Dylan and Me Forever
All my life he's kept our deal:. He writes my personal soundtrack, I meet my hidden self in his lyrics.
When I was a teenage folkie strumming doleful ballads on a 35-dollar guitar, I sent a buck to the Columbia Record Club and acquired an album that made music new— The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was not the only album in the package, just the only one I couldn’t stop playing. Nobody sounded like Dylan. He whooped, he hollered, he prophesied with a barbed-wire rasp that seemed to rise from the earth itself like grains of dust in the wind. His songs blew across the graves of warmongers, over the seas on the path of a dove, through the coat of a shivering girl who might remember who he used to be in his hometown, before he struck out for adventure on the dark side of the road.
In those days lone singers with knocked-around guitars seemed the antidote to every gimmick hyped on TV, every tired parental maxim, every lethal truth ignored by politicians. Other artists lamented the Bomb in voices that quivered with anguish. Only Dylan had the chutzpah to lace his warnings with humor. In “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” he turned post-apocalypse New York into a screwball dream that featured hookups gone wrong and a joyride in a Cadillac down deserted streets where a hungry guy couldn’t find a string bean, much less company. He chanted, swallowing laughter, that he’d let me be in his dream if he could be in mine. My best friend and I used to quote that line, like a secret between ourselves and Dylan. We thought he meant it.
Everyone wanted a place in Dylan’s dream. Joan Baez, my idol and his most famous lover, brought him onstage at her concerts (“I feel it but Dylan can say it,” she declared of anthems like “Blowin’ in the Wind”). Sing Out! magazine, where the scruffy gatekeepers of folk made it their mission to separate phonies from the real deal, put Dylan on the cover, their preacher of peace. Young people spoke his name like code for all things beautiful and real. On the cover of “Freewheelin’,” he walked the snowy streets of Greenwich Village lost in thought—suede jacket too thin for the weather, tousled mop untouched by Vitalis, a radiant girl on his arm.
I wanted to be that flame-haired girl (any female under 30 was a girl back then). But what I wanted even more, with a wordless hunger, was Dylan’s irrepressible creative daring.
A Complete Unknown reveals nothing new about the shapeshifter who landed in New York wrapped in fakery, then upended culture with his real, unquenchable genius.
“Had to see the Dylan movie again?” asked my husband, who has yet to see it once. Ever since A Complete Unknown arrived in theaters like Christmas, I’ve been a kid absorbed in the game of Dylan, bouncing between the new biopic (twice), the classic documentary Don’t Look Back and every fragment of lore I could unearth on my shelves or online. I played Freewheelin’ nightly. So when I came home from an entire afternoon elsewhere, it did not strain belief that I had craved another hit of Timothée Chalamet as a prettier but utterly convincing Dylan.
Chalamet embodies the twitchy wunderkind Baez recalls in her memoir And a Voice to Sing With: “He was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs…. He was touching and infinitely fragile. His indescribably white hands moved constantly: putting a cigarette almost in his mouth, then tugging relentlessly at a tuft of hair on his neck…. He seemed to function from the center of his own thoughts and images, and like a madman he was swallowed up by them.”
A Complete Unknown reveals nothing new about the 20-year-old shapeshifter who landed in New York wrapped in fakery, then upended culture with his real, unquenchable genius. No surprise to anyone who’s followed him forever. The former Bobby Zimmerman, who did not acquire his hayseed accent on a farm or his chops working in a carnival, has always refused to be known except through his ever-changing art.
He could be downright mean about his sacred privacy. In Don’t Look Back, he taunts a reporter from Time: “I know more about what you do, and you don’t even have to ask me how or why or anything, just by looking, than you will ever know about me, ever.” I forgave the little prick all over again, mesmerized by his power to confound. He’ll never let anyone into his dream. What he does instead—and has done relentlessly for more than 60 years—is hold up a mirror to our own dreams and conflicts.
The movie’s first shots of “Green Witch Village,” as Dylan called his creative stomping ground in a talking blues, bring my teenage dreamscape to life. It’s all here—the wan winter light that fell on Dylan and flame-haired Suze Rotolo; the grime left by striving multitudes; the hand-painted sign that summoned minstrels, cut-ups and angel-headed hipsters to Cafe Wha? I wanted to live in the Village, a fantasy I carried into late middle age. On the brink of 60, my husband and I bought a wildly inappropriate loft that reminded me of Dylan’s bohemian digs as he described them in Chronicles, redolent with “gin and tonic, wood alcohol and flowers.” The place opened directly to the street, where any passing drunk could leave his bottle on the window sill—and did.
A traditional biopic hews to narrative rules: ignite a burning desire in the hero, plant an obstacle in the way, then let havoc do its clarifying work until resolution arrives and the world shifts on its axis. In James Mangold’s movie, Dylan’s desire to make his own kind of art is clear as a mountain stream, unimpeded by self-doubt or anything at all except other people’s dreams for him, be they women, the folk establishment or fans like me, a kid who couldn’t get enough of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I loved Dylan for defying expectations—until he shattered mine. When Dylan rocked the Newport Folk Festival with “Like a Rolling Stone,” I felt personally betrayed. A finger-wagging account in Sing Out! convinced me that the newly electrified Dylan had crossed over to the dark side. The biopic’s rip-snorting version made me wish I’d been there.
Others can tell you what Mangold telescoped, missed, ignored or got wrong about that thunderbolt of a performance (and Dylan’s entire world, for that matter). I’ll just say the Newport scene thrilled me to the core. Soon enough, Dylan’s electric phase would give my life a whole new soundtrack. I emblazoned every notebook with quotes from songs that jingle-jangled and thundered—Mona Lisa’s highway blues, tickets to the hanging. Sixty years on, I’ve been listening over and over to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” The song gives voice to something I can’t name. Come to think of it, maybe I can. Like Dylan as a young iconoclast, I’ve had enough of something and am kicking my legs to crash it off.
If Bobby Zimmerman had been born Roberta, with the same torrential gifts, would she have had Bobby’s freedom to go where the art gods called her?
Suze Rotolo, the girl I wanted to be, was an artist on her own creative quest. As Susan Bordo demonstrates in an incisive and richly detailed essay, the real Rotolo bears little resemblance to the submissive Sylvie Russo who subs for her in the movie at Dylan’s request. Sylvie leaves Dylan because he’s cheating on her. Suze left because he expected a “chick” who would “walk a few paces behind, picking up his candy wrappers.” It wasn’t her, babe. Bordo quotes at length from her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, and this line stands out: “I resented not being able to wander off by myself and sit in a café to draw, read, or write the way the guys could, without getting hit on.”
Virginia Woolf asked what would have happened to Shakespeare’s literary sister. A Complete Unknown confronts me with a similar question: If Bobby Zimmerman had been born Roberta, with the same torrential gifts, would she have had Bobby’s freedom to go where the art gods called her? I know the answer, and it chafes, yet I’m with Dylan for the long haul. Art is bigger than the artist.
Dylan once said in that faux hayseed diction, “The world don’t need any more songs.” He needs to write them, though, the diamonds and the dreck. He can’t stop changing up his canon, at times beyond recognition. The last time I saw him perform, not recently, I wished he’d leave well enough alone. He must have been in his 60s then, a wizened gnome leaning on the keyboards for support. But on he powers, unafraid to offend or fail. I like knowing he’s out there, still following Mr. Tambourine Man. Still reminding me, with his example, to keep putting one word in front of the other. Dylan gets under my skin like no other artist, needling, inspiring and enraging. It’s the job I’ve assigned him, and he hasn’t failed me yet. He’s gonna make me lonesome when he goes.
Who’s got something to share about Dylan or the biopic? What would have happened to Roberta Zimmerman, the genius who never was? You’ve got plenty to say, I just know it. So come one, come all! Let’s see how many Dylan quotes turn up in the comments. This is going to be fun.
Conversation builds the case that something particular and real is happening here at Amazement Seeker. So do hearts, shares and recommendations on your own stack, if you have one. A paid subscription, if you happen to be in the mood and have the means, is like a late Christmas present out of the blue. Remember, though: I’d keep writing these letters to the world if no one paid, ever. I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t. And something tells me that Dylan, if he had to work the line at General Motors instead of cutting albums, would come home and reach for his guitar. He’d have a new song in minutes.
Wasn't my mother surprised when she picked me up from an after Little Red School House play date with my friend Anna, and Bob answered the door. 1972 I think. He played the harmonica for us. A chill stay at home Dad I remember who made good snacks.
This is one of my favorite pieces by you—every single line is tight and golden.