Dave Gorton, Chesterfield Socialist Party
A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, has received three Oscar nominations for acting roles. To me, the best portrayals were the music industry’s businessmen who come across, correctly, as leeches. Dan Fogler – as Albert Grossman – certainly makes Dylan’s manager live up to his surname! (Grossman took 50% of Dylan’s song publishing rights).
1960s US was turbulent. There are newsflashes, for instance, of the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King used as devices but the film insufficiently highlights the struggles that came to the fore. For example, Dylan played at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
The artistic world reflected the views of millions of Americans against racism, war and imperialism. But to understand fully their importance, later generations need more than just passing references to such events.
The film’s central theme of Dylan ‘going electric’, omits much. We see Pete Seeger pleading with Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to only play acoustic because the festival was ‘ours’.
Trapped
Like many artists, Dylan was influenced by the battles of the period and wrote songs opposing inequality and tyranny, but he never claimed to be protest music’s central figure. In the mid-sixties he was becoming increasingly frustrated feeling himself becoming trapped in one style – a poet rather than a musician.
It’s a very short clip but Dylan walking into a bar where Bobby Neuwirth and band are playing The Wild Rover to a crowd enthusiastically joining in, speaks volumes. Music was to be enjoyed, not just an incidental accompaniment to a lyrical ‘message’.
In fact Seeger’s ‘ours’ really meant belonging to the Stalinist Communist Party and hangers-on. They were responsible for organised campaigns of interruptions on tours as they sought to protect the ‘authenticity’ of ‘their’ music.
Thirty years previously in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was termed ‘muddle instead of music’ by the Stalinist state. The Russian Revolution, through isolation and Stalin’s bureaucratisation, had deteriorated so that instead of freeing art from the confines of capitalism, the Stalinist bureaucracy simply announced what the people wanted and threatened artists with ostracisation or worse.
In the 1950s and 60s, a huge explosion of Black ‘free jazz’ in the US sprung up, directly influenced by not only the civil rights movement but also colonial revolutions in Africa. This radicalisation swept up the largest figures. John Coltrane alone released albums titled Africa, Dakar and Tanganyika Strut.
In protest against the Vietnam War later, already established Black soul artists released highly political material, not just against the war but slavery and continuing injustice – The Staple Singers’ When Will We Be Paid (For The Work We’ve Done) and the Chi-Lites’ Give More Power To The People.
Socialist realism
It is entirely false to portray music’s part in this radicalisation as solely stemming from mostly white folk musicians, as the Stalinists were trying to have the world believe, ironically relegating Black music in the process. It is, in fact, the embodiment of what had become known as socialist realism which virtually banished artistic exploration and, in effect, defined art as only being useful as propaganda.
Go and see the film. Its omissions don’t detract from its entertainment value. Towards the end is a scene where session musician Al Kooper, told he can’t play guitar, simply sits at the Hammond organ and produces those electrifying opening bars of Like A Rolling Stone. It signifies the release of Dylan from his trap. It is meant to be uplifting. It is. Then continue your own exploration of the music that arose from the period’s struggles.
A Complete Unknown, distributed by Searchlight Pictures, can be seen in Cinemas.
