Folk music is still and always with us. It is in the tap of the hammer to the music on the radio or, in older days, to the workers’ own singing. It is the rhythmic push of the cabinetmaker’s saw, the scan across the checkout station to the beat of songs inside the checker’s head. “Folk music is a river, always flowing, steady and heedless. It has always been the underground stream of American musical culture: the rhythms of daily life.”
In the Academy Award-nominated film A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan stalks off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as the crowd boos. The filmmakers present this as a momentous turn for American culture, when rock’n’roll (factually, folk-rock and blues) trounces the feel-good, all-together-now world of American folk music. The significance of this event, which climaxes the film, is far more subtle. And the private reactions from Pete Seeger, whom Dylan once revered, have yet to be told.
The folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s emerged from eighteenth-century religious revivals, emphasizing individual honesty and spirituality, such as the Great Awakening. In the twentieth century, the first folk music revival was led by researchers and collectors, as in Germany, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantics. Preservationists of stories, jokes, or tunes visited libraries; tromped out in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, down the damp and dusty byways to find a local storyteller or that “fiddler in the woods.”
Out of these efforts came a cultural preservation movement pioneered by John Lomax, a collector of cowboy ballads, and particularly by his son, Alan Lomax. When Alan met Pete Seeger, son of musicologist Charles Seeger (who was the first to teach a course in folk music at an American university), they shifted that movement from cultural antiquarianism to activism, to reflect their desire to use songs for social equality. This fusion of folk music and social justice is what the filmmakers characterize as dissolving in the chaos of “Dylan goes electric” in July 1965. At this point, many of what could be called his followers were disaffected by his apparent turn from liberal politics and from traditional songs in his compositions.
Though depiction of the scene in Greenwich Village is accurate, the film misreads both traditional music and its profound influence on all of Dylan’s tunes and lyrics. Anyone listening to his adaptation of “900 Miles,” or how he turned “The Twa Sisters” (tenth in the collection of traditional ballads of Francis J. Child) into a deeply personal tale, or the traditional ballads and songs on his first album, Bob Dylan, (dismissed here as “other people’s songs”) can only marvel at his genius of reworking tradition. This corresponded to the purpose of the Newport Folk Festival which, instead of a parade of “stars,” devoted most of its stages to songs originating hundreds of years prior.
Dylan, however, was far more than a folk purist. Many do not realize that his first single had a rock band playing behind a rockabilly cut (“Mixed Up Confusion” in 1962), or that soon after that, he released a country-rock tune, “Rocks and Gravel,” also with a band. Dylan didn’t “go electric.” He’d been there for years. The film also disregards the aegis of that festival, directly traceable to the Romantic belief in the music of down-home, everyday folks and its uncommercial roots. The Newport board included Pete Seeger (and his wife and de facto manager, Toshi Ohta), and it had long allowed electrified instruments, though this was usually reserved for traditional blues musicians who had always played that way.
The question at the heart of the film then becomes one of Dylan’s motivation at provoking the citadel of American folk music: was he interested only in headlines and establishing himself commercially? Was he serious about singing out for social justice? (No careful listener to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Masters of War” can dispute this.)
In the film, viewers watch Dylan develop his chops—learning to work a mic, provoking interviewers, handling and at times dismissing baby boomers who sought him out as an oracle, singing alongside Seeger and Phil Ochs against injustice. We see him develop his performative, rebellious persona: mercurial, sullen, snarly, confrontational. Alongside him, we see his mentor Pete Seeger, here presented as benign but authentic, a citybilly singing hillbilly songs to syncretize them for urban audiences. Seeger was the Pied Piper of the folk revival introducing folk music, in one concert, to Dave Guard (Kingston Trio) and Joan Baez (for years Dylan’s partner to folk music). Seeger’s goal diverged from the commercializing instincts of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, instead being rooted in the inherently democratic nature of folksong. And this is where A Complete Unknown stumbles. It captures the dress of folkies (Beat meets Hip) and their clubs: the Café Wha, Folk City, the Gaslight; but it fails to present folksongs as carriers of an important, centuries-long process. It presents Dylan as if he was unknowing and uncaring of folksong and the democratic, ground-up socialism implicit in them.
Finally, we arrive at the dramatic climax, with Dylan in leather jacket and boots (in contrast to Seeger’s flannel shirts) daring the folkies to accept him in his new coat of many colors. As usual, the search for truth through historical fiction requires fact separated from context and characters isolated from their motivation.
In this case, we must examine two issues with Dylan’s performance: a sound system unaccustomed to bands; and the distinctly non-folk, non-protest lyrics he sang. From the first booming chords of “Like a Rolling Stone,” conveniently released the week before this provocation, we hear the boos; objects tumble toward the stage. (Though the film presents audience reactions as mixed, in recordings derision clearly outnumbers cheers.) Seeger implores the sound mixers to turn down the volume; he wants the audience to hear Dylan clearly. “I just want to hear the words,” he kept repeating. Nevertheless, these were drowned out either because of the mix or because the sound system was never set up to handle instrumentation this loud. Add to this Dylan’s abandonment of civil rights and peace songs in favor of angry pop, and you have an audience and its leaders betrayed. That much is true. To many listening, Dylan should no more have a pop song on AM radio than Pete Seeger should replace Johnny Carson on late-night television.
There exist more published interpretations of this performance than of any other concert. (I’ve written mine in a biography of Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing?) Some accused Dylan of prostituting himself for commercial success; or “I come to hear Dylan, not a pop group,” or, ineloquently: “Play folk music: You stink.” Dylan closed by returning to the stage with an acoustic guitar in place of his shiny Fender and played the prophetic, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He charged off the stage with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, passing Toshi, who at this juncture is allowed one of her disgracefully few comments in the film: “Bob!”
In private, Seeger was far more upset by Dylan rejecting traditional song than he was about the sound system massacring the lyrics: “Last week at Newport, I ran to cover my ears and eyes because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd nor some of the most destructive music this side of hell,” he wrote in a letter to himself.In this never-published critique, he referred to Dylan’s new career as a cancer eating away at the musician he had introduced to the world. Later, he would return to this moment repeatedly, trying to understand what had gone wrong.
The last word about his disassociation with folk music—though in later albums he repeatedly recorded traditional songs—comes from Dylan himself at the close of his autobiography, Chronicles: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect.”
Featured image by Dave Gahr, used with permission.
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