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19 Oct 24 - 04:23 PM (#4210083) Subject: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer Coming December 25, 2024: "A Complete Unknown" - a movie starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, with (Actor) ... (Character) Monica Barbaro ... Joan Baez Elle Fanning ... Sylvie Russo (= Suze Rotolo?) Scoot McNairy ... Woody Guthrie Boyd Holbrook ... Johnny Cash Edward Norton ... Pete Seeger Norbert Leo Butz ... Alan Lomax (and many more) "At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, a young Bob Dylan shakes up his act on the folk music scene by going electric and siring rock as the voice of a generation - defining one of the most transformative moments in 20th century music." A teaser and full trailer are at the above IMDb link. The film is loosely/arguably based on the 2015 book "Dylan Goes Electric", by Elijah Wald, which sets the furor surrounding Dylan's 1965 appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in the context of the changes in the . Today Elijah Wald added to his online "Songobiography" posts with this one featuring "Blowin' in the Wind", where he also comments on what he knows about the movie thus far (which isn't more than any of us), in particular with a note on Suze Rotolo, who is one of the key characters whose name was changed for the movie. He hopes that her important role will not also be lost. IndieWire reports: "... Mangold noted during the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that the film is not a traditional biopic, but rather an ensemble period piece reminiscent of Robert Altman’s work. “By the way, it’s not really a Bob Dylan biopic,” Mangold said. “The reason Bob has been so supportive of us making it, is it’s about, as in all cases I think of the best true-life movies are never cradle to grave but they’re about a very specific moment. In this case, it might sound Altman-esque, but it’s a kind of ensemble piece about this moment in time, the early ’60s in New York, and this 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pockets hitchhikes his way to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who is in the hospital and is dying of a nerve disease.” Mangold continued, “And he sings Woody a song that he wrote for him and befriends Pete Seeger, who is like a son to Woody, and Pete sets him up with gigs at local clubs and there you meet Joan Baez and all these other people who are part of this world, and this wanderer who comes in from Minnesota with a fresh name and a fresh outlook on life, becomes a star, signs to the biggest record company in the world within a year, and three years later, has record sales rivaling The Beatles.” Dylan himself gave notes on the script, which Mangold said he now treasures. “I’ve spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” the “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” director said. “I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love “Copland.”‘” --- I imagine that like many here I'm not so interested in the portrayal of Bob Dylan in this movie, but that cultural moment and in particular that cultural moment in American folk and popular music. Side note: Benedict Cumberbatch was originally to play Pete Seeger, probably mostly for his vague physical resemblance, but he had scheduling conflicts. ~ Becky in Oregon |
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19 Oct 24 - 04:25 PM (#4210084) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer Oops - didn't finish the thought: The film is loosely/arguably based on the 2015 book "Dylan Goes Electric", by Elijah Wald, which sets the furor surrounding Dylan's 1965 appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in the context of the changes in the "context of its turbulent times, Dylan's musical evolution, and the oft-misunderstood folk revival, personified by the oft-misunderstood Pete Seeger." ~ B in OR |
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19 Oct 24 - 04:26 PM (#4210085) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer ... and "Mangold", is director James Mangold. ~ B in OR |
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19 Oct 24 - 05:35 PM (#4210090) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: GerryM "Pete Seeger, who is like a son to Woody...." Guthrie was just seven years older than Seeger. |
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19 Oct 24 - 07:45 PM (#4210100) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Stilly River Sage Sometimes that age gap is small but that feeling happens based upon experience, mentoring, etc. It still makes sense. |
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24 Dec 24 - 11:02 PM (#4214097) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer The movie is coming out tomorrow, December 25, 2024. Elijah Wald has been quoted as saying, "It’s not historically accurate, but it is poetically accurate." Wald has created a playlist of Folkways (now Smithsonian-Folkways) recordings. On Facebook, he says about it, "Whether or not you're interested in the new film, or Dylan... Smithsonian/Folkways asked me to compile a Dylan-related playlist from their catalog and I took it as an opportunity to make a deep dive into a lot of my favorite music, back to when I was first getting into this stuff. Some of the connections are obvious, some less so; all of it is music I was glad to hear again, with a few tracks I'd never heard, and a bunch I wanted other people to check out." A Complete Unknown: A Listening Companion from Smithsonian Folkways By Elijah Wald "From the moment he took an interest in folk music, Bob Dylan was intimately engaged with Folkways Records, and that engagement continued throughout his early years in New York and on to the present day. He learned songs from Folkways LPs, wrote songs based on material he’d heard on Folkways, had friends who recorded for Folkways, and eventually, he and others recorded his own songs for the label. "This playlist touches all those bases and, while following Dylan’s journey, gives a sense of the breadth of his influences and the Folkways catalog." More at the link. I'm going to look for some other background info to add to the thread. ~ Becky in Oregon |
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24 Dec 24 - 11:11 PM (#4214098) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer Wald (Facebook, Dec. 4): I'm in shock... (also just saw the movie, and liked it) The above was posted with an image of Bob Dylans post on X, "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 evenents from the early '50s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you've seen the movie read the book." Wald (Facebook, Dec. 11): Since all sorts of people are getting this wrong... Suze Rotolo chose that spelling of her name to be cool and unusual, but pronounced it as two syllables: "Susie." Wald (Facebook, Dec. 19): [He was asked, "... Suze Rotolo was fictionalized as "Sylvie", and a number of people were asking why?"] Apparently, Dylan requested that Suze's name be changed because she was a very private person and should not be treated as a public figure. Elijah Wald's recent Dylan-related posts on his "Songobiography" blog are linked in the sidebar of the intro page, here: https://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/ Blowin' in the Wind Don't Think Twice, It's All Right Freight Train Blues Girl from the North Country If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You (Dylan & Van Ronk) Like a Rolling Stone Love Minus Zero/No Limit Maggie's Farm Mr. Tambourine Man The Old Man There are reviews out, but many are paywalled - I'll leave you to do your own searches. But, here's perspective of use to any not-so-much-a-Dylan-fans, like myself: A Complete Unknown Isn’t Really About Bob Dylan, The new biopic stars Timothée Chalamet as the musical genius, but it’s interested less in him than in his effect on others. (Slate.com) ~ Becky in Oregon |
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27 Dec 24 - 12:45 PM (#4214209) Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024, Dylan & Newport From: Desert Dancer Elijah Wald on Facebook, 12/27/24 With all the discussions about what is real and fictional in the Dylan movie, this seems like a good time to straighten out the record on Alan Lomax's role -- which serious historians keep getting wrong and the movie gets mostly right. Lomax did not hate electric instruments or rock 'n' roll. He was indeed a folk "purist," but not in that way. For him, folk music was the vernacular music of working class communities -- so, for example, the folk music happening in New York in the late 1950s was what groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were singing in Harlem, not middle class college students playing banjos in Washington Square. As far as I can determine, he was the first folklorist to record a band with electric guitar, back in 1941. In 1959, when he got back from sitting out the McCarthy Era in Europe, he held a homecoming "Folksong '59" concert that included Muddy Waters playing electric and was supposed to have the Cadillacs (of "Speedoo" fame), though in the end he had to substitute a Detroit "girl group." As he wrote at the time, he was thrilled by the transformation of US pop music: "A stampeding herd of youngsters—hillbillies, citybillies, rockabillies—had broken through the gates and set America singing, dancing, rocking to its own rhythms. The juke boxes were pouring out the wild expressive singing that I once had to hunt for in the Mississippi Delta…. I saw rock and roll audiences clapping time on the off-beat and watched the kids dancing more expressively than ever in my memory. When I closed my eyes I often couldn’t tell a Negro from a white singer. Tin Pan Alley with its stifling snobby European standards was spinning on its pinnacle." He loved all of that; he did NOT love folks like Dave Van Ronk and the New Lost City Ramblers; he was a close friend of Pete Seeger's, but detested Pete's idea that everyone should pick up guitars and banjos and try to sing folksongs -- to Lomax, that was dumbing down and disrespecting music with deep, complex traditions and skills -- and he had no interest in Dylan or any of the other young songwriters and did his best to keep them out of the Newport limelight, which he thought should be shining on authentic folk artists. He was prepared to modify his views when he saw a chance for major stars to direct attention to the authentic artists: when the Broadway star Libby Holman fell in love with folk music, he provided her with material and teamed her up with Josh White; when Jo Stafford recorded an album of traditional folk songs, he played it regularly on his radio show; and he could see the advantage of using the star power of people like Peter, Paul and Mary to bring audiences to Newport and expose them to the real thing. But that didn't mean he liked the adulterations. The famous fight between Lomax and Grossman was not over Dylan's set, nor was it over electricity. It was over the fact that the first full Chicago blues band to be invited to Newport was fronted by three young white guys -- and his (accurate) belief that Grossman was interested in the Butterfield Blues Band specifically because they were white and hence more marketable to a mass white audience than, say, Junior Wells or Buddy Guy. As it happened, the first night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival included a hot electric set by the Chambers Brothers, and Lomax jumped onstage at the end to say, "I’m very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock ’n’ roll!” Nor was Lomax a lone outlier; there were plenty of people whose definition of "folk music" was based on class consciousness rather than acoustic instruments -- after all, a lot of them were socialists or communists. Bo Diddley was on the bill for the first Newport Folk Fest in 1959, though he didn't make it. A few weeks before Newport '65, Dave Van Ronk programmed a blues concert in New York that included Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Mose Allison, the Muddy Waters Blues Band, and Chuck Berry -- and Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, applauded Berry's appearance, only complaining that the sound system was not powerful enough to convey the full force of his music. There were all kinds of disagreements about all this stuff: Silber famously took Dylan to task for shifting from topical songwriting to introspective songwriting; Lomax had no interest in Dylan, either way; Van Ronk was equally excited by electric blues and by Dylan's fusion of folk tradition with symbolist poetry. To finish up... my most recent book, "Jelly Roll Blues," has Alan Lomax as a central character, and tries to explore some of his complications -- he was a complicated, often difficult, and very opinionated man, and I owe him a huge debt but also note a lot of problems with his views and work. I'm not in any particular camp on any of these issues -- Van Ronk was by far my most important teacher, and if there are camps, I'm in his, but he was interested in erasing musical boundaries rather than policing them. I'm not writing this as a defense of Lomax, just as a corrective to the way he tends to be mischaracterized in pieces about Newport '65. He thought Dylan was destructive, but electricity was not the issue -- and, in Dylan's phrase, he was right from his side: when Dylan left the folk scene and became a rock star, most of the folk audience went with him. As George Wein (the founder of the festival) put it, “[the Newport Folk Fest] lasted four more years, but it was never the same. After that we were no longer ‘It,’ we were no longer hip, we were no longer what was happening. We were just old-time folksingers.” Obviously this is not the whole story: I wrote a book about Dylan, Seeger, and Newport, and it isn't the whole story either. But I was pleased that the movie showed Lomax objecting to the Butterfield Band because they were white and suggesting they were as fake as Peter, Paul and Mary (I don't agree, but that was his view). So far it looks like almost no one is picking up on that, and the dominant narrative continues to mischaracterize him as hating electricity and rock 'n' roll... which is why I'm writing this. Feel free to share it. ~ Becky in Oregon |