That Dylan movie: ‘A Complete Unknown’
The movie, as its spine, fires off the rather banal idea of Dylan taking New York by storm with his intriguing (though now dated, the subtext cannot help implying) early songs.
Not Even Elvis
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The Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is watchable but overall crushingly disappointing. In this opinion, I appear to be in a minority of one — or perhaps two — but what’s new? I’m not saying it’s not ‘entertaining’, but I’m one of those people who know that, were I to tell Bob Dylan to his face that he was ‘entertaining’, he would shoot me a withering look if not with something loaded. Sure, it was a mildly diverting way of spending two hours and twenty minutes (the brevity gave me a clue, though only at the last moment before the lights went down), but that wasn’t the reason I went to see it. I had been hoping for an exercise in cultural self-examination addressed to a question along the lines of ‘Why no more Dylans?’, a piece of work that at least aspired to the quality of a song written by Dylan (and not rejected by its Master), a movie understanding and explaining something that is of its essence mysterious and magical. A Complete Unknown is a passable diversion but achieves nothing of that nature.
Bob Dylan will be 84 in three months time — the age my father was when he died. In a certain frame of mind, I hope, despite being more than a decade younger than Bob, that he outlives me, for I cannot imagine how I might feel on a day I heard he had died. Such a day would be the end of the world as I have known it, a day — much more than the days when we lost Elvis, or even Lennon — that the music too had died. The newspapers would say it was 'the end of an era’, but that, as becomes more common, would be an understated waste of ink and paper. It would in truth be the end of an epoch, of an eon, of a cultural encounter that had lasted for what used to be counted the entire natural lifespan of a very lucky man, a quasi-eternity in which one strolling troubadour took on the burden of providing the world with something it would otherwise have been bereft of: a music for its present that seemed to stand as an equal to complete folk musics of the past, generated by many, many men and, let’s say, nearly as many women, down all the years of the time since the Big Bang made the first audible noise, if it even did.
Bob Dylan has been a one-man oral tradition, while being anything but a traditionalist. In an age of retrospection, repetition, regurgitation, and counterfeiting, he remains almost uniquely true and authentic, and, when the scope of his continued commitment is added to the equation, he stands head and torso over the nearest ‘rival’ — the scare-quotes being necessary because he left all rivals for dead.
Through his frail frame is conducted to the world in general what remains of vertical culture transmitted to us from before living memory by processes that we can but vaguely understand. To have him in the world is something we should think about more, while it is still the case. I cannot think of anyone whose demise might unsettle the world more than his, for on that fateful day, in a deep and bedarkening sense, we would all be bereaved, bereft, and some of us in ways from which we might never recover in a world without one of those rare people whose presence matters even if you have never met.
Think of it like this: Dylan remains today one of just two remaining figures of the revolution in popular culture that began in the 1960s, with its light and dark sides. The only cultural figure whose shuffling off of the ‘cloak of mortality’ (Dylan’s own description of it) might move the world to a comparable degree would be that of Clint Eastwood, and for mostly somewhat different reasons, for in a certain sense Clint’s movies were always ‘entertaining’. Clint is now 94 years old, to Dylan’s tender 83, so he fulfils another function in providing reassurance that the durability of icons remains what it was. When the sole remaining survivor of this couplet finally checks out, something vital will break in the engine of modern culture, which has been running on next-to-empty for a long time now.
This, fundamentally, is why A Complete Unknown disappointed me. It was coming near time, I felt, that someone would stand up and say something like I’ve said in the above, but perhaps in a medium closer to the nature of Dylan’s idiomatic mojo than mere sentences of prose — something that might electrify the world anew to the possibilities he began to lay before us a lifetime ago.
Instead, we get — at this, let’s say, quarter-to the 11th hour moment of the living biography of its subject — a movie about a young man starting out with no knowledge of what he was going to become, a movie about a new arrival who would make some kind of splash, a chronicling of the beginnings of a ‘success story’ in an idiom delivering fame, wealth and veneration to its successful practitioners, a movie which takes advantage of the innocence of its protagonist to present to us a story that implies that Bob Dylan sought a victory of some kind over the very music he was to grace for perhaps centuries to come, a music he was to make his own and remain standing in, singing in, playing in, writing in, while all his would-be peers and competitors gave up the ghost, in some cases even literally.
Essentially, the movie’s storyline covers just the events at the very start of Dylan’s public life, going from his arrival in New York City in 1961 to the rumpus at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he pooped the party by playing an electric (as in plugged in) set, outraging the folkies and seeming to announce himself as part of the new revolution of rock ’n’ roll. I say ‘seeming’ because sometimes he disguises his intentions under layers of misdirection.
The movie has nothing to say to the colossus he has become, or the meaning of his overall journey. For one thing, it leaves out about 94 per cent of his life and work, and stops short just before his first truly great album, Highway 61 Revisited, released just minutes beyond the movie’s timeline — which would have been fine at perhaps any time in the first three or even four decades of his career, but not now as our civilisation finally begins to manifest the kind of responses he has been describing from the beginning:
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken/
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children/
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard/
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
The movie, as its spinal cord, purveys the rather banal idea of Dylan taking New York by storm with his intriguing (but now dated, the subtext cannot help implying) early songs. Here lies a paradox of popular music: that whereas the present music would have been impossible without its progenitors, the modern ear hears the offspring as an improvement, whereas it generally amounts to abysmal mimicry.
The times (changed, briefly, and ostensibly for the better, though not permanently — new, unimagined darknesses waited around the corner) are conveyed by reference to the civil rights uprising in the American South, and occasional TV flashes concerning JFK and the Cuban crisis, but the main storyline is about this young singer breaking into the folk scene in New York, getting himself a record deal and becoming a celebrity who is unable to walk down the street unimpeded by fans. There is little or no sense from the script of what was the impulse or inspiration behind songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-changing and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, as his sense of mission exploded in the young Dylan. It is as if these themes erupt spontaneously in his consciousness and leave no mark other than on the sheets of paper on which he writes down the words.
Sitting back from the screen, it is hard to comprehend, above the crunch of popcorn, what is the meaning, the big deal about this, especially, I would guess, if you didn;t already have a sense of the historical background. The script portrays a bunch of slightly stuck-in-the-mud folkies, including Pete Seeger, who has befriended Dylan, but although their purist reactionism is plausible, Dylan’s motivation is neither explicit nor in accordance with the totality of what we know.
The question that popped into my mind as I watched was: who cares if a bunch of sandal-wearers got their noses put out of joint? Who thinks that was his point? Was rock ’n’ roll still regarded — by musicians — as dangerous, a decade after Elvis’s entry? I don’t think this was what Dylan was thinking of. The movie makes no real attempt to explain the total context of suspicion surrounding the still juvenile form that was rock ‘n’ roll, a year before Lennon described his band as bigger than Jesus. The mood of the Sixties is poorly captured — a slight hint of political protest, provided by the flashes of civil rights demos and Bay of Pigs TV alarmism, but none of this seems to interest the Dylan character much — he’s busy writing songs and trying to establish himself in the New York scene. What, then, was going on, and how does this relate to the Dylan we have observed down all the years since then?
Actually, on a technical level, the movie is impressive. The acting is good, and the singing and guitar playing, especially by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, is extraordinarily convincing. I just don’t think the world needs a docudrama about Dylan going electric back in the Middle Ages. What strength the movie possesses consists in some (excellently executed) musical performances and multiple scenes of Chalamet mooning about the place seeking to impress various young women (Joan Baez included), his smouldering inscrutability punctuated only by regular bouts of whining because people won’t just let him ‘be’.
I caught a glimpse of one seemingly typical online review that gave it a 4.7 rating (out of 5), so I’m well aware that I’m just one audience member out of the 6 per cent who didn’t (particularly) like it. It read:
A Complete Unknown, the biographical film about Bob Dylan, is nothing short of extraordinary. Beautifully crafted and executed, it transports you back in time, immersing you in the life, music, and story of one of the most influential artists of our time.
But, y’know: what does it actually mean to say that Bob Dylan has been ‘one of the most influential artists of our time’? And the trouble is that I didn’t want to be ‘transported back in time’. I wanted to understand something new about this man, who after 64 years of writing and performing, still occasionally writes a song at least as good as anything he produced in his prime, and still does roughly one hundred gigs a year, in which he plays his material, old and new, without ever doing a song the same way twice.
I put it down to the tyranny of false expectations, which nowadays rules all cultural enterprises in virtually every field, rewarding conformism and mediocrity and punishing anything that might stretch people’s heads a little so they get to think beyond what the marketeers want them to think about. Like most of the books on this subject (I haven’t read Paul Morley’s Dylan biography yet, but I read some reviews which were mostly negative — a good sign), this movie has an air of being so baffled by Dylan’s prodigious genius that it needed to reduce it to simplistic statements and notions.
An account of the first four years of Dylan’s public life might have some merit and usefulness were he no longer with us. But not now when he remains at his prime and we are famished for something more, something mightier, more meaningful than a reprise of his youth, his early assaults on Greenwich Village, and his triumph over the old folkies at the Newport Folk Festival of sixty years ago. Even that might have been worthwhile had it succeeded in being more than a quasi-historical document, lacking any real connection with the context of its time, but laid upon that longago moment like a teen magazine on a coffee table, and, by confining its exploration to just four years of juvenilia, affording little or no understanding of the stretch and depth and mythology of Bob Dylan over the course of his (to date) 64 years of public life.
With a working life spanning seven decades, Dylan has created more of the music that has defined that period than anyone else, and in that time became the first such artist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which pleased and pained all the right people, and equally so in both categories.
What happened in Newport does not make sense the way the movie seeks to tell it. The legend, which the movie peddles as its uppermost assertion, is that the issue was his ‘going electric’. But that was merely a symptom of the underlying point: that Dylan regarded folk tradition as a living thing, and all he was hearing were dead tunes delivered with easy sweetness.
He had played the festival twice before, in 1963 and 1964. He was beginning to spread his wings, to integrate more of his personal influences into his music, including the likes of Elvis and Little Richard, if their ‘likes’ even existed.
In the movie, this is conveyed in throwaways, like when Bob says to Joan Baez just after they’ve slept together for the first time:
‘Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist's office.’ She calls him an asshole, which is fair.
In the folkies around him he saw great musicians and singers, but still just interpreters of a tradition behind a line that seemed to imply some form of cessation. There is a difference, of course, between tradition and traditionalism. He wasn’t interested in reproducing artefacts and adhering to a set of rules which didn’t just place limits on himself but limited the tradition he saw himself emerging from to what had been tested and approved in the past. Between the lines, he was talking about the limitations of the folk idiom as defined by its gatekeepers, which was to prove immensely prophetic of what both he and the folk idiom were to become. The issue in Newport was not that he was seeking increased volume, or to have a drummer and bass player behind him, but to announce himself as a new voice in a new world, but following the footsteps of his heroes, like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. He did not fervently wish to become a ‘rocker’ or a ‘rock ’n’ roller’, and those kinds of labels still stick awkwardly to him before falling off for want of adhesion. This theme is thinly present in the script of A Complete Unknown, as in Dylan’s remark to Johnny Cash in response to his question as to who the 'they' are who don't want him to play his new stuff: 'You know, the people who decide what folk music is or isn’t’.
Cash responds: ‘Fuck them, I wanna hear you. Go track some mud on somebody's carpet. Make some noise, B.D.'
Later, onstage at Newport, Dylan is showered with rotten fruit and other debris. A voice in the crowd, as though representing the injured soul of folk, shouts up: ‘Judas! You're Judas!’
Dylan: ‘I don't believe you.’ [Thereupon he turns to his band and shouts:] ‘Play it loud!’
That’s what comes across — making more noise, the right to play loud, like a teenager whose parents have gone away for the weekend who wants to have a party (he was 24 at this time) — but the script isn't rich or detailed enough to convey his deeper and more complex meaning. This would have required much more of Dylan writing, rehearsing, recording, et cetera, and more conversations about the world and how music fits into it — which in any event would have required a full treatment of his life and work in order to convey it properly.
What he was really saying was that the music being played in such venues had become tepid and irrelevant. It didn’t ring true to him. What he wanted to create was not more noise, but the kind of noise that would stop people in their tracks in the next street or roadway and have them ask themselves, What’s that?’
It’s all there in the second verse of his Song to Woody (Dylan found Guthrie at the New Jersey hospital where he was being treated for Huntington’s disease. The upstart took out his guitar, and sang for his hero, Song to Woody):
Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born
What happened that day in Newport, seen from a vantage-point sixty years distant, was far more momentous than the movie seeks to suggest. In a certain sense, folk music ended that day, for it ceased, for the purposes of global amplification, to be a collectivised culture and became a kind of monarchy under King Bob. And yet, it remained an intrinsically folk culture, one that the rest of humanity could participate in, but mostly in a passive fashion. What he seemed to be saying was, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ In the end, the ‘message’ of the movie (dread concept, considering the outlook of its hero), is a trite reworking of the Oedipal longing to kill the father and do what you want, even if you don’t know what that is — the lowest common denominator of the meanings of the Sixties.
When his set is finished, Joan Baez greets him bitterly, telling him: Let go of it, Bobby. You won.
Dylan: ‘What’d I win, Joan?’
Baez: ‘Freedom from all of us and our shit. Isn't that what you wanted?’
No. Presumably we were meant to emerge from the cinemas buoyed up by this feisty overturning of fuddy-duddyness, but I just felt weary that we are supposed to have such banal notions and feel such nondescript feelings. What, after all, does it signify in 2025 that Bob Dylan offended a bunch of folk devotees at a smalltown jamboree on Rhode Island, on July 25th, 1965? Very little, I would hazard, except that it continues to feed some untreated 1960s neurosis based on an idea of maturation that has pretty much disintegrated the entirety of human culture and left it running on the spot, repeating riffs, rolled chords and true rhymes that have nothing new to say to anyone. This condition is what Bob Dylan exists to subvert and lay bare.
I just don't see the point of a movie that leverages a particular episode at the start of Dylan's public life (I hate the word ‘career' except for shooting stars) but fails to explain the context properly and conveys instead the sense that Dylan had scored a 'victory' over folk music and folk folk, whereas, for most of the intervening six decades he has himself been nothing if not a folk singer.
The nearest to an ‘explanation’ of Dylan’s motivation in abandoning folk is in an exchange with sometime New York girlfriend, the artist and political activist Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the film, and played by Elle Fanning), who died in 2011. She it was who introduced him to left-wing politics, directly inspiring Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, among many other songs. She it is who appears on his arm on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was Dylan himself who wanted the film to avoid using Rotolo’s real name. Rotolo, he explained, was ‘a very private person and didn’t ask for this life.’ Nearly 60 years after they broke up, he remained protective of the woman he once called ‘the could-be dream lover of my lifetime.’
In the movie, ‘Russo’ is not a very convincing communist and, by any or all appearances, does very little by way of influencing her boyfriend. This is as explicit as it gets:
Sylvie Russo: ‘What do you want to be?’
Bob Dylan: ‘A musician. Who eats.’
Russo: ‘Well, I like your songs’.
Dylan: ‘My record comes out in a couple of weeks’.
Russo: ‘Some of the songs you played today on your record?’
Dylan: ‘It's mostly covers. It's traditional stuff. Y'know, folk songs are supposed to stand the test of time, like Shakespeare or something. They say no one wants to hear what a kid wrote last month.’
Russo: ‘Who's “they”?’
Dylan: ‘The record company. Manager.’
Russo: ‘I'm sorry, but Where Have All The Flowers Gone? is not Shakespeare!’ [Reaches in purse to pay coffee shop bill]. ‘There was a time when the old songs were new, right? Someone at some point had to give the songs a chance.’
[They get up and begin to leave the restaurant]
Russo: ‘I mean, there's a civil war going on down south. The biggest military buildup in history. Nuclear bombs hanging over us. It's not all about the Dust Bowl and Johnny Appleseed anymore.’
In their final scene together, as she’s saying goodbye to Bob through the fence at a ferry terminal, she says: ‘It was fun to be on the carnival train with you, Bobby, but I think I gotta step off. I feel like one of those plates, you know, that the French guy spins on those sticks on the Sullivan show.’
Dylan: ‘Oh, I like that guy.’
Russo: ‘I'm sure it's fun to be the guy, Bob. But I was a plate.’
Arguably, A Complete Unknown is aimed at people who are too young to know who exactly Bob Dylan is. But it seems to me that there’s a paradox here, since the incident that provides the chief pivot of the ‘plot’ would be incomprehensible other than by the most simplistic interpretation by anyone who didn’t already know that story and its meanings, which in any event become garbled in translation across the six decades between then and now. It may therefore have queered the pitch for a proper Dylan biopic while he’s still around to bask in the appreciation that would follow.
More than once, I’ve heard some people scream ‘cultural appropriation’ and accuse Bob Dylan of stealing his foundational music from the Irish folk tradition. Well, I’m an Irishman and I say please, don’t talk nonsense. What happened (it’s barely touched on, though no more, in A Complete Unknown) was that he picked up Irish music on the roadside in Greenwich Village, already trampled under the feet of the philistine feet of many of the contemptuous descendants of those who had created it, and gave it back its self-respect. This isn’t to say that there are no Irish men and women who have done the same with occasional songs or even lifelong vocations; but there is no Irish person who has seen so consistently through to the spirit of Irish music the way Dylan has done, or made of it a living music that arrived in such good health as did his efforts to the third millennium — not even Shane MacGowan, not even Paul Brady, not even the Chieftains, not even the Clancys. (Although. to be fair, there is a recording on YouTube of Dylan singing Arthur McBride, which is good, though nowhere near as good as Paul Brady’s, from which it is architectually and lyrically ‘borrowed’):
Dylan’s ‘trick’ was in refusing to see Irish music — or any folk music — as an artefact, inherited from the past, insisting that it was a living thing, to be continued, not just reinterpreted or embellished and then left for dead and occasional exhumation, but something alive and developing in accordance with some intrinsic spirit which it was his duty to identify and capture and allow to live and grow in his head and heart.
Once I wrote:
He discovered Irish folk music in the early 1960s, watching the Clancy Brothers play in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, NYC, and subsequently never made any secret of the fact that he had lifted most of his earlier tunes from folk songs dug up by the Clancys and the Donegal family group, The McPeakes. Some of his songs have their roots unmistakably in the Blues, but others seem to be as though a reimagined eruption of the line of a music we Irish know to have been truncated or interrupted by dislocation and cultural scorched earth and thereby denied an organic life in its own place in the modern world. It is as though Dylan, through the medium of his poaching, was taking personal responsibility for completing the threads left hanging by Ireland’s dark history. If so, we have reason to be proud and thankful.
Beyond his roots and lineage, Bob Dylan is a storyteller, a creator of imagined realities. His songs are his songs, and yet not. They are part of the continuum of human culture, born in part out of Ireland, whence it was transported in the hearts of emigrants fleeing famine, reborn in a different acoustic, mated with jazz and blues, classical concertos and Hungarian Czárdás, recorded under the influence of hangover and sent back home in padded envelopes to be listened to in wonder and recreated to the astonishment or chagrin of the neighbours. Dylan distilled his own music by doing much the same thing as those players, despite not being Irish. Sometimes, speaking of the material he has written out of this immersion, it is clear — and sometimes he says precisely as much himself — that he didn’t actually write the song in question. It just arrived, fully formed, to a place right behind his ear. Other times, the song has been gifted him by a Muse who features in it, like The Girl From the Red River Shore, which you could easily be fooled into thinking was about a real woman that Dylan actually met and misled or mislaid.
In an interview to promote the movie, Timothée Chalamet says: ‘The two craziest things to me are how some people are hard on his guitar playing or hard on his voice.’
This is true, and it’s a kind of aural insensibility that sometimes can take years to heal, as it did in the case of my daughter, who banned his music from our car as a child and then, as a teenager, tried to introduce me to Dylan. ‘You need to listen to this guy!’ she said. ‘Okay, I replied, ‘I’ll give him a go.’
As for musicianship, Dylan is as good as he needs to be. My opinion is that he plays the guitar exactly like Bob Dylan would be expected to play it, and that’s what I want to hear and observe. The same with the harmonica and piano, which he plays also, when the humour takes him.
What does it means to ‘play the harmonica’? To let the harmonica play you, which is what Dylan does with any instrument he picks up. Same with the piano. That’s what people come to hear. There are enough cliche-ridden virtuosos out there to bore us all to death.
Another time I wrote:
Dylan always plays the harmonica the same way, and for the same reason: to give time to think, to himself and his audience, to allow thoughts to catch up with feelings. It is never mere adornment. It is never a release. It always seems to repeat the song in another, wordless language that seems to ‘explain’ things a little better.
An issue that kind of bubbles under the text of A Complete Unknown is the idea of protest, which is dealt with in a manner as to suggest that the makers of the movie couldn’t work out where Dylan stands in all this. It’s not so clear, to be sure, for Dylan likes, these days, to drop false clues to keep the press off his scent.
Back in 2011, when he was touring in China, ‘human rights activists’ pronounced as ‘shocking’ his refusal to speak out on behalf of a detained Chinese artist who had been arrested in a renewed crackdown on political and artistic dissidents. Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, denounced Dylan as a ‘sellout’ for agreeing to negotiate his set-list with the Chinese authorities and drop some of his most famous ‘protest’ songs like The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Blowin’ in the Wind.
But there was no necessity for Dylan to utter literal political statements in order to proffer freedom to the people of China. His presence was enough. Rock ‘n’ roll operates at the higher levels of reason, provoking the heart, gut and privates as much as it engages the mind. Those rendered free by encountering it are not liberated by anything they are told to think, but by what they experience in hearing the possibilities between and beyond the notes. Music is not a platform, but an alternative way of hearing life’s promises.
In his 2004 memoir, Chronicle Volume One, Dylan wrote that he never had any ambition to ‘stir things up’, but was merely working to feed his family while the press made him into the conscience of a generation. ‘I really was never any more than what I was, a folk musician. I was not a spokesman for anything or anybody . . . I was only a musician.’
‘All I’d ever done,’ he elaborated, 'was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I’d left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn’t vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilisation. Being true to myself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.’
‘I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn’t that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn’t my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I like old news better.’
‘Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese.’
His songs, even the most ostensibly ‘political’ of them, are not about society, but existence. Listen to an early version of The Times They Are A Changin’, and then to the way Dylan sings it these days. Without making anything of it, he has attached an irony that directs the song back into the faces of those who used it as an anthem half a century ago: don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.
Our age is preoccupied with literal, crude gesturing and sloganeering, concepts anathema to Dylan’s music, which exists much of the time at the level of irony and ambiguity. Their very titles make it impossible for Dylan even to introduce one of his songs without stretching far beyond crude political sloganeering. In Beijing that time, he sang Gonna Change My Way of Thinking and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. ‘I’m here’ he sang (Honest With Me) ‘to create the new imperial empire/I’m gonna do whatever circumstances require’.
The Czech-born playwright, Tom Stoppard, speaking back in 2006 about his own play Rock ’n’ roll, about the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, jailed by the Czech communists in the 1970s, not for their politics but for ‘creating a public nuisance’ — i.e. simply being what they were, a free-thinking band of creative musicians — said: ‘Beauty for beauty’s sake becomes a rebuke to the structures of a society. You can’t really make a distinction between detachment and dissent.’
The Plastics never set out to be symbols of resistance. Their music, free-form jazz and chaotic interpretations of Western pop songs, expressed not social rebellion but existential curiosity. What communism found provocative was the way they looked and dressed, their indifference to the social and political order. And this, the regime intuited, was more to be feared than someone seeking to argue with communism. Vaclav Havel, in explaining the influence the Plastics’ music had on him and his contemporaries, spoke about its magic, sadness and longing for salvation and said that the band’s trial and imprisonment represented ‘an attack on life itself’. Leaving the trial, he said: ‘From now on, being careful seems so petty’.
Political freedom amounts, simply, to the right to be let alone with life’s mysteriousness, which is not a political gift but an existential event. This is the ‘statement’ Bob Dylan makes whenever he opens his mouth to sing. By his very presence in China, he was saying something that would only have been reduced by a speech: that a song is not a placard or a pamphlet, but the fullest enrichment of the human breath. Freedom is the default position of humanity, when the State and the politicians and the ideologues get out of the way. The artist is not an agitator, but an embodiment of freedom. The point of art is not to make statements but to be the statement. Art is gratuitousness, beauty for its own sake, a sign of Something Else From Beyond. What matters is the artist’s life, his gaze and his repose, not his ‘message’, which, if he has one, is merely the grain of grit on which the pearl forms.
Dylan, more than anyone since John Lennon died, has represented the intelligent life of rock ‘n’ roll — not because of any stances he’s adopted but because he remained interested in staying true to his own experiences and seeing what came out. The journey, it has become clear, is a human one, not a political one. Music is not revolutionary, but only appears to be because it represents a kind of prophecy, prefiguring things before they happen rather than actually making them happen. The conventional idea is that pop/rock ‘n’ roll ‘changed’ or ‘changes’ the world, but really the world changes itself and the music merely provides the soundtrack. Bob Dylan has understood this more clearly than anyone else who managed to hold our attention over the past 50 years.
There’s an utterly absurd trope that’s been doing the rounds for some years now to the effect that Dylan is a Satanist. This is the opposite — the exact opposite — of the truth. For several years, in the early 1980s, he had to endure the ridicule of his contemporaries and the haemorrhaging of his audience when he became a born-again Christian and started to record music that made this clear. The ludicrous ‘Satan’ notion came from a clumsy response he gave in an interview on the US TV newsmagazine programme, 60 Minutes, concerning whom he had made a ‘bargain’ with concerning his work as an artist, the slightly coy phrase that came out being ‘the chief commander’. The interviewer asked him, ‘On this Earth?’ and Dylan gave the answer that nobody cares to remember: ‘On this Earth and the world we can’t see.’
Dylan, to my certain knowledge, has not recanted his beliefs, but reconsidered the wisdom of speaking of them explicitly, since these were concepts which have been trampled to death by frauds and pharisees and politicians, and thus reduced to banalities in a faux-rationalist culture. Recurrently, he answers questions about life and mortality which make clear that he remains a believer, though perhaps nowadays more guardedly than he once did. I read someplace that, when he signed off on the final draft of A Complete Unknown, he inscribed his signature and 'Go with God' on the script.
And further:
To Bill Flanagan, for his book of interviews, Written in My Soul, he said:
But I’ll tell you one thing, there’s no way I could write something that would be scripturally incorrect. I mean, I’m not going to put forth any ideas that aren’t scripturally true. I might reverse them, or make them come out a different way, but I’m not going to say anything that’s just totally wrong, that there’s no law for. . . . Because the Bible runs through all US life, whether people know it or not. It’s the founding book. The Founding Fathers’ book anyway. People can’t get away from it. You can’t get away from it, wherever you go. Those ideas were true then and they’re true now. They’re scriptural, scriptural laws. I guess people can read into that what they want. But if they’re familiar with these concepts, they’ll probably find enough of them in my stuff. Because I always get back to that.
And, to the same author:
We’re all sinners. People seem to think that, because their sins are different from other people’s sins, they’re not sinners. It makes them feel uncomfortable. ‘What do you mean sinners?’ It puts them at a disadvantage in their mind. Most people walking around have this strange conception that they’re born good, that they’re really good people, but that the world has just made a mess out of their lives. I have another point of view. But it’s not hard for me to identify with someone who’s on the wrong side. We’re all on the wrong side, really.
The American rock writer Greil Marcus, contemplating the contradiction that was Elvis Presley, was moved to observe (in his book Mystery Train) that, when Elvis sang a particular song — Can’t Help Falling In Love With You — it was impossible to escape the realisation that he possessed ‘a capacity for affection that was all but superhuman’. How could anyone who had witnessed him not immediately react to such a description without tears? In this phrase, which delves into the body of the rock ‘n’ roll Trojan horse — built of shiny, glittery, disposable stuff, like fame, diversion, intoxication, glitter, narcissism, money, but inside which the Cry of Humanity is maintained, preserved and nurtured — we see into the human mission of the singer standing alone in the centre of the stage. Suddenly, he is no longer a ‘star’, still less a narcissist, a pleasure-seeker or a degenerate, but a man who seeks from deep within himself the words and sounds to convey something of the love and longing he has detected in his heart.
What Marcus observed was an emotional quality in Elvis, a longing for love that seemed to elide him more and more as he became increasingly ‘beloved’ of the multitudes. With Dylan, what you might say in a different key is that he has acquired the capacity to create, in words and sound, pictures divined within himself, a sense of transcendence that conveys a hint of something analogous in respect of the human spirit and its appetite and capacity for a love capable of perfect harmony with reality.
This is how I see Dylan: not as a rock star but as a messenger from some other place, the place that ‘we can’t see’. On stage, he is so clearly ‘working’, because he never ceases to be serious, but he is not ‘working’ in the way most other ‘rock artists’ would so describe their activity.
Rock ‘n’ roll has one foot in the sacred world and the other in the material world; part spirit, part flesh; half-holy, half-profane. Thus, perhaps more than any other in our time, this medium captures and feeds off the contradictory, dualistic nature of modern life — at once an exhalation of something greater and a flirting with idolatry, an assertion of human self-assurance, a metaphor for the interaction in modern societies of the secular and the sacred, and a cry for help directed upwards from the heart of the manmade bunker. Rock ‘n’ roll allows for a camouflage, by which the artist contrives to conceal the pure intention of the song, but in a way that the listener, in his or her own heart, can pick it up. It is really astonishing, when you think about it, that this is necessary – why is our culture so afraid of these questions now? – but also that, in spite of everything, it remains possible. Bob Dylan has been a one-man Trojan horse for virtually the whole of my lifetime. It is the best-kept secret of the — haha — ‘devil’s music’!
Speaking of Elvis, Dylan was and is a fan. ‘When I first heard Elvis’ voice, I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss.
‘Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.’
Elvis recorded four of his songs: Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Tomorrow Is a Long Time, and Blowin’ in the Wind.
’I never met Elvis,’ he told Rolling Stone in 2009. ‘because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favor in the Sixties. He didn’t really come back until, whatever was it, ’68?’
‘You see, the music scene had gone past him, and nobody bought his records. Nobody young wanted to listen to him or be like him. Nobody went to see his movies, as far as I know. He just wasn’t in anybody’s mind. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went. Because it seemed like a sorry thing to do.’
I’ve gone to see Bob Dylan live just twice, and both times — the Slane Festival in Ireland in 1984 and a concert in Dublin about ten years ago with my wife and daughter — were dire disappointments.
By all accounts, a Dylan concert is never what you expect it to be, perhaps because Dylan insists on it not being anything like what he himself expects. In my experience and from anecdotal witness, these events tend to divide into two modes: first, those in which he seems to play in order to fulfil a contract or engagement, but has left his heart behind, or has detected on arriving onstage that the audience is there for the wrong reason, in which case(s) he will play his most banal music (and there is a deal of this) and regard the audience as though his enemies, looking balefully at them and behaving as an entertainer who refuses to be entertaining. The second mode is one in which he enters a quasi-sacramental zone in which he chooses his best songs and leads his band in playing them as — quite literally, each time — they have never been played before and will never be played again, entering into a trance in which only he seems able to access completely but still is available to the audience if it can pick up the signal, so as to make of each piece he plays a unique experience for himself and those present, including his backing musicians.
If you wish, you can create your own ‘Bob Dylan concert’ by going on YouTube and lining up ten or a dozen of his songs for him to play in your front room. Here’s my best set-list for today:
Visions of Johanna; Boots of Spanish Leather; The Times They Are A-changing; Blowin’ in the Wind; If You see Her, Say Hello; It Ain’t Me, Babe; My Back Pages; Standing In The Doorway; Don’t Think Twice; Like a Rolling Stone; Forever Young (with Mark Knopfler); Not Dark Yet; Every Grain of Sand.
The way he reinvents songs might well be in the manner of an excavation, many centuries later, operating again from the beginning, from the lyric, and seeking to recreate what the song might have sounded like had it been a completely different song.
In many of these songs, the effect is almost mesmeric, as Dylan sings in the embrace of the music as though at the eye of a rising storm, carried along and at the same time held by the waves of structured sound, a man in the throes of life’s challenges and difficulties holding on to his dreams and understandings and determined to share them.
As he told it:
Well, songs are just thoughts. For the moment they stop time. Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stopping time. With just that thought. To hear a song is to hear someone’s thought, no matter what they’re describing. If you see something and you think it’s important enough to describe, then that’s your thought. You only think one thought at a time, so what you come up with is really what you’re given. When you sit around and imagine things to do and to write and to think — that’s fantasy. I’ve never been much into that. Anybody can fantasise. Little kids can, old people can, everybody’s got the right to their own fantasies. But that’s all they are. Fantasies. They’re not dreams. A dream has more substance to it than a fantasy. Because fantasies are usually based on nothing, they’re based on what’s thrown into your imagination. But I usually have to have proof that something exists before I even want to bother to deal with it at all. It must exist, it must have happened, or the possibility of it happening must have some meaning for me.
Often, when he starts to sing an old song, it is utterly unrecognisable from the beginning because the sound is not quite right or because his voice becomes more nasally and obscure as he ages. The audience holds itself in abeyance, waiting for a moment of recognition, and, when it comes, usually with the refrain or the song’s title line, they cheer and clap and whistle. It is strange and a little gauche, until you realise that it is a signal of their reconnection with the meaning of the song in a new guise, which is precisely the intention: the truth made unfamiliar, and then restored to itself.
If, on the occasion when it is clear that he is pushing the envelope, you watch his band members watching him, you understand that they have no idea what is going to happen: what version of this or that he is going to attempt, or whether it will have any precedent in their experience or rehearsing. They know not how long or short he is going to make it; in what mood he will deliver it (playfulness to solemnity, for instance), what journey of feeling it — and he — might take them on. They seem to have nothing to guide them but their ability to pick up upon his mood, judged from the side or the back, with eye-contact denied, entering into the groove that seems to emerge from his disposition in every moment, to find it and sustain it for as long as he wishes it to last, and then to stop when he turns his head imperceptibly to the right, first as a warning, then, in a couple of bars, as a signal to bring it in to land.
It is strange to think of that unmerciful hoo-hah that greeted his shift from folk to electric all those years ago, for now he has as though returned home, and seems happiest there, playing acoustic with his friends, the loudest folk band the world has ever seen.
Observe his longtime bass player, Tony Garnier, who is almost at all times the musician standing nearest to Bob onstage. Garnier (the one with the hat, always the hat), who has played with Dylan for 36 years and, like his boss, was born in Minnesota, is a member of a legendary American jazz and blues dynasty.
He mostly plays an electrified acoustic Spanish bass guitar, sometimes a Warwick Star cutaway, sometimes an upright double bass. On Tony’s face, if you can see it, it is possible to read the whole thing. He brings to my mind a little boy who is playing along with a non-existent album called The Sweetest Songs of Bob Dylan in his bedroom and is so lost in the dream that it has become real. You can see on his face, flickering between confusion and glee, the dream and the fear possessing him that he will make a mistake and ruin everything. So he watches and watches, astonished in every moment at the mere fact that he is still there, pulling it off, getting away with it. On his face, far more than on Dylan’s, you can read the meanings of Dylan’s music, which at its best is a journey through time, starting from the very beginning of everything. In this wonderland, Tony moves a little around, but never straying far from his boss, rarely taking his eyes off Bob, sometimes staring at him intently as though trying to read his mind, to puzzle out where he is about to go next, smiling occasionally at some secret joke, catching the eye of another musician and grinning broadly, and sometimes — when the groove has established itself and seems like it will continue for an extended while — looking to the audience to see if they hear what he hears, if they understand what’s happening, chuckling to himself.
This is the hidden life of the music, played out in 3D. Garnier seems to say:
‘Look! Look! He’s here! Look at him!'
‘Oh! So this is what we’re doing now?’
‘This a mystery. I can only follow.’
‘I am the servant of genius. Watch my face! everything is visible there.’
‘The songs are different every night because he never sings them the same way,’ Garnier once described the scenario. ‘So we’re not playing them the same way. If he’s phrasing a little differently on a song like A Simple Twist of Fate, the bass line I played the night before might not work. He may bunch up some words or draw them out, and it goes beyond that; sometimes he’ll change the chords. Or he’ll sing a different melody for a few nights, or change the lyrics — like on Tangled Up in Blue, the lyrics in the show are different from the recorded version.’
The song as played, Garner has said, ‘is a conversation between everyone onstage’, by which he means not that the arrangement is decided on the basis of a conversation but that it becomes a ‘conversation’ in the playing.
‘It’s actually a lot easier than having to play the same bass lines every night, and it’s much more creative and fun.’
‘I’ll come up with my own bass lines, or versions of bass lines from Bob’s earlier songs, and if he wants it different he’ll let me know. Simplicity works best. Complicated bass lines can be distracting. You don’t want to disrupt the song; you want to help it along.’
‘What I’m all about is trying to add some movement in between the vocal or the verses, but not sound like I’m just filling. I’m looking to provide subtle forward motion, as opposed to playing a fixed, steady groove.’
‘You have to learn the lyrics to the songs. That will tell you what and how to play, and it makes your job easier because you have a connection; you’re not just playing notes and chords.’
‘I’ve always told new guys in the band, “You’re not playing guitar — you’re playing a song.” I know what the songs are about, and that gives me an emotional attachment when I’m coming up with the bass lines. And of course there’s Bob’s interpretation to draw from.’
Dylan himself never seems to know how long the song might go on, until he decides it should end. Always he seems to be watching — or perhaps, feeling — for that moment between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’, before terminating a song with a nod, a few bars, another nod and — sometimes — a flourish of a Big Finish (though sometimes not) depending on how it feels.
The Germans film director, Wim Wenders, once wrote something (I’ve mislaid the source) to the effect that TV has destroyed the meaning of popular music because the cameras hardly ever show the faces of the singers and musicians. This is so true: the shots are invariably wide pans from the gods, or close-ups of fast-moving fingers, as if speed is always of the essence. Weirdly, this has now been ‘cured’ by the limitations of the hand-held phone-camera, shooting from the fifth row. Now, this single camera focusses on the stage in the way the eye of the audience-member does: watching the expressions on the faces of the musicians, riding the resonances with what’s emanating from the PA. It is strange that very rarely does anyone try to break through these new ‘limitations’, as though there is already an unspoken consensus that being restricted is a positive advantage to be exploited. No matter how wobbly the camera, the person holding it is interested in looking at the artist and nothing else. In the most unexpected way, this makes watching a YouTube video of a performance much closer to being present than anything I’ve ever seen on TV.
Dylan, the artist, does not know what to do with himself on stage, so he plays for peak minimalism. His movements are an avoidance of affectation, as though his body has a mind of its own, as though his attention is elsewhere and yet his body cannot help joining in. His voice is like sandpaper going soft in the rain. His disposition conveys a man who has come to an age when he is weary of things, but cannot stop the tenderness escaping. He is engrossed in the communication he has set himself to execute, and has no time for fripperies. He looks through his musicians, as they stare at him in hopes of learning what he’s going to do next. (It never works.) As he ‘plays’ the guitar, no matter which type, he is as though the instrument, as though the guitar is playing him. This is what Count John McCormack called ‘The Yarragh’: when the singer ceases to sing the song and the song begins to sing the singer. Another word for this might be: prayer.
All of this, of course, has a mystical connection — destiny to origin — with the young man who played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, but not to the account or the person portrayed in A Complete Unknown, except if the intended meaning is that, in that moment, this future of grace and beauty was utterly unforeseeable. None of the victories he is depicted as having achieved back then, nor all of them together, conveys anything of what he would become.
What is happening here is a kind of adjustment and compensation for the waylaying of the stream of human culture by capital and greed. Money and celebrity have acted as dams (damning!) and diverted the central channel from its true line. Only a few artists have constantly stood against this perverted drift. This is the meaning of Dylan the one-man folk tradition.
Further reading:
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