Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius

Chalamet as Dylan

Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4^th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.

You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”

Whatever the case, as listeners and fans, we caught glimpses of him, or thought we did, and in who we thought he was, we saw pieces of ourselves, who we thought we were. All of it was illusion, Dylan’s wilderness of mirrors, that we thought we could learn something from him. But how was that possible, when we, and he, were so young, with his life and ours moving so fast?

What Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown” does best is capture the velocity of Dylan and of that time. The whole movie takes place over only four years. Four years! It’s a blink of an eye, a single drop of water in the great pool of time, and yet that man and those years changed the world in ways that still surround us.

It is one of the great ironies that sometimes it takes a movie for us to see what was there all along in Dylan’s music and lyrics. This movie does exactly that. You look at the faces of those surrounding Dylan during those formative years in Greenwich Village, and you can see that they know they’re being left behind by Dylan and his songs and the speed at which he is producing them, the unfairness of it all, that he is so far ahead of them in such a short time. These were not inconsiderable people – Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and Dave von Ronk and Bob Neuwirth, and yet there they were, reeling, as Dylan’s genius filled the air they breathed.

It had to have been overwhelming for every one of them. The poignant scene of Dylan on the other side of the fence from the character meant to be his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, at the Newport ferry is nearly perfect in its depiction of that incredible mix of pain and wonder of youth. He thought he could share the Newport appearance with her. It was more than a gesture of affection. Dylan owed her. He lived in her apartment. He learned the ways and byways of the Village from Rotolo, who grew up there. But it couldn’t be. She knew it, and he knew it, and their shared sadness is one of the great moments in the film.

It must have been mind-blowing for Dylan to walk around at that young age with all of that inside him at every moment. You see him sit down in Rotolo’s apartment with a notebook and a guitar and it just pours out of him. You watch him walking down the streets of the Village with all that newness coming at him, and you can see him taking it in and turning it into attitude and then song and then performance. The movie is supposed to be about the moment that Dylan “went electric” and abandoned folk music, and it is, because standing there with a guitar and a harmonica was never going to contain him.

There is a wonderful scene when Dylan buys a police whistle from a vendor on the street that will be used in “Highway 61 Revisited.” It doesn’t matter that the scene never happened – Al Kooper brought the whistle to the session. The whistle in the song, and in the movie, captures perfectly the momentum that was everywhere in the Village at that moment. Dylan was inside it, and the magic was that he was able to use it. Nothing with Dylan was serendipitous. There was drive and determination behind every word he wrote, every note he sang.

The way he wrote those songs so quickly and with such assurance makes you dizzy watching it on the screen, and it must have had the same effect on those around Dylan. It must have been nearly impossible to maintain equilibrium when Dylan passed you by. It took a kind of fatalism to survive him, an acceptance that your best was at the bottom of the stairs that he had already climbed and disappeared out of sight at the top. Neuwirth was one who was able to manage the sense of dislocation that came with knowing Bob Dylan. He did it with humor and teasing and a surefooted hipness that could keep Dylan guessing, and that skill must have been at the root of their friendship and finally their willing and mutual disengagement.

“A Complete Unknown” does not try to guess what was happening inside Bob Dylan. How could it? Dylan didn’t know what was happening inside himself. Chalamet plays Dylan straight, no chaser, as the saying goes, and it works perfectly. He seems to have had a basic instinct that he did not have to bring anything extra to the character he was charged with playing because there was so much there to start, beginning with the song lyrics and even his look, thin and hip and quick. The movie even shows how Dylan worked on his look, buying skinny suits in London with Bob Neuwirth, polka-dot shirts with Al Kooper.

Bob Dylan was a gift to Chalamet, as he has been to us all. The way he made his art, it seemed not to matter to him how we would perceive it and what we would take away. Dylan always had an absolutely marvelous onto the next thing attitude about his work. I can still remember listening to him write some of the songs that ended up on the “Blood on the Tracks” album through that wall on the first floor of 124 West Houston Street. He must have had a lot of stuff already written down, because he would struggle through a problem with a lyric or a melody or a beat for one song, and when he got it, he just moved right along to the next one. Listening to the way he managed the session for “Positively 4^th Street” was the same – fiddle around, try this, try that, and when he hears through the speakers what he has in his head, he moves on.

It is incredible to think that Bob Dylan, who in the years 1961 to 1965, really just a boy from Hibbing starting out in the big city like so many others, was able to cleave a seam through our culture that was so deep, you can still see it today. Bob Dylan came to New York City because it was the place to be if you wanted to make it as a singer and a songwriter. New York and Greenwich Village were there waiting for him. But as grand and wonderous as the Village and its scene must have been, they weren’t enough for Bob Dylan, so he changed it.

All you have to do is look at these lyrics to see how he did it:

Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

See? Just like that – a few strokes of a pen and a tune and you are taken away to a place that was in his mind, and now it’s in yours.

The world will never un-see or un-hear the genius of Bob Dylan. We are lucky to have been alive while he has walked this earth, and we have been changed for the better because of him.