A Complete Unknown

Okay, so this is 29 January 2025 and in France, where I now live, , the media are all talking about Bob Dylan. Today is the French release date for the biopic A Complete Unknown revealing Dylan to a whole new generation.

I’m delighted. The film itself is a neat piece of cinematography giving plenty of space to the songs and the music-making process. In addition, there are loads of articles about Dylan in the press, on the radio, on TV and on line from all sorts of angles. Plus we are constantly stumbling on previously unseen photos from his early years. It seems like something turns up just about every single day. There is talk of Oscar nominations. In fact, we are currently flooded with so much information and opinion about him that it is impossible to absorb it all. Neverending Bob Dylan about the man who invented The Neverending Tour.1

All in all, this makes 2025 a great time for teenagers to fast-track on a great artist. That raises a question. How does it compare with my own discovery of Bob Dylan when I was 16 years old in … er, let me see … in 1972? Of course, he’d already been around a while then. We were certainly much closer to his surge to stardom than we are today. But he had yet to acquire the nobility that his longevity and ability to recreate himself have now given him.

Blowin’ In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963)

In 1972, that stunning stream of songs and performances since the release of the Bob Dylan debut album in 1962 spanned a decade, yet it had already been two years since New Morning, his last complete album of original material. Dylan seemed to have said what he had to say and, for all I knew, was cruising on the profits. But what did I know? I was just a kid in the UK with a growing interest in popular music. I probably knew his name and that he wrote Blowin’ in the wind, but that about summed it up.

Source – Comewritersandcritics

Here’s how it all changed through a series of chance circumstances which changed him from being a complete unknown. It wasn’t a biopic that did it for me. It was a biography.

A book on Bob for Christmas

My big sister Angie gave me Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto for Christmas in December 1972 – a book of which Dylan himself would say to the author : “I like your book. That’s the weird thing about it.”2 This would be the beginning of my long, often obsessive, and sometimes solitary journey into Bob Dylan‘s world. Until then, I had been brought up on a diet of British music consisting of lashings of British pop music as served up by BBC Radio One and Top of the Pops, with The Beatles being definitely top of the pile. I was beginning to branch out.

Scaduto turned my gaze across the Atlantic, away from my little island, towards a whole new cast of characters. He introduced me to Dylan‘s hero Woody Guthrie who inspired him to sing and write differently and to find his own style. The biography also described the context of the burgeoning American folk music movement of the early 1960s with its captain Pete Seeger and a string of artists – among them the heart-melting, gifted singer Joan Baez with whom Bob would exprieence musical and romantic entanglement.

NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 1961: Bob Dylan holding his acoustic guitar and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo pose for a portrait in September 1961 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

But Bob’s first serious girlfriend was Suze Rotolo who, at his personal request would later be renamed Sylvie Russo for the Complete Unknown biopic. As the film underlines, she turned out to be a major influence on his interest in civil rights and all things political. Who knows if he would have written in the same way about Davey Moore, Hattie Carroll and later George Jackson without Suze‘s intial influence?

I also discovered his wheeler-dealer manager Albert Grossman. Smarter than many, he immediately spotted Dylan’s potential as a generator of wealth through his songwriting, and made sure that, as manager, he got a nice chunk of the royalties. The scene in DA Pennebaker‘s Dont Look Back3 documentary, where Grossman is shown negotiating a deal over a television appearance during Bob’s UK Tour in 1965, is an eye-opening example of the artful manager at work.

Scaduto‘s narrative also made stops at the various coffeehouses where Dylan played as a young hopeful, newly arrived in New York, such as The Gaslight Cafe4, Gerdes Folk City and Cafe Wha !. There were also his performances at 3 different editions of the Newport Folk Festival beween 1963 and 1965, with the final one being the famous electric concert which everyone still talks about and which is the high-point in A Complete Unknown.5 The biography by Scaduto also described Bob’s appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 for which people had so many expectations that no performance could possibly satisfy them all6.

Looking back, reading this biography was my introduction to the United States as a place of cultural creativity. It was also a chance to discover recent history in the making. It was also an elaborate tale with no ending. Because Dylan seemed to have vanished, rather like the mysterious uncle in a family who people tell tales about. This was just as well, because I had some serious catching up to do.

Follow me into the next episode and I’ll tell you more about my search for the songs.

  1. “It is clear to see that since 1986, the actual year that he began the constant touring, Dylan’s primary consideration in relation to his art is live performance. He has continued to record great albums, but whereas in the 1960s and 1970s he recorded more albums and toured less (no touring between 1966 and 1974 … 8 long years ) since 1988 he has recorded far fewer albums, especially albums of his own songs, but has been on the almost non-stop (in lockdown tours were cancelled in the Far East and the USA ) Never Ending Tour.” Source : bob-dylan.org.uk ↩︎
  2. Source : naturegeezer.com ↩︎
  3. I remember seeing Dont Look Back at Harlow Playhouse one Saturday evening in the early 1970s. they used to run music movies from time to time – things which were never shown on TV but were all part of the cultural jigsaw puzzle you needed if you wanted to understand popular music. Films like Woodstock, Jimi plays Berkeley, Rainbow Bridge, Monterey Pop … and Dont Look Back. ↩︎
  4. Recordings of certain Gaslight concerts are available such as this one from October 15th 1962. ↩︎
  5. The DVD The other side of the mirror directed by Murray Lerner, released in 2007 documents Dylan at Newport magnificently, as this trailer shows. ↩︎
  6. Amateur video footage from the 1969 concert now available on YouTube gives us a taste of how that looked. ↩︎

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