{"id":3383,"date":"2025-01-21T19:16:37","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T18:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=3383"},"modified":"2025-01-21T19:27:55","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T18:27:55","slug":"a-complete-unknown-bob-dylan-and-the-stalinists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/a-complete-unknown-bob-dylan-and-the-stalinists\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Complete Unknown”: Bob Dylan and the Stalinists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The new film about the early years of Bob Dylan’s career, “A Complete Unknown,” is a brilliant, must-see film. \u00a0Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet is outstanding as the young Dylan — not only as an actor, but as a musician.\u00a0 All four lead roles — actors playing Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger — perform the songs with superb results.\u00a0 The film re-creates the world of Greenwich Village in New York City with precision.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story it tells is a fairly well-known one, especially to anyone who has seen Martin Scorcese’s 2005 documentary, “No Direction Home.”  Dylan arrived in New York at the age of twenty and immediately went off in search of his idol, Woody Guthrie, who was then dying in a nursing home in New Jersey.  In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Dylan plays his “Song for Woody” to the man, who has lost the ability to speak.  But Pete Seeger, who is there with him, immediately grasps that the young man from Hibbing, Minnesota is a rare talent and takes him under his wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the story is about the rise and rise of Dylan to super-stardom in the world of folk music.  He winds up touring with, and having a relationship with, Joan Baez, the queen of folk music at the time.  And this is where the trouble starts in the film as in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dylan grows tired of being told what he can and cannot sing.  There’s a painful scene where he is the guest of honour at a party on New York’s Upper West Side, surrounded by wealthy admirers.  Leaving the building, he complains to a stranger about how he cannot stand being what other people want him to be.  He wants to play rock-and-roll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we see in a very early scene with Pete Seeger in a car, Dylan always loved rock-and-roll music and was in particular a fan of Little Richard.  He still is today and not long ago wrote a book called “The Philosophy of Modern Song” which includes an essay  about Little Richard’s hit song, “Tutti Frutti.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the film, Dylan comes up against folk music purists who are furious at the idea that Dylan and a rock band will perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  Among those shown as being against Dylan’s turn to rock are Pete Seeger and the ethnomusicologist and folk revival champion Alan Lomax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the film, as in life, Dylan does go electric, with a spectacular rendition of “LIke a Rolling Stone” and other modern classics.  Some of what is shown happening at the  Newport Festival actually took place in Manchester, where Dylan and his band were booed and slow-clapped — and where one audience member shouted out “Judas!” in the silence between songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the film doesn’t touch on was the role of the Communist Party — both in the UK and the US — in all this.  Pete Seeger had been a party member for a time, and Guthrie claimed to have been one, but that may not have been the case.  Alan Lomax was probably not a party member, but was close to the Communists and suffered for it during the McCarthy era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Communist Party had strong views about folk music.  In their eyes, the folk music that Lomax went around America recording was authentic music, “people’s music.”  It stood in start contrast to commercial music, like rock-and-roll, which was inauthentic.  In their eyes, when folk singers like Dylan played anything other than acoustic folk music, they were betraying the cause.  Dylan disagreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the film makes no mention of the Communist role in the fight for the “purity” of folk music, it makes clear that Dylan was prepared to stand up to the Stalinist bullies and sing the songs he wanted to sing.  One of the last songs we hear in the film is “Maggie’s Farm” in which Dylan sings “I try my best to be just like I am — but everybody wants you to be just like them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dylan’s songs from that period are often about freedom, artistic and otherwise, and they are just as “authentic” as\u00a0 the acoustic ballads being promoted by Lomax, Seeger and the others.\u00a0 This wonderful new film will introduce a whole new generation to Dylan and his music, which despite the best efforts of the Stalinists and their fellow-travellers, endures.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

This article appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new film about the early years of Bob Dylan’s career, “A Complete Unknown,” is a brilliant, must-see film. \u00a0Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet is outstanding as the young Dylan — not only as an actor, but as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3385,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383\/revisions\/3385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}