Now there is always a danger of over-hyping a movie that you are looking forward to seeing with eager expectation. You might see something in a trailer or an interview, or maybe even an early review that will spoil the whole plot line for you. Or it is also possible for your expectations to be raised to such a high level that the film will never be able to reach up to your exalted projections. We don’t want to go there if we can help it. Sometimes your best experiences at the movies are when you hardly know anything about what you are going to see, and the film surprises you. But on other occasions getting a little more context in advance and doing a little research can enhance your experience because there are many things to be known about the subject matter. In these cases, you are not able to catch all of the subtleties and nuances that you might otherwise miss. I think that this new release, which covers Bob Dylan’s early days in Greenwich Village in 1961 up to 1965, might be one that fits into this latter category of films. Because there is a lot to know about Bob Dylan.
I remember going to the Lincoln movie with Daniel Day Lewis
playing the title role. We arrived a
little late, so my companions and I had to sit in the very front row on what
was the very first day of the movie’s release.
There was Daniel Day Lewis, bigger than life, right in front of me,
fully inhabiting that Lincoln persona. I
was blown away. I have since learned that
Daniel Day Lewis is a method actor. This
means he moved into the woods as part of his character research for The Last
of the Mohegans film and that he learned to live off the land and forest
where his character lived, camping, hunting, and fishing. Day-Lewis
also added to his wood-working skills and learned how to make canoes. He
carried a long rifle at all times during filming to remain in character. Then for the Lincoln movie, he spent a year
in preparation for the role. He read
over 100 books on Lincoln and worked long hours with the make-up artist to
achieve a strong physical likeness to Lincoln. He was only speaking in Lincoln's voice
throughout the entire shoot, and he requested that the British crew members who
shared his native accent not to chat with him.
I have read that young Timothee Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan in the new
movie, is making a similar effort to find the young Bob Dylan who arrived in
New York from Minnesota in 1961. He says
that he and James Mangold, the director, have been working on the project for
the last 5 years!
In a recent interview in Minnesota, Timothee Chalamet said that he had made a few trips from his native New York City to Dinkytown, formerly a bohemian section near the University of Minnesota's East Bank campus where Dylan made his debut as a folksinger, and then traveled up Route 61 (the name of an important Bob Dylan song) to Duluth were Bob was born and then on up to Hibbing in Northern Minnesota where Bob was raised.
He checked out the high school there where Bob first performed with a band called The Golden Chords and Timothee tasted the vibe of the Mesabi Iron Range. He referenced a couple of Bob Dylan songs that reek of the surroundings including North Country Blues and Rocks and Gravel. In the first link that I have provided here, to North Country Blues performed at the Newport Folk Festival of 1963 (importantly not 1964, when all hell broke out), pay close attention to the folk singer behind Dylan who looks like Andy of Mayberry, who lends Bob a guitar pick at the outset of the song. I known Andy would do that, if it were Andy. Bob introduces the song as “about Iron ore mines in an Iron ore town.” He might as well have said, this is about Hibbing, Minnesota, where I was raised. But as Suze Rotolo describes the scene in Greenwich Village, it didn’t matter so much where someone had come from, as it was much more about where they were going, so Bob had to keep it a bit cryptic in this introduction. Timothee could have also visited the Sunrise Deli, in Hibbing,
“Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck “
It was wise for Bob to keep it short in the introduction at Newport in 1963 as he had told tall tales of running away from home and living out in the mythic Western states, so he had to be careful not to step on any of these fantastical stories. The song, North Country Blues ends with the words “my children will go, as soon as they grow, for their ain’t nothin’ here now to hold them.” That’s his story. He says it was like he was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body, with the wrong name, and he needed to get out of there to find his place and his destiny. If you watch the folk singer sitting behind Bob, the guy who looks like Andy Giffith,
his smile gets bigger and bigger as the song goes along. He knows he is witnessing something special. As someone writes in the comments below the video, Bob’s “hair is touching the flames, they're witnessing something beyond both them and Dylan. It's as though Dylan's channeling something.” Yeah, that’s right. Timothee has described a couple of good choices in these two songs that he mentions about Minnesota, but he could have added some more where Bob describes “The country he comes from, they call the Midwest” in With God on our Side, or from Girl from the North Country
“If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see she has a coat so warm
To keep her from the howling winds”
And we know from our own experiences, living and being
raised right next door in Wisconsin, up there in the winter time: “The winds do hit heavy on the borderline.”
I put together a Bob Dylan Primer which gives a larger overview of the subject matter in the forthcoming film. Look that over for more background on the bigger picture.
But now I want to focus on what in the world we could possibly do to prepare to watch the new film.
There might be some background details that we could get a hold of that will help when different characters or references appear in the movie. In doing a little homework, we might come to know little more about that person or thing in the story that is be being referenced. Let’s take Dylan’s first muse Suze Rotolo whom he met fairly soon upon his arrival in New York City when he says in his book Chronicles Vol I, “cupid’s arrow hit him in the heart” upon meeting 17-year-old Suze Rotolo and he was 20. He sings soon thereafter, “I once loved a woman, a child I am told, I gave my heart, but she wanted my soul, Don’t Think Twice its alright.” She held off for 40 years before she wrote a memoir in 2009 called: A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties that can be picked up now very inexpensively in the used market. Or we could listen to the incomparable Terri Gross interview her in a 2008 NPR radio interview with Suze describing those unforgettable days. Terri does her usual great job of getting into the questions we all want to know, like What was it like to watch her former boyfriend and live-in companion get totally swept up into the arms of fame and the beautiful and mellifluous Joan Baez? Listen to her soft, (I had to turn my speaker up to hear her) and carefully measured response to these questions. It appears from the trailer from the new movie that we are going get into the tensions of these personal relationships in some detail.
Another example of our need for more background to catch all the nuisances is the film comes from the film Inside Llewyn Davis. This film never garnered too many accolades, which maybe places it in the category of cult film favorite. But if you’re not paying attention, and you don’t know the backstory to some of the careful details in that film, you might miss it. Bob Dylan is everywhere haunting this film, even though his name is never even mentioned once. The title character, Llewyn Davis, is a folk singer from the early 1960’s, which is exactly the same era that is being portrayed in the new film. The poor guy Llewyn Davis is trying to share his creative and artistic talents with the world, which are many, but he can’t seem to catch a break. He does his thing in basket houses (that’s what we call the coffee houses and bars in Greenwich village because the performers were originally paid from what appears in the basket at the end of the night) like the one called the Gaslight that Bob Dylan first played and sang in on MacDougal Street in Greenwich village. But poor Llewyn is a true starving artist, he has trouble landing steady work to pay his bills and has nowhere to lay his head. He finally has to opt to return to the Merchant Marines where he used to have a seaman’s license, but just can’t seem to put his hands on it and getting a new one is prohibitively expensive for the always broke Llewyn.
When we look at the poster for the movie for Inside Llewyn Davis, he is strolling down the street in front of the Gaslight CafĂ© with his guitar in hand, it conjures up the famous pictures of Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo walking together outside their nearby apartment at this very same time. But Bob gets the pretty girl on his arm, while poor, black and white Llewyn only gets nothing but a stray cat which he is trying to return to its rightful owners, since he mistakenly let him out, while crashing on his friend’s sofa.
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"Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)"
The Music director and singing coach for that Llewyn Davis
film was the very gifted T Bone Burnett who toured with Bob Dylan’s Rolling
Thunder Review in 1975 and 1976, and he has since done some stellar and grammy
award-winning work on soundtracks like the one for the 2000 film O Brother,
where art thou? We would be remiss
if we didn’t mention his outstanding single: Diamonds are a girl’s
best friend which includes the very best advice ever given for women in
relationships with men: “Get that ice
or else no Dice!”
So here is something else we can do, we can listen to these folk
songs to get into the ethos of the era and try to picture these guys, like the
fictional Llewyn Davis, or Bob and maybe Dave Van Ronk singing
these beautiful tunes in the small venues along MacDougal Street.
Dave Van Ronk, who appears to have been the personage that the
Llewyn Davis character is based upon, was an earlier leader,
sometimes referred to as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street,” on the folk scene but
he turned out to be less successful. Less
successful than his friend and singing companion from those early years, Bob
Dylan. Bob hints that Dave turned him on
to some important ideas, like never singing the same thing twice in the same
way. But Dave has little bone to pick
with Bob about one of the songs that he arranged called “The House of the
Rising Sun.” He had planned on recording
“his version” but Bob beat him to it in his first album. Bob had been singing this song since back in Saint Paul,
Minnesota in the Purple Onion as early as June 1st, 1960. But New York Times critic Robert Shelton, whose review of Bob's work in the NY Times put him on the map, quotes Dylan as saying, “I always knew this song, but never really knew it
until Dave Van Ronk sang it.” The story
of Dylan “borrowing” Van Ronk's arrangement is told by Van Ronk in his
biography The
Mayor of MacDougal Street. As a
public domain folk blues song (i.e., never originally copyrighted), artists
could take an arrangement credit when they recorded it and receive songwriter
royalties. Imagine the smoke coming out
from under Dave’s hat when Eric Burton and the Animals, took "Bob Dylan’s
version" and recorded it in
1964 and it became a number one smash hit on the UK Singles Chart and in
the US and Canada, being described as the “first folk rock hit!” This reminds me of a very funny scene from in
Inside Llewyn Davis where Llewyn signs away his royalties, for a few
quick bucks, to the smash hit Please Mr. Kennedy
where the guy catching the grove and snapping his fingers in the control room is like the guy who discovered
Bob Dylan, John Hammond of Columbia Records.
It appears that Dave Van Ronk never forgave Bob for
that. And this speaks of the somewhat
competitive nature of the many talented people performing and crowding into the
many small venues in Greenwich village at the time which included people like Joni
Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Richie Havins, The Greenbriar Boys, Ramblin’ Jack
Elliott, and Carolyn Hester, who hired Bob for one of his first gigs recording where he is playing some
backup harmonica on one of her early albums.
And there were many others seeking to perform and make a name for themselves
on those streets. Bob pays a very heavy
tribute to Dave Van Ronk in his book Chronicles Vol. One, one that you
should be sure to listen to if you want to hear some of Bob’s most beautiful
writing from that book, along with some beautiful reading from his book, in a
purple passage where he gives the highest tribute to Dave Van Ronk on this link.
But what about the artist himself? What does he think about all the hype
surrounding this new movie? Timothee
says in the interview in Minnesota that Bob Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen came on
the set and gave them his hearty congratulations and approval to what was going
on there. We know that got back to Bob. Then last week, on December 4th
with three weeks left to go before the release, we get a Tweet on X that
says:
There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete
Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role.
Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as
me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s
Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling
of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After
you’ve seen the movie read the book.
So now we seem to have something of an encouragement from
the man himself. We probably have to
parse this out a bit. We know Bob loves
to use double entendre, so when he uses a word like “fantastic” or “retelling” we
should realize it can mean more than one thing.
And there have been many different incarnations of “me” from the guy who
is always, “shedding off one more layer of skin.” There was even a female version of “me” in
the 2007 musical drama I’m
Not There played by the great Cate Blanchett.
Ok I have given you some ideas, now it time for you to get out there and do
your homework on YouTube University in advance of the movie being released. You don’t want to be like
these guys, these Gen Z'ers who in their podcast, refer to themselves as “Music
Reviewers” who can’t even come up with the Number of the Highway in Highway 61.
Then they have misidentified the song anyway
which is “Like a Rolling Stone” or how can they ask, “Joan Baez is the brunette,
but who’s the Blond?” They call the song
that begins the trailer as “The North County Fair” like Bob is at some
County Fairgrounds somewhere, then they get the sequence of the Muses all mixed
up, putting Joan Baez in front of “the blond chick” then they erroneously talk
about Simon and Garfunkel being against Bob going electric, but Simon and
Garfunkel didn’t come even out with a debut album until late in 1964 and then
they didn’t really come onto the scene until their second album Sounds of
Silence in 1966. By this time Dylan
had already had a motorcycle accident and was in semi-retirement up in
Woodstock, NY and had already released his seventh studio album and half of the important songs of the 20th century. Then they misidentify Pete Seager and then speculate
about him possibly being Bob’s manager. They can’t even come up with the name of the “Newport
something festival,” come on dudes!
I am ready to offer them all a dime to call their mothers and tell her
that, “I’m not going to make it as a music reviewer.” These guys deserved to be flunked out of Dylanology
101.
We don’t want to be like them, so Do Your Homework! Don’t be sitting around in some pancake house
somewhere after the movie sharing your ignorance of these seminal moments in
American popular culture. Mangold and
Chalamet have already received “The Visionary Tribute at the 2024 Gotham’s” last
week and Chalamet says, in
his acceptance speech:
“Getting to study and immerse myself in the world of Bob Dylan is one of the greatest educations a young artist could receive. If you are already a fan of Bob Dylan this will make perfect sense to you, and if you’re not familiar with his work, perhaps our film can serve as a humble gateway to one of the great poets and chroniclers of our times.”
He rightly understands that there are two tiers of people who will be seeing the movie, there is the initiated who can process what he is saying, and then there are the other folks who need this humble gateway to get into the subject matter. Let’s try to get ready for a proper viewing.
Doug
