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pete seeger
Bob Dylan Biopic and the Origin Story of an Electrified Maggie's Farm
The Oscar-nominated film, A Complete Unknown, accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition. It tells a good story, but certainly not all the stories.
Feb 16, 2025
The remarkable Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown has been nominated for eight Oscars—best picture, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, director, costume design, sound, and adapted screenplay. The ceremony is scheduled for March 2, but the film, released in December, has already been drawing enormous attention over how true it is to Dylan’s early career, relationships, and music, particularly the controversy over his performance of "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, backed up by an electric blues band. The film’s arc leads us to this crucial final moment, when he steps on stage and sings, “I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."
In the first stanza, Dylan sings, “Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain” and “It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.” Then he complains that Maggie’s brother “hands you a nickel, and he hands you a dime. And he asks you with a grin, if you're havin' a good time.” Dylan’s protagonist clearly hates the backbreaking work, the low pay, and the lack of respect he gets from Maggie’s family.
Where did those ideas and images come from? What does the song tell us about Dylan’s personal and political transformation represented by his performance at Newport? And who was the real "Maggie"?
First some background.
Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he admired Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Hank Williams, and especially Little Richard, and taught himself to play guitar. In 1959, he moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota but soon dropped out. He stayed in the area to absorb its budding folk music and bohemian scene, began playing in local coffeehouses, and improving his guitar playing. A friend loaned Dylan his collection of Woody Guthrie records and back copies of Sing Out! magazine, which had the music and lyrics to many folk songs. He read Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, and learned to play many of his songs.
By then young Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently after Welsh poet Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie’s persona. He mumbled when he talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore workman’s clothes (including a corduroy cap), and took on what he believed to be Guthrie’s mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to identify more with Guthrie as a loner and bohemian than with Guthrie the radical and activist. Soon after Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961 at age 19 he visited Guthrie, then suffering from Huntington’s disease, in his New Jersey hospital room.
At the time, New York’s Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk music revival, a growing political consciousness, and (along with San Francisco) the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs. The area was dotted with coffeehouses, some of which charged admission fees and others which allowed performers to pass the hat while customers purchased drinks and sandwiches.
Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs, making a big impression. His singing and guitar-playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm and charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan’s initial repertoire consisted mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional ballads. At the time, he began weaving a myth about his past, including stories about being a circus hand and a carnival boy, having a rock band in Hibbing that performed on television, and running away from home and learning songs from black blues artists. He was, as he continued to do throughout his life, reinventing himself.
Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth.
Between 1962 and 1965, Dylan wrote more than a dozen songs that reflected the turmoil of the period. These included “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about a fourteen-year-old African American who was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. It was Dylan’s first “protest” song. To this he soon added “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (poking fun at the right-wing organization), “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (a critique of the Cold War hysteria that led Americans to build bomb shelters), “Oxford Town” (about the riots by white students after James Meredith became the first Black student admitted to University of Mississippi), “Paths of Victory” (about the civil rights marches), and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (about the fear of nuclear war, which he premiered at a Carnegie Hall concert a month before the Cuban missile crisis made that fear more tangible).
In 1963, Dylan also wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (based on a news story from earlier that year about the death of a black barmaid at the hands of a wealthy white man), “Who Killed Davey Moore” (about a black boxer who died after a brutal match), “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (about the threat of nuclear annihilation), and “Masters of War” (a protest against the arms race).
Dylan borrowed the tune from “No More Auction Block,” an anti-slavery Negro spiritual, for what would become his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, but it was the version released a few weeks later by Peter, Paul, and Mary that turned the song into a nationwide phenomenon. The single sold 300,000 copies in its first week. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two on the Billboard pop chart, with over a million copies sold. Millions of Americans learned the words and sang along while it was played on the radio, performed at rallies and concerts, and sung at summer camps and in churches and synagogues.
Unlike Dylan’s songs that were ripped from the headlines about specific events, “Blowin’ in the Wind” suggested broad themes. Dylan‘s three verses achieve a universal quality that makes them open to various interpretations and allows listeners to read their own concerns into the lyrics. “How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?” and “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” are clearly about war, but not any particular war. One can hear the words “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” and relate them to the civil rights movement and the recent Freedom Rides. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?” could refer to the nation’s unwillingness to face its own racism, or to other forms of ignorance. The song reflects a combination of alienation and outrage. Listeners have long debated what Dylan meant by “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the answer so obvious that it is right in front of us? Or is it elusive and beyond our reach? This ambiguity is one reason for the song’s broad appeal.
“The Times They Are a-Changin’” was also not about a specific event but broadly challenged the political establishment on behalf of Dylan’s youth cohort. The finger-pointing song is addressed to “senators, congressmen,” and “mothers and fathers,” telling them that “there’s a battle outside and it is ragin’” and warning them, “don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” Dylan’s lyric “For the loser now will be later to win” sounds much like the biblical notion that the meek shall inherit the earth, or perhaps that America’s black and poor people will win their struggle for justice. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem, a strident warning, angry yet hopeful. It came to symbolize the generation gap, making Dylan the reluctant “spokesman” for the youth revolt.
Dylan’s third album, also called The Times They Are a-Changin’, was recorded between August and October 1963 and included the song “North Country Blues,” which draws on Dylan’s Minnesota upbringing and describes the suffering caused by the closing of the mines in the state’s Iron Range, turning mining areas into jobless ghost towns—a theme that Bruce Springsteen would reprise years later. Remarkably, Dylan tells the tale from the point of view of a woman.
By 1963, Dylan was a super-star, aided by his manager Albert Grossman (who got him a recording contract) and other performers (including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary) who recorded Dylan’s songs and popularized them to wide audiences. Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Odetta were invited to sing at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth. In 1963, before singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan explained, “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write protest songs…I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.” Dylan may have been being coy or disingenuous, but it didn’t matter. The song caught the wind of protest in the country and took flight. Her later told Phil Ochs, who continued to write and perform topical songs and to identify with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit, because politics is bullshit. You’re wasting your time.”
In 1965, the Newport Folk Festival invited Dylan to be the closing act on Sunday night, June 25. He agreed, but insisted on singing a few songs backed by an electrified blues band. There is much controversy about what actually happened before, during and after his performance. A Complete Unknown—based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, When Dylan Went Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties—shows Seeger agonizingly trying to persuade Dylan to stick to his acoustic music. When Dylan insists on performing with his rock-and-roll back-up band, Seeger is visibly upset, but it isn’t clear if he actually tries to pull the plug on the amplified sound or is mainly angry that the sound system isn’t adequate to blast such loud music. The person in the film who appears most shaken up by Dylan’s performance is Alan Lomax, the eminent folklorist who played a major role in aiding little-known rural blues singers, mostly in the South, to gain more widespread attention.
Underlying the controversy is a debate about whether “folk” music mainly involves traditional songs by everyday people or newly-written songs about contemporary concerns by professional singers and songwriters. It also involves whether performers who use amplified electronic instruments are performing “folk” music. Even Seeger and Lomax were big fans of Black blues musicians (like Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim) who played with electrified bands. In fact, the black Chambers Brothers and the white Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which backed Dylan, had already done electrically-amplified sets at Newport on Sunday afternoon with no complaints.
On stage, Dylan sang three amped-up songs—“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and a work-in-progress called “Phantom Engineer” (which would eventually turn into “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry,” on his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. His back-up band included three members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Bank (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay), Al Kooper on organ, an Barry Goldberg (who died on January 22) on organ and piano.
Some audience members were not happy with Dylan’s new sound. A few even booed. After performing those songs, Dylan stormed off the stage. But Seeger and others persuaded him to return to the stage, where he performed two songs with an acoustic guitar, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Many of those same audience members who had booed his first set and cheered his second set no doubt would eventually cheer for the upcoming wave of folk-rock music, like the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But it was “all over now” between Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival. He refused to return to that venue for 37 years.
One aspect of the Newport controversy was Dylan’s apparent rejection of politically-oriented music. That was certainly the direction he was heading. With occasional exceptions, he abandoned acoustic and political music for rock and roll, country, blues, and gospel.
But the back story of “Maggie’s Farm”—and its double meaning—is missing from A Complete Unknown and from most tellings of the Newport brouhaha.
On different occasions, Seeger said he liked Dylan’s song. That shouldn’t be surprising. Seeger had recorded a traditional song, "Penny's Farm," on his first solo album (Darling Corey) in 1950. He often sang it at concerts. It is told from the perspective of a sharecropper protesting the working conditions on the farm.
It was originally recorded on Columbia records as "Down on Penny's Farm" by the Bentley Boys, a duo from North Carolina, in October 1929. That was a few days before the Wall Street stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression. But the rural south was already facing a depression, especially among sharecroppers.
Here the opening lyrics to the Bentley Boys’ song:
Come you ladies and you gentlemen and listen to my song
I'll sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong
May make you mad but I mean no harm
It's just about the renters on Penny's farm
[Refrain]
It's hard times in the country
Out on Penny's farm
It continues:
You go in the fields and you work all day
Way into the night but you get no pay
Promise you meat or a little lard
It's hard to be a renter on Penny's farm
[Refrain]
It’s hard times in the country
Out of Penny’s farm
Now here's George Penny come into town
With his wagon-load of peaches, not one of them sound
He's got to have his money or somebody's check
You pay him for a bushel and you don't get a peck
Then George Penny's renters, they come into town
With their hands in their pockets and their heads hanging down
Go in the store and the merchant will say
Your mortgage is due and I'm looking for my pay
It is likely that Dylan heard the Bentley Boys' version, which was reasonably well-known because Harry Smith had included it in his three-record Anthology of American Folk Music, issued in 1952, which helped spark the folk music revival during that decade. Dylan was familiar with the songs on the Anthology and recorded several of them on his first album.
The first stanza and chorus of Dylan’s "Hard Times in New York Town," as well as the tune, are borrowed directly from the Bentley Boys' "Down on Penny's Farm."
Here's the opening words and the tune for Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town”:
Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song.
Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong.
Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell
'Bout an east coast city that you all know well.
[Refrain] It's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town.
So, whether he learned the song from Smith's Anthology or from Seeger's album, it is clear that Dylan drew on "Down on Penny's Farm" when he wrote “Maggie’s Farm.”
“Down on Penny's Farm" was based on previous songs. That’s the folk tradition—borrowing and revising older songs. Woody Guthrie was a master of the craft. Others who recorded the song, after Seeger, include Jim Kweskin and Geoff Maldaur, Natalie Merchant, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.
There’s another twist to Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” On July 6, 1963, Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi—in the heart of the Delta—to perform at a voter registration rally sponsored by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was joined by Seeger, Theo Bikel, and the Freedom Singers. SNCC leader, and later Congressman, John Lewis was there, too. You can see a clip of Dylan’s performance in the 1965 documentary about Dylan, Don't Look Back.
Dylan performed a new song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers by a segregationist thug, which occurred only a few weeks earlier, on June 12. The song expresses Dylan’s outrage at the assassination of the civil rights leader, but it also attacks the white Southern politicians and landed aristocracy, who used Jim Crow to pit black and white workers against each other to weaken both groups. In the song, Dylan revealed a sophisticated analysis of the white ruling class’ divide-and-conquer strategy, something that Martin Luther King discussed in some detail in his March 1965 speech at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights.
One stanza of the song captures Dylan’s perspective:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
The voting rights rally at which Dylan performed took place on a cotton farm owned by the McGhee (sometimes misspelled Magee) family who were deeply involved with SNCC’s local organizing work. The family included six sons, one of whom, Silas, who had organized to desegregate a movie theater, was shot in the face the following summer by someone whom many believed was a Ku Klux Klan member.
It is hardly a stretch to see that Dylan turned McGhee’s farm into Maggie’s farm.
But what did he mean that he wasn’t going to “work on Maggie’s farm no more”? He certainly wasn’t referring to the McGhee family, whose courage Dylan surely admired. The words refer to his involvement in civil rights movement and politics more broadly.
At the end of the song, Dylan says,
Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them
This is Dylan's way of telling his fans, and the broader public, that, having written many protest songs about civil rights and war in his still-early career, he was no longer going to be a protest singer and didn't like being pigeonholed that way. That was the message he was sending at Newport when he went electric and performed “Maggie’s Farm.”
In fact, Dylan wrote few politically oriented songs after that. By his fourth album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he had decided to look both inward for his inspiration and outward at other kinds of music. He began to explore more personal and abstract themes in his music and in his poetry. He also became more involved with drugs, alcohol, and religion. His songs began to focus on his love life, his alienation, and his growing sense of the absurd. In subsequent decades, Dylan would reinvent himself several more times.
Even after 1965, however, Dylan occasionally revealed that he hadn’t lost his touch for composing political songs. His “Subterranean Homesick Blues” references the violence inflicted on civil rights protestors by cops (“Better stay away from those/That carry around a fire hose”) but also reflected his growing cynicism (“Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters”). The extremist wing of Students for a Democratic Society took their name—Weatherman—from another line in that song (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Other songs, such as “I Shall Be Released” (1967), the Guthrie-esque “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” (1967), “ George Jackson” (1971), “Hurricane” (1975), “License to Kill” (1983), and “Clean Cut Kid” (1984) indicate that Dylan still had the capacity for political outrage.
A Complete Unknown captures the mood and the music of the first few years of Dylan’s ascendency. Timothee Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Seeger embody their characters, including their voices, playing, looks, and performance styles. If the film gets people to be more curious about Seeger, to listen to his songs and learn about his life and legacy—that alone would be enough.
The movie accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition.
Though based on Wald’s extraordinary book, the film takes some artistic liberties that bend or distort the truth. It underplays the importance of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a committed leftist, in educating Dylan about both literature and the civil rights movement. It downplays the fact that Joan Baez was already famous when she met Dylan and helped jumpstart his career by introducing him at music festivals. Contrary to the film, Dylan never appeared on Seeger's homespun educational TV show, "Rainbow Quest." Dylan did visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital when he first arrived in New York, but Seeger wasn't there. And Dylan's second visit with Woody, as depicted at the end of the film, is entirely fictional.
But perhaps most disappointing is what the film left out—Dylan playing on McGhee’s farm in Mississippi and at the March on Washington, both in 1963. Had those incidents been included, we could see that Dylan’s commitment to civil rights and activism , however brief in the context of his long career, was more than rhetorical, and contributed to his image as a protest singer.
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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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Neck-Deep Again in the Big Muddy, But Any Reason for Hope?
Perhaps staring into the abyss created by the horrors and suffering of war will help us turn away from our violent path.
Feb 04, 2024
Read the news, hup, two, three, four!
“Top United States officials prodded Israel on Monday to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip . . .”
Thus began a recent, and oh so typical, piece of war reportage. It was purveyed by the New York Times but it’s something you find in almost any mainstream source. The essence of the news is that the U.S. will continue to support Israel’s right to “defend itself” by bombing the crap out of Gaza and will keep feeding it the military equipment necessary to do so, but it sternly urges Israel to try not to kill too many babies or other civilians. Get it? War must be — and is, when we wage it — a moral undertaking.
And Yoav Gallant, Israeli defense minister — the guy who once declared that Palestinians are “human animals” — assured the world: “Unlike our enemies, we are defending our values, and we operate according to international law. The IDF is operating to minimize the harm to civilian populations.”
Yeah, this is the news! Context-free, reality-free. War is difficult, but war is necessary. When I slog through the verbiage, I can’t help but hear Pete Seeger singing: ‘We’re waist deep — we’re neck deep — in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.”
Missing from this simplistic, “objective” reportage is any awareness that you cannot kill your way to peace, let alone that humanity is in mortal danger of destroying itself unless we learn to evolve — unless we learn what we already know (except at the highest levels of power). Much of this knowledge is remarkably obvious, indeed, so obvious you’d think the New York Times and other such news outlets would be aware of it and work it into the context of their war reportage.
For instance: “Israel can never have security until Palestinians have security.”
Such a clear, basic truth is almost never part of the mainstream news . . . the Big Muddy. The words are those of Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator in the governments of Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, and current president of the U.S. Middle East Project, in an Al-Jazeera interview.
Levy also said: “I hope one day Palestinians, of course, but also Jewish Israelis experience the idea of how liberating it can be to no longer be an oppressor — because when you are oppressing people you know in the back of your mind that you are generating a desire for retribution.”
The point here is not that there’s a simple, quick-and-easy path to peace in any global conflict, but rather that there are obvious, horrific ways to prolong — eternalize — a conflict. In our Big Muddy reportage, the best thing that can happen in a conflict is that it gets “resolved,” sort of, and the violence temporarily stops. You know, a ceasefire is called. What could be better than a ceasefire? This would give surviving Gaza residents a chance to dig corpses out of the rubble in peace. What more could they ask?
Oh God. “Resolving” a conflict generally leaves the opposing sides separate from one another and still in possession of their grievances, or still enduring the hell that they are forced to live in. I would say that creating real peace is a never-ending journey, but can only happen when conflicts aren’t so much resolved as transcended. Another word for this is evolution.
What would that mean with regard to Israel and its ongoing — insane — assault on Palestine? The siege has so far resulted in over 26,000 deaths in Gaza and over 64,000 people injured, not to mention virtually everyone there suffering from hunger, lacking access to clean water, vulnerable to disease. This is madness. But in the context of mainstream reportage, this is nothing more than Israel defending itself — you know, against Hamas, a terrorist organization. Legitimate governments wage war, according to the Big Muddy. Only fringe organizations commit terrorism. Oh, by the way, committing genocide is a war crime, so you shouldn’t do it.
What I’m trying to say here is that war is nothing, nothing, nothing but terrorism and has to be stopped before any sane look at what to do next can even begin. In regard to Israel and Palestine, what might that mean? Certainly it means an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank — and probably a one-state solution in which everyone has fully equal rights, which requires the creation of a society that is trans-Zionist.
As an American, I can’t think about this without deeply, painfully reflecting on my own country’s genocidal actions against the land’s original occupants and the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. Our painfully slow process of political and social evolution is hardly finished, but we have begun creating a trans-racist society — yes, much to the distress of racist true believers. But there have been changes, which in an earlier period were probably unimaginable.
My point is not to dwell solely on the wrongs of this history, but to acknowledge that history evolves, that social structures change. While war and other forms of violence may be part of the change, lasting solutions evolve nonviolently.
I return to the words of Daniel Levy, who acknowledges, speaking of the war on Palestine: “Things look incredibly bleak.
“I don’t want to spread false optimism,” he goes on, “but perhaps this disruptive moment, where everything has been turned on its head, will cause people to stare into the abyss. Israel has proved how insecure it is when it continues down this path. The hope is that as we stare into the abyss, we can turn this around. That’s not going to happen quickly.”
But it can happen. The future is ours to create, even if we’re neck deep in the Big Muddy.
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