Review: A Complete Unknown

To plug or unplug. That is the question.

Unlike Bob Dylan, I didn’t sell out and go electric. My two albums, Winners and Losers, Campaign Songs from Critical Elections in American History, Vols. I and II are both acoustic guitar. Maybe that’s why I remained a teacher and then a lawyer instead of winning the Nobel Prize. Or maybe it’s because I’m not a musical and lyrical genius.

The Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown climaxes with the notorious 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival where he shocked the acoustic purists by singing with an electric guitar and band. Dylan’s mentor, Pete Seeger, is so outraged he tries to pull the plug until his wife Toshi stops him. (Likely apocryphal.)

I loved this film – not only just because it’s a time I lived through or because I’m a Dylan fan. But also because of its recreation of the early ‘60s Village folk scene and its performances: Timothee Chalamet captures the essence of the artist’s brilliance and flaws, especially his spot-on renditions of much of Volume I of the Dylan songbook. Monica Barbaro flawlessly replicates the beauty and purity of Joan Baez’s singing. And Edward Norton so deeply conjures up Pete Seeger, I didn’t know it was him until the credits.

The climax of the film is at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan ignores the pleas of the acoustic traditionalists and “goes electric” for Maggie’s Farm and Like a Rolling Stone. This was the birth of “Folk Rock,” which spawned late sixties groups like The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But why were Seeger et al. so threatened by electrification?

One answer is they feared their own obsolescence if rock took over folk. They saw themselves carrying on a long tradition of troubadours, achieving mainstream acceptance in the late ‘40s and ‘50s with Seeger and the Weavers, and culminating in the popularity of Peter, Paul and Mary in the Sixties. The portability of acoustic guitars enabled people to perform anywhere, and non-professionals could enjoy strumming and singing with friends and family for any occasion.

But also the folkies feared going electric threatened the left-wing politics inherent in the folk music of the ‘50s and ‘60s, whose founding father was Woody Guthrie. Rock meant commercialization and de-politicization – Elvis, the Beatles, the Beachboys. Yet folk-rock was a great part of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with songs like Country Joe & the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” (“One, Two, Three Four What are we Fighting for”), CSNY’s Ohio, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”

And many post-Newport hit songs remained acoustic or had acoustic guitar with electric background, most prominently songs by Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, and the singer-songwriter movement he exemplified. And you could still play non-electric versions of songs at those gatherings of family, friends or even strangers. (Like my repeat performances of Satisfaction for Dutch tourists in the middle of the Amazon Jungle. (See Welcome to the Hotel Anaconda). So Dylan was right that it was time to move on from acoustic-only purism.

The true end of the folkie acoustic era came in 1978 at the hands of John Belushi in Animal House:

Yes, I was that guy. (Not Belushi.)