Dylan Biopic Evokes Memories of Heroes

by admin | April 25, 2025 7:48 am

The other night, I watched A Complete Unknown, the biopic of Bob Dylan released last year. It stars Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan. The nearly 84-year-old troubadour and Nobel Prize winner posted that he was pleased with the film and Chalamet’s performance, which indeed was impressive. Dylan[1] even read the entire script aloud before production, wrote “Go with God” on his copy and signed it.

I was more intrigued, largely because of the memories it invoked, with the performance of Ed Norton as Pete Seeger. Norton had to learn how to play the banjo to play the famed folk singer, and he did so quite creditably. I consider Seeger an American hero who spent his 94 years on this planet fighting for justice, environmental causes, civil rights, and international disarmament. He did so cheerfully and gracefully.

A Complete Unknown also features Monica Barbara portraying Joan Baez, who is still singing beautifully at 84, and recently showed up at the Fighting Oligarchy rally in Los Angeles. Another strong performance came from actor Scoot McNairy, playing an ill Woody Guthrie, unable to speak and dying of Huntington’s Disease. Dylan and Seeger go to see him in the hospital in the movie. It is a touching but disturbing scene. Guthrie’s guitar, from the 1940s on, sported a sign that proclaimed: This Machine Kills Fascists. He wrote This Land is Your Land in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Woody’s song ought to be our national anthem, in my view.

My eyes kept welling up during the movie because of the memories it evoked. These singers provided much of the soundtrack to our youth, and at least for me, helped shape my left-leaning politics. I remember walking to Howard’s, across from LeTourneau University on Mobberly Avenue in 1971, cutting through the campus from our home on South Twelfth Street. (Howard’s was a precursor to Walmart and had a decent album collection.) There, I bought a copy of Rainbow Race, whose first song, Last Train to Nuremberg, became seared into my memory:

Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who manufactured the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?

Last train to Nuremberg!
Last train to Nuremberg!
Last train to Nuremberg!
All on board!

Seeger was a gifted songwriter, author of Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and co-writer of If I Had a Hammer. He also adopted an old gospel hymn by the Rev. Charles Tindley and gave us We Shall Overcome, which became the anthem of the civil rights movement. He was a founding member of the Weavers. The group recorded one of my life’s enduring earworms: Wimoweh, also known as The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The mere mention of that song sends it spiraling into my brain, where it can dwell for days.

The rift between Dylan and Seeger, when the former went electric at the Newport Festival, is somewhat overplayed in A Complete Unknown, from what I have read. In a 2001 interview, Seeger said he just wanted to understand the words to Maggie’s Farm, but the sound was too distorted for him to decipher them. He admitted in that interview that as the emcee, he should have done a better job of hushing the Newport crowd booing Dylan for going electric: Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. E[2]lectric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father’s old term.

Seeger had deep musical roots. His father, Charles, taught composition at what is now Juilliard, while his mother taught violin there. They divorced and Charles married a former student, Ruth Crawford, who became a well-known composer and musicologist. After World War II, Charles taught ethnomusicology at UC-Berkely and at Yale. Seeger strayed away from his family’s love of classical music to become one of the country’s best-known folk singers.

We could sure use Pete Seeger right now, plucking his banjo and singing protest songs, railing about the oligarchs laying waste to this country of ours. There would be no shortage of material to write and sing about.

Source URL: https://garyborders.com/pages/dylan-biopic-evokes-memories-of-heroes/

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