Bob Dylan’s past has once again exploded into public view with the release of A Complete Unknown (2024, starring Timothée Chalamet), a partly fictionalized rendering of the brouhaha surrounding the singer’s supposed apostasy when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. This is not a review of the film per se; interested readers can find plenty of descriptive material across the internet. I’m also going to assume readers already know a little about Dylan and, again, there are heaps of material online and on the bookshelves of public libraries.
This piece is about something different: why does this change of artistic direction, which in this case involved Dylan turning his back (if he ever properly faced it) on the US liberal-left folk movement, endlessly reappear in books and films? Sure, it’s exquisite drama: the hero refusing to acquiesce to the demands of his audience and reappearing with bad-ass electric guitar players to howl his poetry into the dark night. But then, the opposition to Dylan on his 1966 world tour (as captured in the oblique Eat the Document film that the singer made with DA Pennebaker) was mostly polite and civilized, being partly organized in the UK by members of the Young Communist League; it wasn’t exactly the Rolling Stones at Altamont. Rather, earnest young men in ties line up to state they hadn’t paid to see a “pop group,” while the shows are punctuated by slow handclaps, boos, and catcalls from what I suspect is a small minority of the audience. Dylan had clearly pissed this group off, but the recorded evidence suggests a passing footnote of popular music history amplified by journalists and liberal leftists who ended up writing up some of the history. History is meant to be written by winners. Dylan’s mid-1960s career has too often been written by losers.
If the events themselves don’t sustain the hyperbole, then the theoretical miasma that surrounded the left’s then denunciation of Dylan certainly does. This period is endlessly raked over into a succession of modern myths because the tensions that underwrote it (which are pinioned by the post-war US liberal-left’s rationalization of certain popular folk-music forms) endlessly recur. The modern left aesthetic, such as it is, still runs along tramlines laid down by the now obliterated Second and Third Internationals; hence Dylan’s history, one of the classic frontlines of this forever war, continues to ripen as the cultural politics of the Western left in the 20th century were never positively resolved in the sense of Marxist politics colliding with a proletarian mass.
The US cultural liberal-left, like its British counterpart, was suffused with the ideas of the Popular Front of the mid-to-late 1930s that bled into Andrei Zhdanov’s influential writings in the Soviet Union. Culture was treated as a national (hence, popular) not class form and thus reached for certain invented (in the sense that every form is invented) traditions around folk music and equated them with a plastic authenticity. This was incredibly beguiling (and inspiring in many senses) as ethnomusicologists such as Alan Lomax were able to uncover an extraordinarily rich oral heritage of proletarian song. However, this voyage of discovery had hardened the arteries of interpreters of the 1950s and 1960s into a set of patriotic aesthetic prescriptions against certain types of popular music such as rock and roll (mostly produced by corporations and imitated by the likes of a young Dylan at high school), with any hint of stardom or individualism being frowned upon.
The liberal-left tried, and miserably failed, to keep its traditions hermetically sealed in a water-tight container. Music, like other traditions, is so obviously a product of intermingling and blending, that the whole notion of fastening on to what is authentic, when authenticity is constantly mediated by the unauthentic, is a fool’s errand. Similarly, folk singers often sang solo, and the movement produced huge stars who faced large audiences in their firmaments. How on earth then could such performances not produce an awareness of the individual in the context of the collective? The liberal-left folkies complained about the non-electric 1964 Another Side of Bob Dylan album for being individualist and solipsistic. One wonders how Dylan could have possibly escaped this, given that the movement had awarded him star status after 1963’s Freewheelin’ and his aesthetic experience was funneled by individual appearances or duets with Joan Baez in front of large crowds. In that situation, a person who does not begin to fathom the dialectic between their own identity and that of the collective is simply not living. The silliest of the folk-left injunctions was to jump on Dylan for abandoning ‘protest’ songs. The trilogy of highly literate mid-1960s electric albums is not the work of an artist at ease with himself or American society. What this tramples on is not protest but civil rights sentiment, which, precisely, as an heir of the patriotic Popular Front, had to be a watery pap contained in soft recitations of songs such as “We Shall Overcome” or “This Land is Your Land”; or in the likes of former communist Pete Seeger telling audiences that what they needed was a set of decent senators.
In truth, Dylan had never pandered very much to that aesthetic, with or without the ghost of electricity, and sang many, many love songs that are highly direct about the women in his life and all the associated shades of beauty and longing. But to the extent that the artist observed the wider world on an album like Blonde on Blonde (1966), the writing moved through allegory and symbolism into levels of absurdism that suggested, much like a song he later recorded in 1993, it was a “World Gone Wrong.” The liberal-left simply found a political blank at the heart of songs such as “Desolation Row” and “Tombstone Blues” that it equated at best with anarchism and, at worst, nihilism.
It probably also sensed the aesthetic threat that Dylan posed in the mid-1960s to the whole theory of water-tight compartments. Frank Zappa once observed that if Dylan achieved what his music promised, pushing literature onto the radio with the help of electric guitars and a beat, then the avant-garde was effectively finished. This holds for all other musical movements that exaggerate their differences with popular music in the cause of a purer identity. As Zappa realized, Dylan didn’t manage this monumental feat; records such as “Like a Rolling Stone” appeared, broke into the hit parade, and faded away, like their author, who, from late 1966, was engaged in a full-on retreat from the world after a ‘motorcycle accident.’
Dylan’s failure shouldn’t surprise us; only deep-rooted social movements (and we’re not talking about the unpopular Popular Fronts of the liberal-left) can enact those transitions. What happened instead is that Dylan started to dictate some of the contours of popular music in the second half of the 1960s. Who can really imagine that The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” or “A Day in the Life” would have existed without Dylan, never mind Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies to god with the Beach Boys and Van Dyke Parks on the aborted Smile? As Pop Art failed to overturn the antiseptic world of gallery and buyer, so the intellectualization of rock music increasingly functioned as an anesthetic cocoon, accompanied by a blizzard of cocaine as this world turned in on itself in the 1970s.
A Complete Unknown shows a gnomic artist, a shy man of relatively few words distinctly uneasy with notoriety and fame. This is unduly empathetic to the persona that Dylan has relied upon down the years to preserve his mystique as a commercial performer. The problem with such an interpretation is, as biographer Clinton Heylin has observed, that Dylan has spoken with clarity many times on his career and wrote at length on exactly why he rejected the liberal-left’s attempt to canonize him in Chronicles.[1] Dylan erected his own boiler-plate manner of speaking in absurd riddles to respond to stupid questions from journalists in the mid-1960s (occasionally reverting to caustic attack mode as in the infamous scene with Horace Judson of Time magazine in Don’t Look Back). The function of this persona changed from dealing with being under siege to the silence of the late 1960s as the artist sought to purge himself of an audience that as late as the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 still saw Dylan as in some way symbolic of the US protest movement (despite the singer’s then preppy appearance and an album partly constructed from country cornball–Nashville Skyline). In later years, Dylan’s mystique, which always proceeds by turns back to 1960s nostalgia for the old battles, has functioned as an adjunct to his status as a singer who occasionally produces interesting pieces of work alongside a huge pile of dross. Dylan admitted to a BBC interviewer in the 1986 documentary Getting to Dylan that much of his artistic existence was reliant upon the opinions of closed circles of record company people and managers.
At the end of A Complete Unknown, Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) is shown sardonically congratulating Dylan after the 1965 Newport festival for leaving behind all the liberal-left folk establishment’s shit. But after defining the contours of his freedom against the heteronomy of an army of leftists who were prepared to wag their fingers at him, Dylan arguably traded this for something much worse in the domination of the music industry. Sure, Dylan escaped from some of those pressures for a while in the late 1960s while he was raising a family in Woodstock and hanging out with The Band in the basement, but it is noticeable that when he returned to relative prominence in the mid-1970s, the Rolling Thunder Revue concert package was underscored by an attempt to recreate the fraternity of the folk-music community of the early 1960s. Much of the power of the Blood on the Tracks (1975) album was built upon themes drawn from a decade earlier when he was in the eye of the hurricane, or “hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn” as he put it in “Shelter from the Storm.”
It’s too simplistic to suggest, as Mike Marqusee did in a wretched study of Dylan,[2] that the artist was merely a “corruptible seed” after leaving behind the folk left. This merely resurrects the thin morality play of US liberals, with its simple binaries of good senators and bad senators; nice guys and bad guys; good cops and bad cops. I’d hesitate to make a judgment on Dylan’s personal morality in all this and it’s not really important. It’s more a case of what consequences his actions had in terms of the collectives Dylan then had to answer to. A Complete Unknown suggests he found freedom; a freedom that now manifests its opposite in the form of everlasting tours and endless call-backs to the “wild, thin mercury sound” of Dylan’s youth.
It should be obvious that the split discussed here is fundamentally about a judgement on popular consciousness and its administration by Popular Front aesthetics, which build on the superstition that Bertolt Brecht identified long ago, where the proletariat is deemed to be incapable of understanding artistic experimentation, allusion, symbols or difficult art. This is the myth that the folk movement almost made whole until one listens to the traditional music Lomax dredged up from working-class communities in Britain. To hear Lal Smith from Belfast croon “Sweet Willie” (on Topic Records’ 1969 Sailormen and Servingmaids collection) is like hearing some bugged-out voice from a time capsule in outer space; steeped in the past and yet modern as the morning. Its mystique and relative impenetrability from the way in which Smith bends the notes and draws out the lines is what gives it its residual power, not any narrower notion of topicality. As a lament for a lover lost at sea it’s perhaps the ultimate protest song. As Dylan once said to a catcalling audience, “these are all protest songs.”
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