Paw goes to the cinema: Professor Sean Wilentz looks at ‘a complete unknown’

Bob Dylan played just three songs backed by electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but that set has been called a transformative moment in modern music, dissected in books, articles and seemingly endless debate. Now it is the subject of a feature film, A complete unknownstarring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan, Edward Norton as his mentor, Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro as folk singer Joan Baez. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress.

Who better to review A complete unknown For the latest installment of Paw goes to the cinema than Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American history? Bob Dylan has earned 38 Grammy nominations during his long career (not to mention the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature). Wilentz has two Grammy nominations, receiving the first in 2005 for his liner notes on a recording of Dylan’s 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall. In addition to several works on American political history, he is also the author of the 2010 book Bob Dylan in America And is currently working on another project about Dylan’s early career which will be released later this year.

Ties to Dylan are also somewhat personal for Wilentz. He attended the 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert as a teenager, and his family owned a Greenwich Village bookstore frequented by Dylan and other folk musicians. Wilentz has written that Dylan first met the poet Allen Ginsberg in his uncle’s apartment above the bookstore in 1963.

Wilentz recently went to see the film with Paw Senior Writer Mark F. Bernstein ’83, and the two discussed it afterward.

What did the filmmakers get right?

The spirit. The scenes I liked the most were almost parables about the story of Dylan’s development and how he fits into the Greenwich Village scene. There is a scene towards the middle of the film when Bob Neuwirth, an artist and folk singer who becomes a sidekick of Dylan’s, appears and from the moment when Dylan first starts playing the electric stuff, I was smiling and my Feet drained.

How accurate was it?

The facts are all true, the songs are all true. But none of that happened the way the movie portrays it. Dylan didn’t come to Greenwich Village in 1961 with “Girl from the North Country” ready to go. That’s not a criticism, but one of the things that the movie couldn’t capture was his development from the time he arrived in New York to, say, 1963 or so. He wasn’t that big when he arrived. He was okay, but he learned a lot. It was the learning process that is missing.

Did the others make big mistakes?

I think both writers and Chalamet portrayed Dylan from the get-go as a dark genius. It wasn’t Bob Dylan at all. Dylan, when he hit the village, was jittery. His foot would swarm all the time. He had this intense energy and it doesn’t come across. And he was also very funny, very witty. He still is.

The biggest mistake for me was the way they portrayed Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York, even though the character, played by Elle Fanning, is called Sylvia in the film. I knew Suze and she was nothing like the Sylvia character. The filmmakers made Sylvia out to be some sort of dilettante, but Suze was a serious artist and she introduced Dylan to a great deal about poetry and painting as well as politics.

Dylan’s electric set in Newport has been highly controversial, but what was its real significance?

I think it was an extension of what he was doing musically, rather than a break with it. The film, as well as Elijah Wald’s 2015 book on which it is based (Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Divided the Sixties), establishes a kind of uneasy connection between Dylan and Pete Seeger, who was one of the leaders of the folk revival. Seeger is a left-wing political and musical purist, and Dylan wants nothing to do with it. But Dylan was part of the folk revival, and he was moved by the early civil rights movement. He wrote the early songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times, they’re a-changin’,” absolutely sincerely. But then the whole form became limited.

The very first song he sang at Newport was “Maggie’s Farm.” It is based on an old song called “Down on Penny’s Farm”, performed by the Bentley Boys in the 1920s. And Dylan had already turned it into another song called “Hard Times in New York.” And then he transformed it again into “Maggie’s Farm”, except this time with Mike Bloomfield, a great Blues player, on guitar. One of the things Dylan does so beautifully is take a tradition, reinvent it and take it somewhere else.

I liked the invented last scene where Dylan goes out to see Woody Guthrie in a hospital in New Jersey. Earlier in the film, Guthrie had given Dylan his accordion, and Dylan decides to keep it. And as the credits roll, we see him riding off on his motorcycle. This scene is significant not only in what it says about Guthrie as Dylan’s mentor, but also because it says that Dylan will not give up what he had done as a folk musician, even though he was on artistic. That is the difference between an ideologue and an artist. Ideologues give things up. Artists absorb things and use everything at their disposal to create.

Seeger and the other older white folk singers come across as stodgy reactionaries. Is that fair?

Someone asked me recently why did people get upset about Dylan playing electric music when Johnny Cash and Muddy Waters were already playing electric? It is because there was this compartmentalization. If you were a white southerner, you could go ahead and play electrified country music. If you were a black man from Mississippi who has gone to Chicago, sure. But if you’re the embodiment of a movement that loved its purity, its authenticity, and its connection to “the people” — aka the proletariat — you couldn’t. So there was this compartmentalization that I think was subtly hierarchical. Although Seeger and the other folk were great warriors for civil rights and championed black artists, there was a certain condescending view of other musicians and other traditions that crept in. Dylan’s genius was that he blew all that apart.

What is Dylan’s influence on American music?

He put intelligent poetry into pop music. There were forms of poetry before him; I mean, Cole Porter had more than a touch of a poet. I’m not putting these people down. But Dylan introduced modernist poetry and other lyrical forms, including traditional folk balladry, that were virtually unheard of in popular music before him. He knows every inch of American music and has managed to take it places it had never been before.

Interview conducted and condensed by MFB