American film director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a brilliant and compelling exploration of Bob Dylan at the start of his career in the 1960s and his relationship with the people who helped shape his future. The film is already a box office success as the highest grossing movie ever for its distributor, Searchlight Pictures. No one would claim that Bob was ever a mainstream bluesman because he has defied any single specific genre and created his own niche as a musical and lyrical genius. However, at least one song in his extensive back catalogue proves that he could sing and play the blues as well as anyone of his generation, “Blind Willie McTell.” Born in 1898, Willie was a Piedmont and ragtime singer, songwriter and guitarist.
It is a beautiful song about the power of the human spirit to transform suffering into transcendent art: “I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan seems to get in touch with the spirit of McTell evoking the deep south of the 19th century through this song which reaches deep into the soul.
By early 1961 Bob Dylan, fresh from Minnesota and a college dropout, was dreaming of making it as a folk singer in New York. He scoured the Greenwich Village bars and coffee houses looking for open mics and opportunities to play. One of these venues was Gerde’s Folk City, Manhattan’s top venue for folk music. Dylan had been able to perform briefly on stage a couple of times, and when the club owner booked blues legend John Lee Hooker for a two-week engagement he hired Dylan as Hooker’s opening act.
“Every night he’d be right there with me. We’d stay there, we’d party there, drink gin,” Hooker recalled in Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography. “He’d sit around and watch me play; he’d be right there every night, and we’d be playing guitars in the hotel. I don’t know what he got from me, but he must’ve got something.”
And in the book Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Hooker said, “We were great friends. A beautiful man. He really wasn’t playing with me for money. He was doing it for fun.”
After reading a New York Times review of the above show and then watching Dylan perform in Greenwich Village, American producer John Hammond realized his potential. He invited the young singer to audition for Columbia Records and subsequently produced his debut album, Bob Dylan. John later worked as a talent scout and in 1983 signed guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Also on the scene was Alan Lomax whose impact on popular music and blues in particular is significant. His field recordings of blues, gospel, bluegrass and Appalachian folk musicians taped in the ‘30s and ‘40s were important for folk, blues, and roots singers like Dylan searching for authenticity. Lomax brought otherwise obscure musicians including Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Woody Guthrie to a wider audience.
Tennessee bluesman Brownie McGhee often shared bills with Dylan in Greenwich Village clubs and as part of a musical partnership with Sonny Terry. One of their most recognizable songs, “Walk On,” features in A Complete Unknown, at a church hootenanny. The multi-talented Broadway actor and singer Joshua Henry plays the part of Brownie McGhee superbly and with conviction.
In Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech he mentioned McGhee in connection with his appreciation of Lead Belly’s timeless classic “Cotton Fields”,a record he said changed his life and transported him into a world he had never known.
“Cotton Fields” with its mesmeric haunting melodies holds a very significant meaning that chimes with historical struggles and collective memories of an entire culture. The song captures the realities of African American life during the era of sharecropping, a system which perpetuated racial inequality and economic oppression in America.
The most obvious discrepancy between fact and fiction in Mangold’s movie is the scene where Dylan appears on a TV and radio show hosted by Pete Seeger with a blues singer named Jesse Moffette. The latter is a fictional character played by real-life blues guitarist ‘Big Bill’ Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters. Muddy has greatly influenced not only Dylan but also American music as a whole.
The duo sing, play guitars and jam on “Down In My Heart,” a song Morganfield co-wrote with the film’s executive music producer Nick Baxter. It is also one of the most memorable cinematic moments, a triumph of authentic acoustic blues. Actor Timothée Chalamet sounds remarkably like his character Dylan while Blues Hall of Fame inductee ‘Big Bill’ is a highly accomplished blues performer in his own right. The pain in the Chicago bluesman’s heart is palpable, his sumptuous slide work complementing Chalamet’s more intricate strings.
Nick revealed how Dylan’s tone for the film was nailed with a little help from Gibson guitars and their team of luthiers:
For most of the songs, you need old, dead strings for sure, or else it does not sound right. And a lot of times on these recordings there’s just a sort of dead quality to the guitar. It’s not super-resonant. That’s not to say it’s not good; there’s a really cool feeling to a guitar when it’s dead in that way. You can attack it differently. It sort of emotes differently. But recreating that was a challenge.
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s virtuosic blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield alongside sublime Hammond organist Al Kooper and top drummer Sam Lay helped determine Dylan’s emerging post-acoustic rock and roll sound, specifically “Like A Rolling Stone” and much of Highway 61 Revisited. They were all part of the band picked by Dylan to back him at Newport in 1965 in his momentous and consequential electric set. The rest, as they say, is history.
This epic biopic lasts well over two hours and includes around 30 songs. A Complete Unknown celebrates the genius of Dylan and the musicians around him and oozes pure blues alongside folk, roots, rock and roll and R&B.
POSTSCRIPT:
In Bob Dylan’s 2022 seminal tome, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, he lists influential singers, musicians and songs, many of which reflect his formative years in the Village. These include:
Little Walter: “Key To The Highway”
“Little Walter is an excellent guitar player and in a lot of people’s opinion a greater singer than anyone on Chess Records. When Walter sings, “I’m going back to the border where I’m better known, he means it.” He was never meant to reach old age.”
Jimmy Reed: “Big Boss Man”
One of the most popular blues singers of the 1950s, Dylan describes Reed as “the essence of electric simplicity; you can play 12 bar blues in hundreds of variations and Jimmy Reed must have known them all.”
Nina Simone: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”
Originally released on her Broadway-Blues-Ballads album, Dylan opines, “The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life.”
Also referenced are Mose Allison, Ray Charles, Carl Perkins and Little Richard.Appropriately, Dylan has the final words: “Soul records like hillbilly, blues, calypso, Cajun, polka, salsa and other indigenous forms of music contain wisdom that the upper-crust often gets in academia.”
