How ‘A Complete Unknown’ factual fudges helped, hurt portrayal of Dylan at Newport Folk Festival

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When Newport Folk Festival historian and author Rick Massimo walked into a movie theater to see “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, he assumed he would have to suspend disbelief for the film’s 2-hours-plus running time. Massimo, a former WTOP journalist and historian, researched and wrote 2017’s “I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival,” the first book chronicling the history of the Rhode Island music festival, which originated in 1959. One of the most compelling storylines in the new film revolves around the “Dylan goes electric,” controversy, when Dylan and his band plugged in electric guitars at Newport in 1965 — going against the roots of the mostly-acoustic folk festival. How negative was the audience reaction, exactly? Massimo found several conflicting accounts, and realized that all these competing narratives actually were the story. “When you’re recounting history for a dramatic film, some of those changes are going to be more important than others,” Massimo tells WTOP. “A lot of it was very true to the bigger picture of what actually happened, and advance the real story and make it plainer, because life is messy, and film isn’t.” A key relationship in Dylan’s career and “A Complete Unknown” is with folk singer Pete Seeger, who championed young Dylan, opened the first Newport Folk Festival in 1979, and was on the festival’s first board of directors. “If you look at this movie as a father-son story, Edward Norton (as Pete Seeger) did a fantastic job of looking like somebody who thought he’d found the one who was going to come up after him, and realizing that (Dylan) was going to go his own way,” said Massimo. Massimo thinks the film underplayed the importance of Seeger’s wife, Toshi. “She had almost literally no lines in the movie, when in fact she was one of the producers of the Newport Folk Festival. And she was the producer of the TV show that Bob Dylan ended up showing up late, while it was already in progress.” Chalamet spent years training to play and sing like Dylan, whose voice quality and abilities have been scrutinized, especially earlier in his career. “I don’t have a lot of interest in weighing up how much Timothee Chalamet sounded like Bob Dylan,” said Massimo. “You know, an actor creates a character, and I think he did that.”

What really happened when Dylan went electric at Newport The Newport Folk Festival evolved over the decades, absorbing influences from rock, traditional music, and the singer-songwriters of the ’60s and ’70s, according to Massimo, who grew up in Providence, and covered the festival for nine years for the Providence Journal. “During festival weekend, the population of Newport basically doubled,” said Massimo, with many visitors arriving by ferry. “Residents of Newport would wake up with people sleeping on their front lawn, there were people sleeping on the beaches.” On July 20, 1965, after Dylan’s successes with acoustic guitar-based songs including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” he released the electrified “Like a Rolling Stone” as a single. Festival organizers lamented the likelihood that Dylan planned to “go electric,” breaking tradition with the fingerpicking style of the festival. Five days later, on July 25, Dylan took the stage at Newport and strapped on an electric guitar — backed by Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Al Kooper on organ, and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. As for how the moment was portrayed in the new film, “They made it sound like going electric was much more of a spur-of-the-moment decision than it actually was,” said Massimo. “He rehearsed with the band the day before, he sound-checked with the band that afternoon.” In the film, during Dylan’s performance, as electric guitars blared, Dylan’s manager Al Grossman and folk archivist Alan Lomax had a fistfight, as Pete Seeger scrambled to improve the sound or stop the performance. “Alan Lomax was not a reflexively anti-rock-and-roll guy,” said Massimo. “The year before, the Chambers Brothers played at Newport, with electric guitars and drums, and Alan Lomax introduced them.” According to Massimo, Lomax’s angst was prompted by Dylan’s choice of a backing band. “He was annoyed that the Butterfield Blues Band was coming, because this was a bunch of white guys. He was like, ‘This is Black music,’ and this is a commercial concoction.” The film portrays fans at the folk festival angrily booing throughout Dylan’s three electric songs (“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”) “I thought the crowd response that was shown in the movie was far more negative than what I’ve been able to ascertain really happened,” said Massimo. In the early 1960s, the up-and-coming Dylan collaborated with — and had a romantic relationship with — folk icon Joan Baez, despite his longtime girlfriend Suze Rotolo, whose name is changed to Sylvie Russo in “A Complete Unknown.” In the movie, on the day of Dylan’s planned electric performance, he joined Baez on the Newport stage for a duet. Sensing she had been replaced by Baez, the Sylvie Russo character left the festival and headed for the ferry. “His girlfriend did not break up with him the afternoon they went electric,” Massimo said. “But, when you’re trying to tell a three-year story in two hours, I see why you do that.”  

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