In 1993, the band Counting Crows released a hit single called “Mr. Jones.” It’s a great song, one that I put on when I wanted to jump around the room, my measure of music capable of “taking you there.”
The song carries an indelible line: “I wanna be Bob Dylan…”
Like many an aspiring artist wondering if the big break would ever come, I embraced the lyric in hopeful intoxication — and then shook it off and got back to the much more difficult work of becoming who I was created to be.
After watching the new Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — in which actor Timothée Chamalet nails his performance as the kid from Hibbing — I’m astounded that even Robert Zimmerman was able to become Bob Dylan. But he did, and continues to do so again and again and again.
Historically accurate for the most part, the film connects the dots on how it happened. Or at least it tries to, because neither this film nor the learned high priests in the Cult of Bob can explain why. If anybody could split that atom, we’d all be Bob Dylan.
The film begins in 1961, the dawn of the New Frontier when Dylan lands in New York City from his home state of Minnesota. It ends over the summer of 1965 when he jettisons the dimming bulb of folk music for the thunder and lightning of rock and roll. The axe fell at the Newport Folk Festival that year, where as you may have heard, he “went electric.”
Pop bands at the time — the particularly better ones like the Byrds and the Turtles — were already charting with rock versions of Dylan songs: “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” respectively. Why not the man himself? He joined them in earnest in September with “Like a Rolling Stone,” from whose lyrics the film’s title was taken.
It topped out at No. 4 on the charts and was so powerful that even the cynical composer Frank Zappa — never one to praise lightly — was agog.
“When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ I wanted to quit the music business,” said Zappa, who died in 1993. “I felt: ‘If this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else.’ ” But things just kept getting worse in this country and Frank kept making music.
The Beatles, who steered the Ship of Pop from ’64 to ’68, are only mentioned once in the movie. The day after the Newport festival, a fan or a journalist at the motel where the musicians were staying asks Bob if he was trying to be like the Liverpudlians. Bob doesn’t answer. Why would he?
Except for Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” I came to Dylan late, in my early 30s after finally quieting the power chords of Zeppelin and The Who and the Kinks in my head. The last of these get a quick mention in the film when Bob defends their hit song “All Day and All of the Night” against the folk fundamentalists.
The song is on the radio when Dylan’s friend and folk music legend Pete Seeger — played with gentle sanctimony by Edward Norton — comes into Dylan’s motel room to plead, once again, that he not play amplified rock during the last set of the festival.
“It’s the Kinks, Pete,” explains Bob, as if to say, “It’s 1965, the Dust Bowl done blew over before I was born."
If I had one quibble with the movie, it’s not the rearranging of a few events or the invention of minor ones. It’s the failure to aver that Elvis Presley was the young Zimmerman’s true inspiration.
The film dances around this in an early, fleeting scene when Seeger gives Dylan a ride after they cross paths in Woody Guthrie’s hospital room. As the car pulls up to Seeger’s house in Beacon, New York, some 50 miles north of Greenwich Village, a snippet of Little Richard’s “Slippin’ & Slidin’” wails on the car radio.
Seeger disparages the song as nothing more than candy. In a quiet mumble, Dylan says he likes all kinds of music. It would have been a perfect moment, if just for another 30 seconds, to bring the King into the conversation. That would have fried Seeger’s banjo!
Maryland writer John Lewis was a good friend of Jim Dickinson [1941-2009] who played the pump organ on “Time Out of Mind,” Dylan’s 1997 release. Lewis published a book about the sessions called “Whirly Gig,” a phrase used during the recording to describe the saturnalian sound of Dickinson’s keyboards.
Sometime in the 1990s, Dylan visited Humes High School in Memphis where Elvis graduated in 1953. It’s said that he found a penny near the auditorium stage and picked it up saying, “A lucky penny. How about that?”
Later, in Miami where he recorded “Time Out of Mind,” Dylan told Dickinson about the visit to Presley’s alma mater. “Bob was a disciple of Elvis,” said Lewis. “Both Dylan and Jim could recall what life was like before Elvis, before the seismic shift.”
In 1997, after the release of the LP, Dylan was hospitalized with life-threatening histoplasmosis. It was quite the close call and Lewis said that Bob quipped, “ ‘I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.’ Not Woody, Elvis.”
“A Complete Unknown” is a wonderful movie because of the obvious, Dylan’s music — at once stirring, profound, timeless, and exhilarating no matter what bucket you want to put it in.
Again, where do such mysteries come from? How did it feel to bring them into being?
In 2004, Dylan told Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. All those early songs were almost magically written — Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon… Try to sit down and write something like that.”
