Bob Dylan’s Light Bulb Moment

“Mair nonsense” has been uttered in the name of Robert Burns, wrote the never under-opinionated Hugh MacDiarmid, “than in ony’s barrin’ liberty and Christ.” The same might be said of Bob Dylan - even as I add a few more stones to a cairn the size of Everest.

Last weekend my wife and I and a few dozen others attended the Pavilion cinema in Galashiels where A Complete Unknown, about Dylan’s emergence as the reluctant spokesman for a generation, was showing. A few contrary and ignorant critics apart, the movie has been well-received. This is no less than it deserves. It is a long time since I have sat for nearly two and a half hours without looking at my watch.

As the credits rolled, my wife said she would happily sit through it again then and there. So would I. Hosannas must go to the director, James Mangold, Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. None, however, eclipsed Timothée Chalamet, who within a few minutes made you forget you were watching someone who was impersonating Dylan and not the man himself.

Bob Dylan and his doppelganger

It was inevitable that Dylanophiles would agonise over Mangold’s imaginative presentation of Dylan’s story. While one sympathises with them, it must be borne in mind that biopics are not documentaries and that we must expect creative licence while in a theatre. It is also worth acknowledging that Dylan himself approved the script, even to the point of insisting that the name of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, be changed. Who knows why he did this; who knows why he does a lot of things. If you expect consistency, try following Englebert Humperdinck.

Suze Rotolo was seventeen when Dylan, then nineteen, first met her. “Right from the start,” he writes in Chronicles: Volume One (2004), “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned, and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves.” Banana leaves? No, I don’t get it either. Equally alluring - but in an altogether different way - was Suze’s feisty mother, who did not take at all to her daughter’s boyfriend. “Once,” recalled Dylan, “I said to her that I didn’t think she was being fair.” “Do me a favour,” replied Mrs Rotolo, “don’t think when I’m around.”

As relayed in A Complete Unknown, Suze is supplanted by Joan Baez, who in turn will be sidelined as Dylan’s career burgeons. One misguided reviewer suggested this is an example of his boorishness when actually it is more likely to have been youthful insensitivity. Whatever, it can not have been easy to be with someone like Dylan. Many moons ago I interviewed Baez who recalled an occasion when she, then famous, and he, looking like a hobo, tried to check into a swanky hotel. She was warmly welcomed but Dylan was told to take a hike. While she remonstrated Dylan drifted off who knows where. Overnight, though, he channelled his anger at being rejected into a song - if only I could remember which one.

If A Complete Unknown has a story, it tells of how Dylan, the inheritor of the mantles of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, turned his back on folk music by “going electric”. This was seen by many fundamentalist folkies as a betrayal which, in hindsight, seems daft. By sticking a jack into his guitar, Dylan was asserting his right as an artist to take whichever path he chose. He did not betray folk music; he took it in another direction and to another dimension.

He was not alone. I recall my old chum Robin Harper, erstwhile leader of the Scottish Greens, telling me how after he saw Paul Simon perform in London in 1965, he asked him if he’d like to come to Scotland and appear at his local folk club. Apparently, Simon was keen but the invitation was never confirmed because the Club’s diehards felt he was “too modern”.

What A Complete Unknown does not - and cannot - identify is where Dylan’s genius sprang from. But towards the end of Chronicles, he tells how, through Suze, he was introduced to the music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. “Every song,” he writes, “seemed to come from some obscure tradition, seemed to have a pistol in its hip pocket, a club or a brickbat and they came at you in crutches, braces and wheelchairs. They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.”

This was Dylan’s light bulb moment. “Within a few minutes,” he adds, “I felt like I hadn’t slept or tasted food for about thirty hours, I was so into it.” If there is one song that transformed his approach to song writing, it was Brecht and Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’, which has been covered by Lotte Lenya, Nina Simone and others, some of which are available on YouTube. It is, as Dylan says, “a wild song…a nasty song, sung by an evil beast.” The lyrics are spat out as if they taste of washing up liquid, their singer a skivvy like the one in Dylan’s own ‘Sweetheart Like You’. “Woody,” he writes, “had never written a song like that. It wasn’t a protest song or topical song and there was no love for people in it.”

What ‘Pirate Jenny’ did was allow Dylan to find subjects to write about in places he had hitherto been unaware of or blind to. In part, this explains his extraordinary eclecticism. Released from the bonds of tradition, he gave himself permission to ignore the clamour of musical gatekeepers and the demands of record companies and fans for more of the same. “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden,” he writes in the last paragraph of Chronicles. “It was just too perfect.” Now he could look back to the fast receding past if he wanted, but he could also turn his back on it and create a shock with the new. What struck me as A Complete Unknown ended and Dylan rode off on his motorbike was how much of his story was yet to be told. Was there ever a film that demanded a sequel more?