The Bob Dylan shape-shift myth factory homesick blues

I WAS too nervous to watch Scorcese’s two takes on the enigmatic troubadour Bob Dylan, or I’m Not There by Todd Haynes, which by most accounts is outstanding. Fear of disappointment has paralysed much better men than me. But I manned up and watched James Mangold’s new attempt released on circuit last week.

Based on Elija Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric the drama is spread evenly over nearly two and a half hours, but leads up to a single pivotal moment when Dylan breaks the standing musical mould by performing an electric set to the chagrin of all the good ol’ folk-lovin’ folks at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

Apart from a powerful compulsion to see Dylan not being portrayed by Richard Gere or fawned over by a Hollywood feature-film champion in a reality-fiction hybrid, I admit to having also been drawn to this film by the faint hope of catching a glimpse of an even bigger musical subject of my admiration included in the Newport line-up – a South African one.

A largely unknown aspect of the controversial 1965 festival which forms the fulcrum of Mangold’s biopic, is that the titular phrase “a complete unknown” could just as well have been applied to our very own Sponono “Spokes” Mashiyane featuring at the event that year.

Though a musical hero on home ground after the release of his King Kwela album in 1958, Mashiyane was by no means a household name in the US when he took to the stage at Newport. Billboard Magazine nevertheless described the pennywhistle-meister’s act as “the unscheduled highlight of the night” and his praises were sung by famed New York Times arts critic and lifelong Dylan friend Robert Shelton.

As author of the Dylan biography, No Direction Home, it was Shelton who helped launch the youngster's career by way of a particularly affirmative review in The New York Times, which led to the poet-musician’s contract with Columbia Records.

Booed and bombarded in Newport with debris when he straps on his electric guitar, if Mangold’s version of Dylan’s experience is to be taken literally, Bob holds his own and eventually wins over at least a part of the crowd – effectively marking the decline of folk music and the advent of folk-rock. Or more dramatically, heralding a new era in the evolution of modern music.

By many accounts, it is a defining, course-shifting, rut-busting moment in musical history perhaps comparable to Stravinsky’s 1913 Paris debut of his ballet The Rite of Spring when the composer – bolstered by Vaslav Nijinsky’s unorthodox choreography – blitzed an unsuspecting audience with an entire performance devoid of a tonal centre.

The “rude” introduction of atonal music (compositions not set in any particular key), apparently caused a violent riot between the stuck-up toffs expecting fare more strictly confined to the traditional parameters of classical music and the beau monde (or “aesthetic crowd”, according to writer Jean Cocteau) who supported innovation and despised the status quo (according to one critic, music which “always goes to the note next to the one you expect”.)

A new era in Western music

The Rite of Spring ushered in a new era in Western music and was eventually commercialised to such an extent that it featured in Disney’s animation Fantasia.

If his choice to go electric was indeed such a breakthrough, it slots Dylan into the elite category of iconoclastic, groundbreaking doyens of art and culture who perhaps not unlike Picasso, is acknowledged by many for his daring and innovation as much as for his actual artistic efforts.

But did the Newport act really constitute such a trend-altering moment?

Historically significant it most certainly was, but bittersweet, for a start. As in so many defining events this dramatic victory over norm included betrayal.

The film shows Dylan on the eve before he is due to take the stage being begged by a desperate Pete Seeger (convincingly portrayed by Ed Norton) – who played a major role in placing Dylan on the musical map – not to destroy a long-standing tradition of nurturing the folk genre. Seeger is eventually brutally rejected.

Dylan’s defiance is for the most part depicted as a self-serving, near-narcissistic indulgence but off-screen the incident was multi-layered.

While some punters insist Bob was merely following the lead (so to speak) of his idol Johnny Cash who had plugged in the previous year at Newport, others say Dylan’s decision was more than just a natural inclination to swim upstream – but rather a direct challenge to the festival organisers that was spawned by anger.

On the Saturday Dylan had played an acoustic workshop where, according to roadie Jonathan Taplin, he interpreted remarks by festival organiser Alan Lomax while introducing the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as condescending. So he decided to play an electric set with three members of the Paul Butterfield Blues band in his backing line-up.

In the same way opinions around the 1913 Stravinsky performance at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées varied from “blows exchanged, objects thrown at the stage and at least one person being subjected to a duel” to Cardiff University music professor Stephen Walsh’s suggestion that the cast was “perhaps not met with uniform admiration”, Dylan’s Newport performance has also been mythologised.

According to Al Kooper, who played the organ for the set, the audience wasn’t upset about Dylan resorting to electric amplification but rather for playing only 15 minutes of a proposed 45-minute set: “They were feeling ripped off. Wouldn't you? They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.” And according to fellow performers Ian and Sylvia Tyson, “it was a hostile audience" that year for other performers too.

In a series of interviews afterwards, a number of people who attended the performance refused to acknowledge there was any booing at all. But according to Dylan himself in an interview later that year the crowd “certainly booed, I'll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place ... I mean, they must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn't afford it if I was in their shoes".

In the same myth-provoking vein, there are several versions of Pete Seeger’s purported fuming at Dylan’s erm ... electrifying, performance to the extent that he wanted to cut the cable-feed to the sound system with an axe. Seeger maintained he was only mucking about with the system because he wanted to adjust the volume and distortion so people could hear Dylan’s voice better. Dylan responded that Seeger’s negative attitude to his set was like a “dagger in my heart" and made him “want to go out and get drunk”.

Even though Dylan was persuaded to go back up and play some acoustic numbers, he did not return to the festival for 37 years. The following year featured several electric acts at Newport including The Lovin’ Spoonful and Chuck Berry.

Such diverse versions of reality and distortions of the “truth” are personified by Dylan himself, who has never stopped reinventing himself or creating various versions of his own life. The film has been criticised for warping his personal chronology (Seeger wasn’t in the room when Dylan first visits Woody Guthrie in hospital; Cash wasn’t at the ’65 Newport Fest etc.) but any fooling around with the facts should rather be seen as a reflection of Dylan’s own enigmatic personality.

As one critic explained: Dylan obfuscated his own life and past to such a degree that any “Dylan movie that is too faithful to the truth just wouldn’t be Dylanesque”.

Todd Haynes goes a step further in I’m Not There, compartmentalising Dylan’s persona into six personality types played by different actors portraying real-life characters with similar traits. Go figure.

The effect of this insistence by Dylan not to be labelled or pigeonholed, that our past and future should not be used to define us, is poignantly reflected in the Mangold film, particularly in a taut dawn interaction between Dylan and his first love and muse, Suze Rotolo (changed to Sylvie Russo in the movie, played by Elle Fanning) – who hooked her arm into his on the Freewheelin’ cover. She unsuccessfully tries to shake loose some clues as to who he actually is.

Equally painful is the moment when Rotolo/Russo sees the magnetic on-stage exchange between Dylan and Joan Baez (convincingly played both dramatically and musically by Monica Barbaro) and flees.

I wish there was something you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
But we never did too much talking anyway
Don't think twice, it's all right

After years of practicing Dylan’s singing and playing (Covid did yield some positive results) Timothée Chalamet more than adequately pulls off the near impossible task of embodying an enigma – or at the least, a highly secretive persona with multiple, fleeting manifestations.

One would be hard-pressed not to slightly agree with Sunday Times arts critic Tymon Smith’s view that the film is not particularly revealing of new facts or fresh insights into his past – it covers more or less the same period in his life after arriving in New York as the Scorcese film – but I found what was offered more than sufficient and the understated storytelling, unfolding at the somewhat languid pace that it did, refreshing.

I personally experienced A Complete Unknown as a tear-jerker. Albeit mainly in the curiously uplifting way in which nostalgic melancholia sometimes surfaces. Seeing Chalamet as Dylan perform the classic ballads and anthems in their original contexts, wrenched a deluge of stark, stabbing images from the back of my mind.

My generation barely slipstreamed the peak of counter-cultural dissent (we were finishing primary school during Woodstock), but I and many of my friends were nevertheless completely immersed in it via our older peers and siblings and the fuck-you attitude was tangible, intimidating and thrilling.

So I wept through the anthology of mental snapshots conjuring up the glory days of hopeful youth and the gradual loss of innocence.

I wept over images of my sister and her friends spinning vinyls, the blinding Pretoria sun bouncing off “subversive” covers strewn across the carpet: the gaudy tomfoolery of Sgt. Peppers, the ominous sneer from Aqualung, the solemn, foreboding monotone of Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die …

I wept seeing my father, losing himself in his garden to avoid the new realities encroaching on his insulated Calvinistic reality.

As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

I wept watching my mother, a natural-born bohemian and free spirit, still mustering a smile behind her book with her legs drawn up onto her favourite armchair – while slowly suffocating from the social restrictions and increasingly paranoid political order.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance b'neath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

I wept for my high school girlfriend and her lucky escape from my existential confusion.

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-travelling on
But don't think twice, it's all right

And I wept for all the blinkered young souls conscripted to fight a nonsensical and unjust war for a desperate, sadistic clutch of ice-eyed fascists – our own Masters of War – and the sense of hopelessness and anger it instilled in many of us:

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket
On a pale afternoon
And I’ll watch as you’re lowered
Down to Your death bed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘till I’m sure that you’re dead.

This, I found dragging my hand across my upper lip, was the true heft of A Complete Unknown. But, of course, you probably had to be there …

♦ VWB ♦

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