Printing the Legend
The naysayers are dead wrong about James Mangold’s remarkable new film about Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.
At last, the wait is over. Director James Mangold’s eagerly awaited Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown finally arrived in US theatres on Christmas Day, following special preview screenings at selected IMAX theatres earlier in December. Its release was preceded by a barrage of trailers, clips, and promotional interviews with its stars Timothée Chalamet (Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger), Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), and Elle Fanning (who plays a version of Dylan’s first real love, Suze Rotolo, renamed Sylvia Rosso in the film).
The initial critical reception has been somewhat mixed. At the Daily Beast, Nick Schager complains about “the film’s inability to convey anything meaningful about the legendary musician’s inspirations and motivations.” In the Guardian, on the other hand, Peter Bradshaw praises Chalamet’s “amazing bravado” and Mangold’s successful dramatisation “of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the first half of the decade as he electrified the world of folk in every sense.”
A recurring gripe, particularly from self-declared Dylan fans, has been that Mangold gets things wrong, that he has omitted key characters, and that he has muddled up the chronology of events. In the January issue of The Atlantic, James Parker accuses Mangold of tossing “twinkling showbiz confetti” over the narrative and predicts that this “fairy tale” approach will make Dylanologists “scream.” Over at The Forward, Gary Lucas grumbles about the lack of “verisimilitude” and calls the film “a candy-colored confection.” He adds:
Against my better judgment, I briefly teared up at the scene where Dylan is initially roundly booed at Newport by his rabid folkie fans for going electric, upending the entire Newport Folk Festival tradition—before he ultimately roars off on his Triumph a la Brando in The Wild One down that Lost Highway where Fate (it is implied) will eventually catch up with him in the form of his infamous Motorcycle Accident. That happened many months later in Woodstock, not Newport—but hey, it’s a biopic, right? And as the phrase from the 1962 John Ford-directed film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance goes: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Well, I am at least as much of a Dylan fan as Lucas, and I am here to tell you that he and the other naysayers are dead wrong about Mangold’s film. Yes, there are the usual liberties with the record that films like this one always take for dramatic or ideological purposes (more about which in a moment), but the film makes no pretence of historical accuracy. What it offers instead is a transportive reimagining of a revolutionary era, and critics who have accepted this have tended to enjoy the film on its own terms.
In a cover story for Rolling Stone focussed on Chalamet’s remarkable performance in the title role, Brian Hiatt has this to say the cultural importance of Dylan’s music in the period covered by the film:
Unlike so many other Sixties heroes, Dylan stubbornly kept on living, molting through phase after phase as the decades piled on, and he’s not done yet. But his very persistence may obscure just how much he changed the world in his initial run, including that Dylan-goes-electric moment, which was really a gradual, multiyear transformation of style and subject matter, from acoustic protest songs to thunderingly abstract rock. Many assumptions we take for granted about popular music across genres—that superstars can be unconventional vocalists, that pop can be a vehicle for deep personal and political expression, that lyrics can be poetry, that artists can transform radically between eras—have roots with Dylan’s work from 1961 to 1965. His impact went way beyond rock: Artists from Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone covered his songs, and as George Clinton recently reminded me, even the sound and lyrics of Motown changed after “Like a Rolling Stone.”
James Mangold vividly brings this short 1961–65 period to life as Dylan triumphs in the small, closed world of American folk music and “protest songs” (a term Dylan disdained) before conquering and transforming the rock and roll scene. Unsure of what to make of Dylan’s new musical direction, many critics settled for calling it “folk rock,” a genre that Roger McGuinn of the Byrds claimed to have invented but which Dylan then made his own. As Dylan told McGuinn after hearing the Byrds’ jangly psychedelic covers of his early compositions, “You can dance to it!” And once Dylan had this epiphany, rock music would never be the same.
Mangold has wisely adapted his script (co-written with Jay Cocks) from Elijah Wald’s outstanding 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties. In the most complete account I’ve ever read of the American folk scene in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Wald gives us a deeply researched story of Dylan’s rise and the conflict between the folk-music world and that of the new rock and rollers. As Wald explains it, the controversy created by Dylan’s electric performance at Newport was inevitable given the speed with which popular culture was changing.
Mangold’s film begins with Dylan’s arrival in New York’s fabled Greenwich Village in 1961, which is a scene I know a bit about. I had befriended Dylan the previous winter, when he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, and phoned me from the bus station in search of a place to stay. A New York guitarist named Carl Granich had given Dylan my number and he dropped by briefly. I couldn’t put him up myself, since my then wife and I had a very small apartment with no room for a guest. So, I called him a cab and arranged for him to stay with Danny Kalb, who subsequently became his close friend and the founder of the Blues Project in 1964. The two of them made a ninety-minute tape recording of folk songs and blues—now archived at the Dylan Museum and Library in Tulsa—called “The Madison Tapes.” A second informal recording session known as the “Madison Party Tape” features an impromptu folk singalong held in a friend’s apartment, during which Dylan performed with assembled friends, including Paul Prestopino, Marshall Brickman, Eric Weissberg, and me.
The next time I saw Dylan was when he returned to Madison in the spring of 1961 after his first trip to New York. He looked then just as Chalamet does at the start of Mangold’s movie. He was not yet as thin as he became in the mid-’60s, and the cap he wears on the front of his first album was perpetually fixed to his head. As we sat in the sun outside the Student Union, he told me about his trip and we discussed what our respective futures might hold. With the confidence and certainty of a prophet, he announced that he planned to fill major venues and become “as big as Elvis.” I did not bother to challenge this claim but I was dubious—Dylan was still a complete unknown, and as far as I knew, he hadn’t even written any of his own songs yet. His repertoire then still consisted of traditional folk standards. “I was a Woody Guthrie jukebox,” he later remarked.
When he arrived in New York, Dylan discovered that Guthrie had been hospitalised at the Greystone Park psychiatric facility in New Jersey, where he was ailing from the Huntingdon’s disease that would eventually kill him. Dylan would visit Guthrie regularly, and in Mangold’s film, it is during one of these visits that he first meets Pete Seeger, who was then America’s most popular and influential folk singer. Seeger believed that Dylan was Guthrie’s natural heir and he became instrumental to Dylan’s development as an artist. Mangold divides his attention between Dylan’s musical evolution and a more intimate and complex portrait of his romantic relationships, particularly with Baez and Rosso/Rotolo, but it is his friendship with Seeger that provides the film with its narrative spine.
In an interview with The Forward, Elijah Wald offers a thoughtful assessment of the filmmakers’ adaptation: “What they have done with the film is they’ve taken my idea of looking at the overall story of Dylan vs. the folk scene represented by Seeger and made that into a thread that runs through the movie. It historically captured who they were and what their relationship was to each other.” In an email to me, Wald adds, “I think Mangold has done an excellent job of taking the central idea of my book—tracing the story as a two-hander between Dylan and Seeger—and personalizing it by putting them in the same rooms, relating directly to each other. Most of those scenes are completely fictitious, but feel true to my sense of both of them and how they might have acted in those situations.”
Critics have justifiably praised Chalamet’s uncanny mimicry of Dylan’s singing voice. The actor—who is nine or ten years older than Dylan was during the period depicted in the movie—captures the cadences, the phrasing, and the timbre of that unique vocal with eerie precision. Less remarked upon is Edward Norton’s extraordinary portrayal of Seeger and his captivating live performances. In one sequence, Seeger leads his audience in a rendition of the South African song “Wimoweh” at Carnegie Hall. It is a very difficult song to sing, and only Erik Darling, Seeger’s replacement in the Weavers, could do it well. But Norton somehow manages to hit the high tenor notes and capture what became Seeger’s most popular concert song.
I met Seeger in the early 1950s and we got to know each other well. I took lessons from him on the five-string banjo, I sang with him at a People’s Artists’ Hootenanny in New York, I sponsored his first concerts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I visited him at his home in Beacon, NY, and I kept in regular touch with him over the years. Our politics would diverge during the 1980s, and we hashed out our differences in public for much of the last decade or two of his life. A year or so before he died, we spoke on the phone, reconciled, and planned to get together in the near future. (Sadly, that reunion never took place.)
Mangold rightly celebrates Seeger’s contributions to the American story, including his strident politics and his opposition to the infamous HUAC hearings, which led to him being blacklisted by the McCarthyites he hated. Unfortunately, Mangold’s determination to portray Seeger as a secular saint means there is no mention of his apologetics for the Soviet Union, which revealed what David A. Graham once called his “disturbingly durable devotion to Communism.” As I noted in an obituary for the Weekly Standard in 2014, “His political vision, his service over the decades to the brutality of Soviet-era Stalinism and to all of the post-Cold War leftist tyrannies, was inseparable from the music he made [and] simply cannot be overlooked.” Paul Berman, whom I quoted in that piece, was even less forgiving, describing Seeger as “a fool and an idiot.”
Not that Seeger was especially fazed by this kind of criticism. “I’m sure,” he told the New York Times in 2007 when he was asked about my work, “there are more constructive things [Radosh] could do with his life.” Nevertheless, after I wrote an article for the New York Sun titled “Time for Pete Seeger to Repent,” he wrote me a letter. “I think you’re right,” it said. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” Instead, upon his return to the US, he had written a tribute to the achievements of the Soviet Union for the English edition of a Soviet magazine. The letter he sent me included a copy of a song he had written criticising Stalin, but he only performed it privately for a few friends. It was, in any case, fifty-odd years too late.
Benjamin Kerstein
None of this complicating information makes it into Mangold’s film. But that’s probably because none of it mattered to Bob Dylan, who did not share our circle’s enthusiasm for radical politics. A mutual friend at the University of Minnesota once told me that whenever he tried to talk to Dylan about Marxist theory, the young singer would simply tune out. So whatever Seeger thought or said about the Soviet Union was irrelevant. Dylan agreed with Seeger’s fight against Southern segregation, and he joined him and the SNCC Freedom Singers in endorsing that effort. That Dylan went South with Seeger during Freedom Summer was most obviously evidence of his feelings about racism, but it was also a testament to the great respect and admiration he had for Seeger as a musician and mentor.
A few weeks ago, Dylan tweeted:
There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric—a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.
That “fiasco” at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island on 25 July 1965 provides Mangold’s film with its climax. Four months earlier, Dylan had released his fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home, which offered a side of acoustic folk music and a side of startling electric rock performed with a band. It should therefore not have been a total surprise that when Dylan returned to the Newport stage after he completed his first acoustic set, he brought the band along—guitarist Mike Bloomfield, keyboardist Al Kooper, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s rhythm section.
Mangold ramps up the volume in this scene to allow viewers to experience the shock of hearing Dylan lead his musicians into his first live performance of ear-splitting rock and roll. Chalamet delivers a blistering performance of “Maggie’s Farm,” the lyrics of which were an implied rebuke to those fans and critics who resented this change of musical direction and simply wanted to hear him play “Blowin’ in the Wind” over and over again. And Chalamet’s rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” (from which the movie takes its title) is the film’s best moment, even if it doesn’t quite have the spite and bite of the original.
This transformational performance is now widely considered one of the most important moments in the history of modern music, but it was not universally well-received at the time. There was already some debate about whether or not the Newport Folk Festival could or should make room for the electric groups who sought to emulate Muddy Waters’ Chicago blues alongside the usual line-up of folk artists and their descendants.
Dylan’s electric performance brought the matter to a head and enraged the traditionalists. Seeger was furious and is said to have screamed, “If I had an axe, I’d chop the cable right now!” (He later explained that he was less bothered by the electric guitars than by the lousy PA: “I blew my top because the sound was so bad. You could not understand the words, and I was frantic.”) Folk purist Alan Lomax was so disgusted by Dylan’s electric performance that he got into a fist-fight with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. And although much of the audience enjoyed the show, some attendees booed and jeered the electric set.
But some people back then understood the importance of what had happened at Newport. In the first volume of his biography The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin quotes a contemporary review in the Village Voice by Arthur Kretchmer:
Bob Dylan was booed [at Newport] for linking rhythm and blues to the paranoid nightmares of his vision. … The irony of the folklorists and their parochial ire at Dylan’s musical transgressions is that he is … this generation’s most awesome talent. And in eighty years you will read scholarly papers about his themes.
Kretchmer’s prediction has been vindicated. There are now university departments of Dylan studies throughout the world; the Bob Dylan Center at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma holds regular Dylan conferences; hundreds of academic papers are written about the meaning of his lyrics and work; and every year, new biographies and books appear investigating various aspects of Dylan’s writing, music, life, and mythology. And of course, Dylan has the distinction of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” This was a rare departure for the Nobel committee, which had never awarded the coveted prize to a songwriter before.
Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax were disappointed because they believed Dylan had betrayed his historic responsibility to carry Woody Guthrie’s torch as a Voice Against The System for a new generation. They hadn’t understood that Dylan was capable of accomplishing something far more ambitious and important. In any case, Dylan never lost his reverence for Guthrie, and Mangold pays tribute to this abiding influence by bookending his film with Dylan’s most important musical forefather. The film opens with a black screen, over which we hear the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, Woody Guthrie,” followed by the first verse of “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” In one of the last scenes in the film, we see Dylan visiting Guthrie at Greystone one last time. Although Dylan was now a rock and roller and dressed like one, the love and respect he still felt for his childhood hero is palpable.
Other musicians have paid their own tributes to Woody Guthrie. The British socialist folk singer Billy Bragg and American alt-country outfit Wilco filled two albums with new arrangements of previously unrecorded Guthrie songs. Bostonian punks the Dropkick Murphys covered Guthrie’s “I’m Shipping Out to Boston,” which featured prominently in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 thriller The Departed. Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen played “This Land Is Your Land” together at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony in 2009. And Guthrie’s most loyal interpreters are still Ramblin’ Jack Eliott and the California-based singer Joel Rafael. But none of these artists—Springsteen included—has had the transformative effect on music and the broader culture that Bob Dylan effected between 1961 and ’65.
Of the countless available volumes exploring the Dylan phenomenon, few come as close to the importance and insight of Wald’s account as Rolling Stone writer David Browne’s new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of American’s Bohemian Music Capital. Browne brings New York City in 1961 back to life and helps us to understand how someone like Dylan was able to fit right into the Village scene and mature as an artist there.
Browne illuminates the folk-music scene in the Village’s regular Sunday gatherings in Washington Square Park, and in scores of clubs like Gerde’s Folk City, the Village Gate, the Café Wha, and the Bitter End. There was also Izzy Young’s small but influential store, the Folklore Center, where Young discovered Dylan browsing the literature and immediately identified him as the most talented member of the Village group. It was Young who first sponsored Dylan’s first New York City concert at the small Carnegie Recital Hall.
Browne emphasises the importance of the Blues Project, the band put together by Danny Kalb in 1964, which Browne says exemplified the “amplified Village of the mid-sixties.” Kalb and Dylan played together at the famous all-day folk concert at Riverside Church (although Kalb’s participation has been airbrushed out of the movie’s recreation of that performance for some reason). In his own way, Kalb would later follow Dylan’s switch from folk to rock. Writing about the Blues Project’s first LP, recorded live at the Café Au Go over four nights in November 1965, Browne writes:
Kalb’s guitar scraped and wailed, [Steve] Katz’s harmonica chugged, and [Al] Kooper’s organ lurched the song into the present. Coming across green but hungry, they sounded as if they were ready to conquer the lock, the whole neighborhood, and maybe the rest of the world.
Browne tells us about Dylan, Kalb, Eric Anderson, Happy Traum, Dave van Ronk, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, John Sebastian and his band the Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. We learn that Dylan wanted Kalb to play electric guitar on his early rock albums, but Kalb was depressed and never answered the phone. We also learn about the competition between Dylan and radical political singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, whom Dylan disdainfully called a “journalist” (which he had been in college) instead of a folk musician. Ochs developed his own following as part of the antiwar movement, but he was perhaps the only one of Dylan’s circle from the Broadside magazine era who was not invited to be part of Dylan’s famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the 1970s.
Browne also covers the Village’s smaller but important jazz scene, where all the greats came and jammed, including John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Chick Corea, and others. All this creative activity produced tension with the long-time Italian-American residents of the Village, who resented the influx of suburban crowds, hippies, folkies, and tourists, all of whom they believed were ruining their old community. With this kind of detail, Browne’s book supplements Wald’s account with new information and his own take on the centrality of the local music scene to Bob Dylan’s growing popularity and the wider counterculture.
David Browne and Elijah Wald have given us their painstaking works of historical and cultural research, while James Mangold’s new film has provided us with a mesmerising piece of myth-making. The critics complaining that Mangold is less than entirely faithful to well-documented facts are missing the point of the exercise, which was to recapture the spirit of excitement and innovation that galvanised a critical moment in American pop-cultural evolution. And judged by this standard, his film is a cinematic triumph that demands to be seen and enjoyed. One of the pleasures of living in an age still soaked in Dylan appreciation is that we don’t have to choose between the facts and the legend. We can have both.
