level, consider this comprehensive page with a detailed map devoted to a stroll Dylan took one day with friends across Greenwich Village in 1963, during which photographer Jim Marshall snapped pre-superstar black-and-white photographs of him since reproduced endlessly.
Your mileage may vary considerably, but I grew up with his music and “A Complete Unknown” made me teary in places. It’s a powerful portrayal of a young singer-songwriter trying to self-discover his truest, most soul-centered sound and what he has to say in couplets and verse. That’s true even if the up-and-coming, freshly re-named performer ‘Bob Dylan‘ was already pretty sure of himself — and could be a dick about people not getting him or getting in the way of the path he saw forward for his artistry. As a longtime weekend singer-songwriter myself with a few unfamous albums of my own tunes in the world, musical expression in song is a key to my being. And, so, for this particular viewer the movie’s portrayal of the stumbling, exhilarating eureka moments of self-discovery and creative evolution were quite moving. Were I to give words to that process as shown in the film and felt in my own songwriting, it might go something like this:
‘Oh, that’s it! That’s how that line ends. THAT’S how those chords line up. That is EXACTLY how the song needs to come together!!! Thank god. Thank you, thank you. That’s IT. I need to play this. I need to keep playing this song until I really get it down. Where can I play this next …?!?‘
The film is thrilling when it breaks into song, and not only Dylan singing solo. As a story in The Wrap notes, all the Dylan tunes in this James Mangold film were performed by Chalamet. Meanwhile, Edward Norton sings as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro delivers a gorgeous evocation of Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook delightfully channels Johnny Cash. If anything, this popcorn-munching filmgoer felt too-teased in places. I wanted far more of Chalamet/Dylan singing excerpts from such by-now American Songbook classics as “Girl From the North Country,” “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Times They Are A’Changin’,’ and other gems from Dylan’s notebooks.
So — human creampuff alert! — other weepy moments came from hearing songs deeply tangled in the helix of my DNA, while watching their birth or development reenacted on a large screen. Plus, there is the utter magic of ethereal harmony singing, as in the several times Chalamet and Barbaro perform Dylan-Baez duets such as “It Ain’t Me Babe” and — slay me with a spoon — a nascent, halting duet of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Dylan’s Greenwich Village walk-up. The relationship between them was a heartbreaker. Baez was a TIME-magazine covergirl and gold album singer-songwriter while Dylan was still getting his guitar tuned, but his star shone even brighter than hers after their brief relationship ended. (Baez once remarked: “I think that his fame happened so fast, and it was so huge, that I kind of got lost in the shuffle.”) The powerhouse snippets of the Chalamet/Barbaro duets compel me to seek out the real-live versions from back in the day.
The mark of a good film in my book is whether it leaves you with anything well after you leave the theater. I can’t count the number of high-profile, big budget Hollywood films that dropped straight out of my mind and experience within days, gone like a will-o-the-wisp. Not so this one. I was humming Dylan tunes for days after seeing “A Complete Unknown.” And I’ve since learned more about the historic minutiae of Dylan’s Newport Folk Festival throw-down, where one commentator observed he “electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other.”
I also need to research how historically accurate is Pete Seeger’s utter frustration with electrified-Bob in the split — apparently resolved years later — depicted after Dylan plugs in at Newport and the mild-mannered Seeger goes briefly ballistic and considers hatcheting the stage’s power supply.
I twice saw Seeger perform live. The first time was in West Virginia’s capital city, and the other was a triumphal reunion with Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers at the Ohio State Fair grounds, one of the many locales from which they and the group were blacklisted by Communist-crazy government apparatchiks, prompting Seeger’s subjection to 30 years of FBI surveillance. (Seeger had been in the party in the 1940s, and later said he should have left earlier than he did, but was ever just an idealist for a better America.) Seeing him up close and live in concert and loving his feisty, uplifting singalong spirit, I may feel protective of the image I hold of him in my head. Yet, as the film portrays, he was also the preeminent folk evangelist at the epicenter of the folk movement. So, he maybe deserves some slack as Dylan and his amps roared at Newport.
I also ponder whether to suggest to our ‘folk-chamber music’ quartet THROUGH the TREES that we try other covers of Dylan tunes (as we already do “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”). Maybe “Only a Pawn in Their Game”? That unflinching song seems still relevant, given the onrushing billionaire takeover of America’s government and the unctuous abdication of moral responsibility by mega-social media titans with innocent neighborhood names like Jeff and Mark. Also, people in my singer-songwriter circles seem to have long stopped performing “Blowin’ In the Wind.” Too earnest, maybe? And yet how gorgeous a tune!
Plus, I cannot imagine lyrics any more on-target for the ‘Trump 2.0 Age’ than these lines below, which will increase in significance as more people begin to obey in advance (a la Timothy Snyder) with Donnie’s wannabe fling with autocracy and government-sanctioned cruelty. And if you think the unraveling of the American experiment is just liberal scaremongering, you have not read up yet on the horrific Laken Riley immigration act, racing towards passage in the U.S. Congress, which will curtail legal immigration and allow summary detention and deportation of law-abiding immigrants and asylum-seeking children:
‘Yes, and how many years can some people exist
before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
and pretend that he just doesn’t see? …‘
So, I heartily encourage you to watch “A Complete Unknown,” if well-done biopics of epic performers’ lives and their essential music speak to your heart and mind. And if you’re within striking distance of a THROUGH the TREES show, or might like to hum or sing along to an online version of a Dylan cover or two, free subscribe to this site for news of them.
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Meanwhile, the spirit of Bob Dylan’s songcraft survives in the folks who still bear witness to our travails. That same spirit can be found in the biting Molly Nilsson song ‘Money Never Dreams‘; in The Decemberist’s ‘This is Why We Fight,’ and in Anais Mitchell’s ‘Why We Build the Wall,’ from her Tony Award-winning ‘Hadestown’ musical, aimed like a heat-seeking missile at Trumpian urges to build walls supposedly to ‘keep us free.’ (Please add your own favored anthems in the comments below.)
Music may not immediately set us free from the chains that bind our lives and hold our societies down. But as the songs of Bob Dylan and so many other essential songwriters demonstrate, they are a key we may use to start the tumblers turning and to unlock the fundamental joy and solidarity of a great song that gets us swaying along with everyone else in the joint.
Thanks to Jeff Seager for his writing and editing advice on this piece.
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‘It’s a Dylan Thing: PART 2’: A New York State of Mind’: In this excerpt from ‘CRAZY DAYS: Confessions of a Fallen Altar Boy,’ our ‘sorta memoir’ author recalls the first cappuccino in his life in 1979 at Cafe Reggio in Bob Dylan’s old neighborhood.
I'm afraid to see this movie. Young Greenwich Villagers used to belong to one of two camps. My boyfriend was one of very few with a foot in each, jazz and folk. I was of the jazz persuasion, but Jerry was so excited over a folk musician who just hit town I let him drag me over to Gerde's a.couple of weeks after Dylan crossed the Hudson. I simply didn't get him till after my brother (a Mountain Stage co-founder) made me listen to the pre-Sullivan Beatles. In time, I moonlighted as a rock critic, but somehow that wasted night at Gerde's is still the only time I ever saw Dylan live.