Dylan: The Known Unknown

 

Exactly who Bob Dylan is remains a mystery to his millions of followers. It’s been estimated that over two thousand books have been written about Dylan since he emerged in the mid-Sixties, a situation that gives us many versions of the who, what, and why of the former Robert Zimmerman.Coupled with the songwriter’s infamous habit of fictionalizing  his biography, what we’ve had for decades are many personal Dylans.  You could read him in any way that suited you. Dylan crafted a mystique by withholding details about his upbringing. He remains a mystery, an enigma, a man hidden in plain sight. The difficulty of saying who Dylan was hasn’t prevented writers and filmmakers from creating versions of the Nobel Laureate. The variations on the known facts of Dylan’s story settle nothing, of course, and in fact compound the mystery around the man, a situation that only makes the icon more alluring.

It was reported in July of 1966 that Dylan had a motorcycle accident while riding in upstate New York. The tour was cancelled. He was a recluse for eight years after the accident, not returning to the stage until 1974. He remained creative during his radio seclusion, releasing his John Wesley Harding album in 1967, Nashville Skyline in 1969, and Self Portrait in 1970, but this wasn’t enough to stymie the musings on who Dylan was truly and what he was up to. The absence of interviews, concerts, and new paparazzi photos resulted in artistic expressions about pop stars either ascending to unreal heights of influence or who performed vanishing acts of a sort. Great Jones Street, a brilliantly etched 1973 satire by novelist Don DeLillo, tells the tale of an influential rock star named Bucky Wunderlick who has burned out and finds himself approached, despite his seclusion, by promoters, fans, intellectuals, would-be gurus, and hucksters of all sorts, all of whom seek approval and a blessing from the reluctant Oracle, a stream of hucksters who need to be told what to do.  A figure as vast, vague, and finally overwhelming as Dylan, though, makes for rich premises on fantasies about rock musicians who reach a level of influence in society and who become political tools to nefarious ends. 1968’s Wild in the Streets, based on a Robert Thom short story and who also wrote the screenplay, an American political party finds itself desperate to increase its power, with kingmakers seeking and getting the cooperation of an enigmatic and sullen rock star named Max Frost to convince the young fans to get involved in politics. In a sequence of events, the voting age is lowered to fourteen, Max Frost is elected president, and adults over the age of thirty are required to go to reeducation camps where they’re force-fed large doses of LSD.

More recently, we come to I’m Not There, a 2007 movie directed by Todd Haynes that depicts Dylan himself, as we think we understand, in the bringing together of different personas of the singer, each variation tweaked, twisted ever so, and recontextualized in unexpected ways. The nonlinear plot reveals a series of narratives drawn from the legend and lyrics of Dylan, with different actors highlighted as the singer in one of his various personas, i.e., the doomed poet, as Woody Guthrie, rustic folksinger, and a doomed rock and roll star. It’s an interesting project that plays around with the many personas Dylan mythology has spawned through the decades, and the point of the movie’s divergent take on him seems to be that we’re no closer to uncovering the inner being of this quizzical figure. Take your favorite version of Dylan and enjoy it, love it, and may it add to your life in only the best ways.

With all the magical thinking about the meaning of Dylan, it’s a relief that director James Mangold’s biopic, A Complete Unknown, sticks with the best-known biographical arc associated with the singer. We meet him (portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) first being dropped off in New York and wandering into Greenwich Village, jean-clad, toting a battered guitar case. The world of 60s bohemia greets the man from Minnesota: coffee houses, poets, art galleries, street corner musicians, intellectuals, lifestyle avant-gardists—all real geniuses and posers alike—gathered in the few condensed New York blocks of the Village that comprised the free-thinking capital of America. And of course, the folk music, the folk boom, the sweeping interests in traditional music forms, Civil Rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This was a world the young Dylan wanted to be a part of, one he’d come to dominate. It was a world he conquered and abruptly left. 

The movie is splendidly crafted, with Mangold’s direction taking us through the known events in Dylan’s early life prior to his 1966 accident, progressing from his arrival in New York through his meeting of his first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo (named ‘Sylvie Russo” in the film), meeting Pete Seeger in folk legend Woody Guthrie’s hospital room, where the young Dylan sings the patient a song written in his honor, his early days at open mics and hootenannies, performing for benefits for civil rights and other lefty causes, meeting Joan Baez, and growing attention from the public and the media. Mangold and screenplay coauthor Jay Cocks (incidentally a former film critic for Time magazine) enliven the oft-told incidents with precisely the right amount of speculative dialogue, no speeches, no political rhetoric, and no exposition dumps.

The interactions between the singer and those who befriend him and come to love him are quirky, set in a natural rhythm of give and take. It’s no small accomplishment that the screenwriter restrains a desire to explain, hypothesize, or convert the Dylan saga into a weighty and unreal melodrama. There’s a natural, unforced progression here, with telling scenes, well known to Dylan completists, given the right emotional temperament. What might have been a segment ripe for overdramatization, such as when Al Kooper showed up for an electric Bob Dylan session for Like a Rolling Stone, preparing to play guitar only to be temporarily sidelined when he hears the red-hot fret master Mike Bloomfield play some snarling blues licks. Kooper knew he couldn’t compete with Bloomfield  but  insinuated himself behind an organ, insisting he had a terrific keyboard idea .Kooper had no  such idea and was barely a keyboardist at the time, but when the tapes rolled, the musician’s poking and jabbing at the keys became an integral ingredient in one of the greatest rock songs. There were any number of grandstanding Hollywood clichés the filmmaker might have relied on to create this scene, with fast edits, loud voices, cartoonish facial expressions, and lots of rapid edits to enhance tension and drama, but Mangold maintains his sure hand. Obviously, an abbreviated rendition, there is no natural arch nor false about the scene, only an intriguing showing of musicians and producers working their way through a problem. 

A Complete Unknown doesn’t portray Dylan as a saint or would-be prophet as (maybe) some fans might have liked, and one of the issues they tackle with the icon is inconsistency with both who he is and how he treats those close to him. Well known for telling tall tales and otherwise fabulating about his upbringing and experiences prior to landing in New York, we witness where those he meets are awestruck at the apparent uniqueness of the young genius in their midst, only to have those closest to him become distressed and (perhaps) a bit disillusioned when Dylan’s accounting of himself is found wanting. He’s seen being duplicitous in his relationships with Sylvie Russo and fellow folk singer Joan Baez, an unfaithful lover and user of other people’s good graces to get ahead. Those who’d welcomed him into their world of folk music and left-wing politics witnessed the man they looked up to. By the time the film lands on the infamous Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan “goes electric,” his relationship with the traditional folk community has become tentative at best. He refuses to sing his old songs with Joan Baez when she attempts to get him to duet on “Blowin’ in the Wind.”. Despite pleas from the crowd and Baez’s chiding, Dylan walks off stage. Later, as the noise from his performance with the Butterfield Blues Band creates a backstage argument, an incensed Pete Seeger attempts to take a fire axe to the speaker cords but is stopped by his wife. Dylan is booed after his three-song set but is coaxed back for an encore with only an acoustic guitar, where he sings, to rapt attention, “It’s All Over Baby Blue.”. It’s a fact that Dylan did perform “Baby Blue” as an encore to the discontented crowd, and it works well as a subtle, cleanly presented symbol of Dylan’s leaving the folkie world that nurtured him behind as his music became more raucous and rock and roll and his lyrics ceased being topical and instead became surreal, Dadaesque, a landscape of existential confusion and wonder. 

The casting is as perfect as one could want, with Edward Norton virtually disappearing inside his portrayal as Pete Seeger, with the entire ensemble, especially Monica Barbero as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (the name given the real-life Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s early love interest), inhabiting their characters with a particular reserve that makes their changing view of the Dylan character through the movie’s near two-hour length believable, credible as felt experiences. Early in the film, Baez watches Dylan in a folk club as his voice, his words, and his wise guy attitude captivate her. She’s aware that she’s witnessing something original, unique. Later, after their affair ends and his continual flaunting of his creativity, she tells him the morning following an unexpected one-night stand, “You know, you’re kind of an asshole.” 

Nothing overplayed here, just a hard stare and some direct words indicating the end of something that was never going to progress to anything fulfilling. The storytelling style, the reined-in performances, and the uncluttered dialogue give the sense of the changing status of Dylan’s relationships with others. The disappointments of others in what the songwriter had become are tangible and powerful, effective without bombast or visual flash. A Complete Unknown is a fine-wrought telling of a well-documented life, laying out the slightly fictionalized iteration of the tale that tells what we already know, that Dylan was an enigma in his early life and has remained an enigma ever since those days.

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

WHEN DID THE STONES JUMP THE SHARK? A HOT TAKE

 Some bands don't know when to quit, with the Rollings Stones at the top of that list. I believe Some Girls is the band's last great album, an obvious response to the punk rockers who rejected the Stones and their generational mates as old and in the way, utterly useless to the current cultural grimness. It seems the band knew they had something to prove, and did so powerfully here, the songs solid, tight but bursting with gang fight aggression, jaded but hardly retiring, momentarily reflective and even sentimental but kicking aside the repast for a crazed, speed freak delirium both exciting and suggesting complete and total collapse. "Beast of Burden", "Miss You","When the Whip Comes Down", "Shattered"--peak songwriting throughout from Jagger and Richards in their last important album. This was the last time they could get away with being purely the Rolling Stones of legend without being accused of being a parody of their former greatness. They had two resolutely mediocre albums following Exiles--Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock and Roll--and it was my hope that the unexpected vitality and verve of Some Girls would be a long-lasting return to form. But alas, not the case. But it is, in my view, among their best work, and is the last significant record they made. Following were discs that were good to fair to middling at best , none of which generated lasting heat and little of which couldn't escape the feeling that this was band that replaced corporate style professionalism ahead of inspiration. Their occupation was to sound like the Rolling Stones.

BALD HEADED WOMAN by THE WHO

 There were times when the usually spirited and inventive wave of Brit bands covering American soul and blues songs yielded music that was cartoonish and , say, insulting. The basic problem is singer Daltry, an energetic, versatile but sadly colorless vocalist who only manages a naive minstrel parody of , maybe, the Lightnin' Hopkins version that came before. Interestingly, the track was produced by Shel Talmy, who according to some references, claimed credit for writing the song , which was actually a traditional chain gang song , author unknown. Talmy is quoted why he took credit for composing a public domain song in Ray Davis: Not Like Everybody Else :"They were my perks, a way for me to get in on the publishing royalties, they were just folk things I adapted. Old public domain folk songs." It was a common practice. Much as I dislike the song, I do find the uptempo, gospel fervor of the conclusion pretty exhilarating . Keith Moon's drumming in this portion is him at his carpet bombing best.

A BRIEF EXCHANGE WITH BARRY ALFONSO ON BOB DYLAN WORSHIP

 

(Barry Alfonso, a scholar, writer and a cultural critic of uncommon depth and equipoise, is a friend with whom I've been having an ongoing conversation about many interests we have in common, Bob Dylan among them. I have been skeptical of Dylan's work since John Wesely Harding, and Barry has been an impressive defender. But with all things Dylan achieving critical mass , even Barry had to slam on the brakes. The dust mote that tipped the scale was an inanely praising review of Dylan's pricey retrospective, The Cutting Edge: 1965-1966 that appeared on the increasingly tone-deaf news site The Daily Beast. We had a brief exchange over what appears the relentless pouring over of Dylan's great period of work. We both agreed, it seems, that it's gotten thick and mindlessly redundant. -tb)

Barry Alfonso:Ted, one of our first literary set-to's was over the value of Bob Dylan's work. I defended Bob -- as I continue to do for the most part, with reservations -- while you made him into a most delicious chew-toy. However, this constant regurgitation of Dylan's golden years is getting pretty boring, leading even the most dedicated fan to scream ENOUGH and go put on some Ken Nordine albums.

Ted Burke:Most of our departures on Dylan's work, I think, was bout Dylan's post-John Wesley Harding album to the present day. I don't dismiss it entirely, but as a collection that accounts for his middle and late career, it is spotty at best. His is the problem of Having the compulsion to produce even when his muse isn't having lunch with him. But, yes, enough of exhuming of the glory days . As is, Dylan's work from that period is over examined and, I think, the tragic recipient of something that has cluttered and clouded appreciation of Shakespeare's plays, namely "Bardolotry", a near deification of the playwright. The writing that comes out of that is a slog. Writing about Dylan for most of the mainstream arts press, on line and print, has become a hagiographic exercise. The difficulty with the worshipful approach is that it obscures the real instances of brilliance in the work.

Barry Alfonso:I think some of that hagiography comes out of a fascination with Dylan as the embodiment of arrogant visionary youth circa 1965-67. His work after this period seems to exert less fascination. It also speaks to the lack of a commanding voice in popular music over the past 50 years. There's some combing and re-combing through the Costello catalog these days, but still there is no stopping the endless parsing of Dylan's prime era. His burst of brilliance speaks to the lack of similar bardic vision today.

Ted Burke:Umberto Eco, the novelist, has written that there are limits to how texts, in this case songs, can be interpreted and made to seem to have yield previously undisclosed meanings and nuance. He insists that there really does come a point where interpretations only repeat themselves if we wish to stay with what is actually in the material; beyond that,it is a matter of academics and pop music critics trying to stay in business. Dylan, not to diminish the greatness of his best work, has been over discussed , inspected, and extrapolated upon where the actual man who wrote the songs no longer exists and the songs becomes mere props to brace up the flimsy theorizing that dims the worth of the music. I am not sure if I would say that there haven't been other songwriters in Dylan's time or in more recent years who haven't had visions, bardic and otherwise, comparable to Dylan's; Van Morrison, Costello, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, off the top of my head, have written and recorded work over the decades that has moments of major greatness that is , I think , no less than Dyan's .Dylan is the case of being the first one out of the gate, the mood of the times and the songwriter's desire to excel as no else had creating a synergy that changed the way the rent gets paid. I almost think it was merely a happy accident that it was Dylan who became the poet, the spokesman, the prophet, all that rot; if it hadn't been Dylan, another musician would have filled the need.Or maybe not. Phil Ochs, who I think is Dylan's equal as a "rock poet" , certainly had the talent but not, from what I've read about him, the temperament to get to the top and remain there. Dylan understood the complications of persona. In any event, it maybe a case of that if Dylan had not existed, the times would have created him, or someone like him. Contrarily, there is the Great Man Theory of history that puts forth that events of historical consequence are the result of the impact "Great Men" have on the destinies of the countries they rule . In this instance, if Dylan hadn't been born, we might still be wearing side burns and be listening to Como and Clooney through cheap car radio speakers.

Barry Alfonso:Yes and yes. Dylan did a lot of things first. And he changed. He rebelled against the rebels. Phil Ochs was an eloquent advocate and a poignant chronicler of his own disintegration. But he lacked that cruel streak, that arrogance that people seem to gravitate towards. The Great Man theory in history is pernicious and leads to the sort of blood and thunder hero-worship Carlyle and Wagner engaged in. But there is some truth to it and, yes, Dylan may have saved us from unchallenged Comoism.

Todd Rundgren from 1977

 
Todd Rundgren is an annoying whiz kids who can dually amaze you with his music and embarrass you with his lyrics. The words he writes are themes of cosmic consciousness and verbose mysticism and rival Yes' Jon Anderson for elevated pretentiousness. The sincerity of both Rundgren and Anderson may well be real, to be sure, but lets say that the precision of the intricate music making s a bad match with the muddy thinking visible in the respective set of lyrics. .Anyway, Ra, a 1977 effort with an occasional band, the ostensibly progressive rock and sometimes brilliantly kinetic Utopia, continued the Rundgren tragedy of good music with awful lyrics. When matters are at their best when the singing stops and the band is given the room to negotiate odd time signatures and reveal, in doing so, a remarkable, amazing in fact capacity to handle any style that strikes their collective fancy. The band (Roger Powell, Kisim Sulton, John Wilcox) proceeds towards some charging, frenetic, deliciously clever music.

But Rundgren, like, Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, allows the lyrics to become full-blown libretto. The merits of the extended narrative and the underlying bits of spiritualism is a debate left for those who seek truth in tea leaves and horoscopes, but the experience of having the words come at you, sun or recited in equal measure, makes this a record that does not rock you at all. Rather, it talks you into a fitful sleep, with dreams punctuated by agitated percussion. Most notable on side two's extended workout "Singring and The Glass Guitar", a detailed parable that breaks up the music, with Rundgren droning on with the plot particulars. The fantasy, what there is of it, is belabored at length. Every time the band begins something interesting or when Rundgren is doing an impressive guitar exposition, the recited lyrics intrude again, and so on. Either Rundgren considers himself a wise fabulist, or he just employs this clutter to kill time, fleshing out and lending continuity to passages he could not otherwise connect. The discerning 'Rundgren fan will throw away the lyric sheet and let the music mitigate the intellectual vacuity. Taking his world view seriously is like reading between the lines on a blank page.

Ian Anderson and the Music of Jethro Tull

I'm the first to admit that Jethro Tull had "pretty parts", but I would reserve that classification for those musical moments where a shining bit of ensemble work actually clicked and highlighted a fine band raging happily along with some problematic time signatures. In that vein, I rather like the Martin Barre composed introduction to "Minstrel in the Gallery", a tour de force of quirky transitions and sculpted dissonance that rises to actual art. 

Compression and brevity are the keys to those instances when JT catches my attention, but as often as not Anderson refuses to move from his signature amalgam of styles he likes and provides than is needed, or even effective, in the then-mistaken belief that length of composition and promiscuously convolutions of theme equals serious art. I was always one who preferred their progressive rock not to drag along the road. Lyrically, principle songwriter Ian Anderson is not so stunning ; he had an effective light touch with imagery in the early work like "Living in the Past" or the particularly riveting tune "Nothing to Say"; 'though perhaps guised in a fictional character's persona, Anderson all the same connects with a convincing humanity as matters of being alive without certainty are sussed through impressionistically and, yes, concisely,closer to true poetry . 

The man had a knack, in the day, of getting to the point and getting you to think about things other than material gain. That word smithing, I think, has been far less in evidence since their career took off, from 'Aqualung" on ward.