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music
In the New Dylan Biopic, Context Is the ‘Complete Unknown’
The film would have benefited from showing what was happening, both in Greenwich Village and around the country, that led Bob Dylan to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems.
Jan 05, 2025
Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.
So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?
And then it hit. Context.
As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.
Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?
Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?
I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.
To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.
The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:
The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.
Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.
And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.
A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:
Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.
This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.
And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.
But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.
Take a look at just a few of those events:
- February 1, 1960–Four African American college students sit down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and are viciously beaten while the cameras rolled;
- 1961–Black and white students, known as “Freedom Riders,” are brutally beaten and their busses burned as they attempt to ride integrated busses through the South;
- May 2, 1963–1,000 Black school children are attacked with fire hoses and police dogs as they attempt to march for school integration in Birmingham, Alabama;
- June 12, 1963–Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is gunned down outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi;
- September 15, 1963–A bomb kills four children and injures dozens at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; and
- June 21, 1964–Three Civil Rights Movement workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—are kidnapped and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.
Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.
My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.
That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.
To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.
PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.
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‘Musicians Without Borders’ Is Playing Human Rights Into Reality
This is the deeper meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: our right to have access to our own creative spirit. To put it another way: our right to help create the collective, human future.
Dec 15, 2024
You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right?
I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what should be a global day of connection and collective inner reflection. International Human Rights Day is December 10. It’s an annual honoring of the day in 1948 when the newly formed United Nations, in the wake of World War II, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which publicly recognizes “the inherent dignity and... equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
All members of the human family! Every last one of us must be valued. This is not simply a hidden, personal wish, but a public—legal—document, posted globally in 577 languages (from Abhkaz to Zulu), declaring that all humans are equal at the cores of their being and deserve the chance to live full lives, free from... a whole slew of hellish possibilities, including: slavery, torture, arbitrary arrest, and much, much more. And we deserve, my God, freedom of thought. Hey, book banners! Did you know your cowardly insistence on limiting human awareness is against world law?
We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself.
This past Tuesday I was informed that it was International Human Rights Day in an email from Musicians Without Borders, an extraordinary nonprofit, publicly funded organization, formed in 1999 (during the war in Kosovo), that I’ve written about in the past. Indeed, the recognition of this day by Musicians Without Borders is what brought it to life for me, instantly pushing me beyond my own cynicism and impulse to ask “So what?”
I mean, the U.N. doesn’t have any global enforcement power—and, as is utterly and horribly obvious, millions or maybe billions of human beings remain trapped today in various forms of hell on Earth, from war to starvation to poverty to slavery. And the Universal Declaration itself, with its preamble and 30 articles of declared rights, is written in legal, bureaucratic language that obscures the deep truths it’s attempting to define and essentially turns them into abstractions. In a way, the declaration separates us from our own rights.
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the declaration states. “They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
Yes, absolutely, but how does this impact the actual state of the world? To begin with, I would cry beyond the legalese of the declaration: Come on! What you’re saying is that we’re all the same! We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself. Please, oh world, let us live this truth. Let us organize ourselves around it.
But how, oh how, does a truth this deep manifest itself in the real world? It can’t be simplistically “enforced.” And here’s where Musicians Without Borders comes in. The spiritual depth of the Declaration of Human Rights comes to life when we construct reality around it—and that’s what this organization does. Its raison d’etre is to counter the effects of war around the world through music, and give those who are trapped in war and occupation and apartheid the power to be their deepest selves.
Laura Hassler, the organization’s director, puts it this way in a recent essay, in which she calls the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “a framework of guiding principles, a collective conscience for our organization and our programs around the world.”
“Why? Because music creates connection and empathy, builds community, brings people together.”
But be careful! “...just as any powerful human potential,” she adds, “music can also be used to unite one group against another, as it has been many times. So, it is crucial for social changemakers to have guidelines, and the declaration provides these.”
She also notes: “If human rights only apply when politically convenient to the most powerful, they are not really rights—they are arbitrarily applied privileges.”
Musicians Without Borders, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, works in conflict zones around the world: Jordan, El Salvador, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kosovo, Rwanda and, yes, Palestine.
Since 2021, it has run a program in Bethlehem that provides children, including those in refugee camps, with weekly music sessions, where they can sing together and learn traditional Arabic music—that is to say, enjoy life for a while despite the instability of their lives in the West Bank.
Laura put it to me thus: Their work in Palestine “is aimed at supporting marginalized Palestinian children who suffer the impacts of occupation and apartheid. It is about strengthening resilience, building community, giving children access to creativity and a feeling of safety in an extremely unsafe environment.”
Giving children access to their own creativity! As I read her words in an email she sent me, I felt a gush of spiritual joy and could only cry: Wow! This is the deeper meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: our right to have access to our own creative spirit. To put it another way: our right to help create the collective, human future.
We’re not just listeners. We’re not just consumers. In the column I wrote about Musicians Without Borders five years ago, I quoted Laura thus: “Every person has music in them!”
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Joni Mitchell: 'F*ck Donald Trump!'
"This is an important one," Mitchell said of the U.S. election. "I wish I could vote—I'm Canadian."
Oct 21, 2024
With 17 days to go until Election Day in the United States, folk music icon Joni Mitchell told 17,000 people assembled at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles how she feels about the Republican presidential candidate.
"Fuck Donald Trump," said the singer and songwriter at her three-hour concert on Saturday night.
Mitchell drew applause with the remark, which followed her performance of "Dog Eat Dog," a 1985 song she hadn't performed publicly since the year it was released.
The political song includes the lyrics, "The white washed hawks peddle hate and call it love," "Where the wealth's displayed / thieves and sycophants parade," and the refrain, "Holy hope in the hands of / snakebite evangelists and racketeers / and big wig financiers."
To the latter line, Mitchell ad-libbed the words, "Like Donald Trump!"
Mitchell called on audience members to ensure they vote in the election. Early voting has started in California and a number of other states including Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota.
"This is an important one," Mitchell said. "I wish I could vote—I'm Canadian."
She then made a reference to Trump's yearslong attacks on immigrants, whom he has long accused of being disproportionately likely to commit crimes—a claim that is not supported by facts—and has said he would subject to mass deportation if he wins the election.
"I'm one of those lousy immigrants," Mitchell said, prompting laughter from the audience.
Mitchell has weighed in on political issues since launching her music career in the 1960s. She has written songs protesting wars including the Vietnam War, environmental destruction, and attacks on women's rights and autonomy.
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