Bob Dylan’s Music and the Age of Trump
In the early Sixties, the left side had human credibility. They seemed authentic, concerned about ordinary people, the sovereigns of the nation whose authority had been usurped by powerful factions.
Seeger proceeded to use his name and fame to help Dylan break into New York City’s folk music scene.
The liberal left of those days defended free speech, advocated race-blind laws and practices, and opposed endless warring. In the popular mind, the right was more likely to be censorious (McCarthy), stuck on racial categories (Ross Barnett, George Wallace), and military confrontation (MacArthur, Foster Dulles). The left seemed then friendly, beckoning, human, not imprisoned in ideology.
What a change Trump has wrought in the culture! Of course, it is not him alone, not at all. But the causes of the liberal left in the early Sixties are the very causes that Trump is seen to champion. Nor was it Trump who forced the left to be censorious, racialist, or rigidly ideological (TDS is a self-inflicted disorder).
The last is the most important — Trump is seen as the one who sees humanity where the rigid left sees only clingers, deplorables, and garbage. He is authentic to a fault, not someone who opts for the caricature of humanity that political ideologies churn forth.
It’s in the Age of Trump that a new movie about Bob Dylan has hit the screen, A Complete Unknown. It offers some insight into what really moves human beings, as real art, in whatever medium, is meant to do. It shows the pursuit of authenticity, both its exhilaration and its cost. And it gives a sense of why Dylan moved the souls of a generation to seek something not yet defined. He was always in the business of finding his own way and so his music was not about preaching but about reaching further. As lyricist Robert Hunter (a Dylan collaborator) put it an a way Dylan would like: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.”
What we got with Dylan was the search for meaning, not final answers. For those ready to embark, he can be spectacular company.
The first thing about the movie is the music. That’s as it should be. The songs speak for themselves, the music giving Dylan’s words their indispensable context. In this age of ear buds and iPhone speakers, hearing the music on the big theatre speakers throws us at once into the glorious power of Dylan’s music at its best.
Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, is stunning. Chalamet sings the songs himself, and in a way that is mystical and wondrous, fully inhabits Dylan’s genius. He is immersed so deeply in the character that there is no distance or separation from that seething cauldron of creativity that was Dylan’s soul at this time in particular.
The film shows how that genius was a severe and relentless master. Everything else in Dylan’s life, in this film, comes in a distant second. He may hesitate for a moment, drawn by other attachments, but cannot give himself to the people who would love him as he gives himself to his onrushing muse. Only the songs and the performances engaged his full dedication.
Yet it was the admiration and love for a person that moved Dylan to leave home and come to the East Coast to meet a man who inspired his devotion through music which spoke to the heart and soul. The film begins with Dylan’s pilgrimage to see Woodie Guthrie, who was in a New Jersey state hospital suffering the devastation of Huntington’s disease. Guthrie’s simple genius drew Dylan — simple in his appreciation of the simple and overlooked, and simple in the clarity of its concern and its expression in words and music.
As Pete Seeger said of Guthrie, “Any damn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” Americans rightly distrust the fools who tell them they do not understand complexities well enough to run their own lives. Guthrie trusted the people, spoke to them straightforwardly, respected their hearts and their humanity. Dylan felt that trust to his depth and followed Woody as an acolyte before a master on the road that same authenticity.
In Guthrie’s hospital room, Dylan met Pete Seeger, who saw Dylan’s talent and heart. Seeger proceeded to use his name and fame to help Dylan break into New York City’s folk music scene.
That scene was intensely political. At that time, the campaign to dismantle segregation and gain racial equality was the foremost issue, along with the fear of nuclear war that had been brought to a peak by the Cuban missile showdown of late 1962. Guthrie and Seeger were both political, but Woody in particular made a point that differentiated himself from today’s ideology-driven progressives: he insisted that above all, he was a humanist.
His songs’ appeal went far beyond politics. A wide public knows the chorus of his This Land is Your Land by heart, and perhaps the first verse; very few even know of the verse which objects to private property. Seeger in the film asks that the songs should only be judged by a good listen. They are great songs. Most people hear them that way if they give a listen. They appeal to our humanity. They are not the political abstractions of today’s sorry academe.
Dylan’s latched on to Guthrie’s simplicity and humanism. In his “Song to Woodie,” one of his very first, he wrote:
Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born.
It is a song about shared human concern on a compelling personal level. That was what drew Dylan to Guthrie’s music. And it was to that task of laying out the human soul into words and music that he would remain true, beyond any other loyalty.
This was revealed over the course of the three years to which the film confines itself. It follows Dylan’s rapid rise as he zeroed in on where the progressive mindset intersected with real human emotion. Their hearts touched, Dylan became their hero with songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changing,” and “Masters of War.”
The Break With Folk Music
The progressives of the folk movement thought that this was true love and had expectations that it would last forever. But Dylan followed his own inspiration wherever it led, even if that confounded the expectations of those whose love he accepted. Like the two real loves portrayed here in the film, the folk/progressive community would come to feel betrayed and its ardent love unrequited in the end, when it mattered.
The break with the folkies exploded into public view at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan defied the organizers and a very large part of his faithful audience by coming out with an electric band and playing songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” which no longer voiced the simple black and whites of world of progressive protest, but a world of complex and baffling emotions.
Instead of the prim world of leftist moral preachment, he had thrown himself and his audience into the fire of the blues and its sharing of deep emotions, by turns, wild, joyous, and troubling. Blues had become electrified and lurked in the background of rock and roll. Dylan threw himself into that electric music and its power.
He would win a new, much larger audience this way. But the film shows the other side of this change. The folk music fans who had supported him and were devoted to him found themselves, like the two women in his life during this time, ignored. Dylan followed his dark muse, which still spoke to the human heart, but a heart no longer believing in a simple political gospel or an easy positivity. Robbie Robertson, who Dylan picked as his lead guitarist on his world tour at this time, described Dylan’s mindset then:
[We] played these first two dates with Bob Dylan and it was kind of insane. People hated it. They didn’t disapprove — they violently hatred it…. So I meet with Bobby then and he said, “That was great!”
We ended up touring all over … Just about every night, every place we played — people threw stuff at us, booed us, and sometimes charged the stage.
The film shows the violence of the feelings with its recreation of Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Half of the audience was as outraged as a betrayed lover when Dylan came out with an electric band at top volume. Booing and jeers prompted Dylan to play louder, playing past the devoted fans who had made him famous as well as the festival organizers and to Pete Seeger himself, who had done so much to get him heard and famous.
It is hard to watch. But the power of the music is undeniable — you can feel why Dylan followed it and why it appealed to so many and still does.
Such radical authenticity morphs for some into an actual embrace of violence or a retreat to formula. With Dylan, the violence came in a motorcycle accident that took him off the road and he did not return to steady concertizing for years. But his muse brought him to make a reckoning within, and he often found himself in calmer waters. In a confessional mood, he wrote these lyrics during this period off the road:
Love and only love, it can’t be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won’t be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who’s tried.
But this change, and the many changes that came after, are beyond the reach of this film, which ends right after Newport 1965.
What the film gives us is the core genius as it first emerged. If it had one message, it is that the human soul cannot be reduced to rigid ideologies that don’t touch the heart and which look down on the simple understanding of the people.
It’s a message that can help us to overthrow the chokingly narrow culture that has throttled the American spirit these past years. Add Dylan’s later ruminations on love, and we have plenty to inspire us in our own creative contribution to renewed American greatness, in the various ways that the divine creative spirit moves us.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
We Won, but True Freedom Requires More Work
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