I remember a lot of empty seats when I went to see Bob Dylan and his band perform in a theater in downtown San Diego in 1979. He’d just released the first of three albums of Christian songs, “Slow Train Coming.” Featuring Mark Knopfler on guitar, it was a great album of theologically forbidding music. Dylan had been studying with ministers from the evangelical Vineyard Christian Fellowship, out of Costa Mesa. I wish he’d found St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in his then hometown of Malibu instead.
Within a few years, he’d veered in the direction of ultra-orthodox Judaism. But the average fan was less interested in his religious beliefs than in hearing “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” During the 1979 tour, he wasn’t playing any non-Christian music. It was still Bob Dylan, the most fascinating and eventually the most important singer and songwriter of his time. But Dylan lovers stayed away — which makes you wonder how much they really loved him.
Same in 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, when he stunned the crowd by taking the stage, plugging in his Stratocaster, and counting four on a blistering version of “Maggie’s Farm.” The moment comprises the climax of “A Complete Unknown” starring the also electrifying Timothée Chalamet, who learned guitar to play the part and did all his own vocals. It’s a beautiful movie that takes the period and music and its characters seriously. The film’s title does triple duty by invoking a song lyric, Dylan’s condition on arriving in New York from Minnesota in 1961 carrying his guitar and backpack, and his insistence on being enigmatic about his background, emotions, and dreams, especially with the women in his life.
Same in 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, when he stunned the crowd by taking the stage, plugging in his Stratocaster, and counting four on a blistering version of “Maggie’s Farm.” The moment comprises the climax of “A Complete Unknown” starring the also electrifying Timothée Chalamet, who learned guitar to play the part and did all his own vocals. It’s a beautiful movie that takes the period and music
The lockstep folk purists in charge of the festival warned Dylan to stick with his acoustic guitar. His early albums had invigorated folk music and the festival itself to the extent that he was the better judge of what constituted a folk song. I imagine someone complained that Beethoven included a quartet and chorus in his Ninth Symphony on the basis that no one had done it before. Nevertheless, some fans are shown booing, swearing, and throwing things but then warming a bit after “Like A Rolling Stone,” which ends up on most lists of the top ten best songs ever. Dylan famously told blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who played on the record and at Newport, not to play any blues on his song. The jingle-jangle textures Bloomfield came up with instead helped inspire the Byrds, Tom Petty, and R.E.M.
Real-life accounts suggest filmmakers exaggerated the crowd’s initial outrage. In the film, the rougher stuff was backstage, where the crunchy got punchy. Dylan’s friend and early advocate Pete Seeger, played endearingly by Edward Norton, is on the verge of silencing the rock and roll by taking an axe to the sound system.
It’s easy to make fun of peaceniks who would engage in corporeal violence over a setlist. The lesson isn’t about hypocrisy but our emotional investment in the art we love. Bob Dylan’s every word and note belong to him; we wouldn’t have any of it if not for him, from Hibbing and Newport to the Vineyard and snubbing the Pulitzer judges. In the movie, after he’s recognized at a party, he complains that everyone in the room wanted him to be someone else. “They should just let me be,” he said. If I am a true fan of someone’s epochal greatness, I had better be in for the whole ride.
Perhaps the film’s most touching moment comes when folksinger Joan Baez, who had just spent the night, spots a page of lyrics on Dylan’s desk and asks him to sing. It turns out to be “Blowin’ in the Wind.” She sings along and then harmonizes. Their musical partnership outlasted their romance. Check out her song “Diamonds and Rust” for additional details. In the mid-seventies, they toured together. Among the ways Dylan continued to defy purists was by promiscuously altering the phrasing and melodies of his most familiar songs. But on this version of “Blowin’,” to enable Baez’s close harmony, he sings note by note according to the canon. We know he wasn’t doing it for the fans. Which means he was doing it for her. Every time I hear this song, it sounds like it comes from the heart of God, but this time especially so. https://music.apple.com/…/blowin-in-the…/263688383…
[Photos: Baez and Dylan in the sixties; Monica Barbaro and Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown”]