How Does It Feeeel?

Look,

Bruce Warren

and I didn’t expect to like A Complete Unknown. As a couple of lifelong music fanatics, each with relevant behind-the-scenes experience, we went in carrying our share of skepticism. But when the credits rolled at our screening last week, we exchanged a look. Both of us had been disarmed, even charmed.

Naturally I wanted to talk about it. So on Sunday afternoon, we had a post-film rap session here on the ‘stack. A good handful of folks joined us for the livestream, and now we’re sharing it for everybody else to enjoy on their own time.

After we first saw the movie together about a week ago, Bruce went and saw it again (actually, literally moments before this convo). As for me, I rewatched The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, which compiles Murray Lerner’s incredible footage from 1963 through ‘65, and reread Elijah Wald’s definitive Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, which provided the officially cited source material for James Mangold’s film.

The book, which I can’t recommend highly enough, conscientiously lays out the context and stakes for Dylan’s big moment, without which it would hardly have resonated the way that it does. Wald also presents the loosely oppositional alignment of energies and priorities that resurface, in A Complete Unknown, as an epic schematic conflict. There’s a moment early in the movie when Seeger is giving Dylan a ride back from Greystone Park Hospital in Morris Plains, NJ, where they’d both been visiting Woody Guthrie. Bobby asks for permission to turn on the car radio, and he’s delighted when the dials lands on some Little Richard. What follows is an awkward, halting exchange about folk music, which Seeger regards as a noble calling and Dylan understands more as a useful construct. Here’s what Wald has to say about that:

For Dylan, as for Pete Seeger, the attraction of folk music was that it was steeped in reality, in history, in profound experiences, ancient myths, and enduring dreams. It was not a particular sound or genre; it was a way of understanding the world and rooting the present in the past.

Bruce and I discuss this notion and the related specter of authenticity, something that got quite a bit complicated during the ‘60s folk revival. We also talk about poetic and narrative liberties — those we freely grant the filmmakers, and those we take exception to. We kick around the effectiveness of the love triangle at the center of the film, and the masculinist ideal that overrides pivotal contributions by several remarkable women in this story. And of course, we talk about the performances, both dramatic and musical, that rescued this film from abject embarrassment.

Thanks to the many subscribers, including

Songletter

,

DJpeterDE

, and

Will Hermes

, who tuned in live. If you haven’t yet downloaded the Substack app, that’s the best way to be sure you don’t miss the next one of these.

And thanks again to

Bruce Warren

for his voluminous insights! As you’ll see, we had a lot of fun unpacking the film and our feelings about it.

Strike Another Match

• After 1965, Bob Dylan didn’t return to the Newport Folk Festival until 2002. I was there, and wrote a review for the Philadelphia City Paper (which I have somewhere in my files, but can’t seem to find online). What I remember most is the fact that he came out in western attire, a fake beard and a wig. Here you go:

Bob Dylan at the 2002 Newport Folk Festival. (John Freidah)

• Toward the end of this conversation, I mention a great post by

  Merrill Markoe
  , a comedy legend who saw the movie and Had Some Questions. As somebody who lived for more than a decade in Beacon, NY, and even spent a blessed afternoon in Pete and Toshi’s log cabin, I deeply appreciate where Merrill is coming from.

  'A Complete Unknown': The Ballad of TOSHI

• As I mention in passing, Elijah Wald not only wrote the book on which A Complete Unknown is based; he’s also coauthor of Dave Van Ronk’s terrific memoir The Mayor of Macdougal Street, the stated source text for Inside Llewyn Davis. One of my favorite freelance pieces in recent memory is this essay for Criterion about “Dink’s Song,” and the crucial function it serves in the Coen Brothers’ film.

• The electric guitar that Dylan played at Newport in 1965 — a 1964 Three-Tone Sunburst Stratocaster — sold at auction for almost a million dollars in 2013, after collecting dust in an attic for decades. It was backstage at Newport Folk in 2015, where a handful of artists had a precious moment with it. Here is Jason Isbell’s.

• My entrée to this whole discourse — the 1960s folk revival, the Newport Folk Festival, and Dylanology writ large — came out of my exhaustive work with George Wein, founder of the fest. He would have turned 100 this year, and I plan to pay tribute. For right now, I think it’s only fitting to give him the final word.