A Complete Unknown 2
The environment created around the biopic A Complete Unknown has released so many articles, reviews, videos and photos about Bob Dylan, that just leafing through it all is a part-time job. With Timothée Chalamet as lead actor, the film invites long-time fans to look again at events they may only vaguely remember. It also announces what looks like the perfect moment for a 16 year-olds to begin exploring the discography of a great artist.
If that’s how things work today, what was it like for earlier generations who wanted to find out about Bob Dylan?
In 1972, when I was 16, Dylan was in a creative lull. It had been 2 years since he released new material in any quantity with the album New Morning in October 1970. He wasn’t playing live anymore – his short set at the benefit Concert for Bangla Desh organized by his good friend George Harrison back in August 1971 being the exception.
An intimate biography by Anthony Scaduto first published in 1971 was an invitation to discover or rediscover Dylan. When I opened my copy on Christmas Day 19721, I knew next to nothing about his work. The book also opened my eyes and made me realize that I had to find out more about this complete unknown, starting with the songs.
Let me give you a little more detail as I continue the narrative begun in an earlier post.
Searching for the songs
Looking for a shortcut to Bob Dylan‘s recordings, in January 1973 I bought a copy of his Greatest Hits album and discovered how little of his music I knew. Immediate favourites were Mr Tambourine Man and Subterranean Homesick Blues, the latter earning a scratch which would make it jump thereafter as I had dropped the needle several times while attempting to transcribe the lyrics.
I would eventually happen upon a book of Dylan songs with sheet music and lyrics in the music section of our local library in Harlow, Essex. Naturally, Subterranean Homesick Blues, the one track I needed help with, wasn’t in the collection, which had been designed for the wandering guitar-playing troubadour folkie. However, I did discover that in Mr Tambourine Man the “one hand waving free” in the final verse was not “to be wetted by the sea”, as I had thought, but “silhouetted by the sea.” So much for transcriptions. Nevertheless, I told myself, as I turned the yellowing pages, and read through the words to songs I had never heard, with imposing titles such as Masters of War or With God On Our Side, this was his legacy. Since he seemed to have disappeared, maybe I had arrived too late?
Not going to be easy
I took the fact that I was asking myself all these questions about Bob as proof that I was moving into a more adult world. I was leaving behind a childhood passion for football – I was seriously soccer – and embarking on a new quest in the wonderland of music.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The Greatest Hits album had been released in 1967, with the newest song dating from 1966, when I was 10 years old and England beat West Germany 4-2 after extra time to win the Football World Cup. On my timescale, that was a big gap!
Even though intense listening to One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) revealed that songs could tell strange stories, that a popular voice could be many things, and that the vocals on the recent chart hit Virginia Plain by Roxy Music were clearly Dylan-influenced, I needed to continue my search. Scaduto had made me want to know more.
Words or music?
I bought a copy of Michael Gray‘s Song & Dance Man : The Art Of Bob Dylan, which was released in 1973 by the same publisher as the biography. It was tougher going.2 In fact, to get my head round it, not only did I need to have a working knowledge of the 1960s pop culture, but also a familiarity with the whole of English Literature. For example, Gray pointed out that Subterranean Homesick Blues was inspired both by Chuck Berry and Robert Browning. Hmm. How about that?
Berry wrote some fine lyrics and Browning was a poet. Was Dylan more about words or more about music? I wondered. This was more than four decades before he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For me the words and music went together, they were part of the same whole, I hadn’t been able to separate the two. Gray‘s scholarly analysis was mainly literarature-based, but also mixed in references to particular musical styles and singers I had never heard of before. Reading him felt like following someone up a dark alley to find an answer, and finally discovering you were on your own. With no direction home.
I realized, after reading his book, that I was less interested in what the words meant than in how the songs were made. It seemed I’d just have to find my own answers.
Confused by a new Dylan release
By June 1973, I had become a regular reader of the music papers. I followed the build-up to the release of the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which Dylan played a minor role, as well as writing and performing the soundtrack. Yes, it was a western – a genre for my parents‘ generation – but I wasn’t focused on the movie at all. For the first time, I was about to experience the release of a new Bob Dylan song! That was an exciting prospect!
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door got regular radio play and was a hit in the UK. Dylan was fighting to be heard amid the mass of commercial music of the time. Did the song stand out from the rest? Not for a long time. I regret to say that, what today is clearly a deep reflection on the passage between life and death, didn’t sound like an instant classic to my 16 year-old ears.
It was short, brooding, and seemed underperformed, as if he was holding something back. Okay, it was Dylan. But I had been reading about a Dylan who was in the spotlight, ringing the changes. I wasn’t expecting this.3 The title was enough to put me off. I was rebelling against the Catholic church in my personal life, and didn’t want to hear anything about Heaven’s Door.4
A new song but it sounded old
It may have been new material, but to me Uncle Bob sounded old. It’s true that he already sounded old on his first album, which was released when he was 20, with its songs about keeping graves clean and constant sorrow. But with this new song, the energy just didn’t reach me.
I didn’t even buy a copy of Knockin’, preferring to trust the spark of Bob’s Greatest Hits while also picking up two of his previous albums when I had the funds. Freewheelin‘ from 1963 came first, with its wildly original language and wide-ranging themes and moods . The songs were full of spirit and sincerity and wheedled their way into my head.
Then I leapt to 1965 for Bringing it all back home with its electric and acoustic sides and that great cover, It was an album where every song seemed so skilfully crafted that electric and acoustic performances alike glistened and gleamed.
So what had I learnt? I had begun to distinguish how he sounded before and after going electric, both in terms of content and performance. I grasped that the transition from acoustic to electric had been deliberate and now saw that first Greatest Hits album as the chronicle of how that happened.
That change was longer and less of a straight line to that first electric performance at the Newport Festival in 1965 than James Mangold suggests in A Complete Unknown. I have no problem with that, because there is only so much you can say in a movie. However, as I pushed on to 17, it was now clear to me that I wanted to know more about an individual who was capable of leaving behind the security of a familiar environment, and the people who were part of it, to go somewhere new, somewhere completely unknown.
What I didn’t know was that I was about to enter a streak of Dylan luck as he would manage to kick start his career again. As you will see if you read the final episode.
- Thanks to Angie, my big sister. ↩︎
- I didn’t realise that this was the first book to show in such detail that Dylan was a major creative figure to be absolutely taken seriously. The 50th anniversary edition has just been published in 3 volumes. I wonder how many of the Nobel Prize committee read this when they were students. ↩︎
- If you know the previous Dylan biopic I’m Not There by Todd Haynes where 6 different actors play different parts of Dylan’s life, I was looking for Cate Blanchett but I got Richard Gere! I would have to learn that I would have to learn to expect and accept the unexpected. ↩︎
- Heaven’s Door today is a Bob-branded bourbon. ↩︎
Merci Gerry pour avoir évoqué Bob Dylan avec conviction, mais aussi avec sensibilité, avec force références aux émotions ressenties au moment où tu as découvert ses chansons, poésies, musiques, harmonies, rythmes (il est bien difficile de dissocier ces divers aspects, tant ils sont imbriqués dans sa création et dans son art) Les textes de Bob Dylan se découvrent à l’écoute, mais ne perdent rien de leur puissance à la lecture. Ce sont alors des sons nouveaux que l’on perçoit, imperceptibles et paradoxalement passés sous silence à l’écoute. Ces résonnances reviennent en écho longtemps après les avoir entendues. Magie des mots, magie des sons, magie de la voix qui les portent et nous transporte…
I absolutely agree that Bob Dylan is to be experienced as song heard and listened to. The timing, the accentuation, the rhythms, the choice of words are all part of the experience. There’s a moving passage in Martin Scorcese’s “No Direction Home” where Allen Ginsberg talks about the effect of hearing Dylan sing for the first time. Somebody kindly put an extract from what he says on YouTube.
There’s another moment in the same documentary where he talks about seeing Dylan play on stage – they became close friends as Ginsberg followed him on tour from time to time. Here’s what the poet says about the singer : “What struck me was that he had become one – or had become identical with his breath. Dylan had become a column of air, so to speak, at certain moments, where his total physical and mental focus was this single breath coming out of his body. He had found a way in public to be almost like a shaman, with all of his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.” I thinks that sums things up nicely.