It’s easy to make the mistake that a key scene in A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, involved a mere disagreement about style and instrumentation. The scene depicts the famous moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan “went electric,” outraging the acoustic folk music crowd and prompting folk icon Pete Seeger, the composer of “If I Had a Hammer,” to try to turn off the power, saying later that if he had had an axe, he would have cut the cables. Years later, Seeger claimed that he was concerned only because the sound was “distorted,” but there’s good reason to be skeptical about that claim. When Dylan launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” he had turned his back not just on acoustic-only music but on Seeger’s idea of music as agitprop. Dylan had chosen art over politics.
From his early days in Greenwich Village, which the movie lovingly evokes, Dylan was something of a Seeger protégé, regarded as a “folk balladeer” and “protest singer.” He was better at it than anyone else, penning the civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the antiwar polemic “With God on Our Side,” and the apocalyptic epic “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” These were politically loaded broadsides, but they were also powerful songs on their own terms; that’s what made Dylan so important for Seeger.
A longtime Communist Party member, Seeger embodied the Stalinist idea of the “popular front”—the use of art, whether film, music, or painting, as a driver of change in public attitude. The American Communist Party’s bluntest expression of the idea of culture as a revolutionary tool came in writer V. J. Jerome’s talk, “Let Us Grasp the Weapon of Culture,” presented to the party’s 15th national convention in New York in 1951. “Cultural activity is an essential phase of the party’s general ideological work,” Jerome observed. The party was dramatically successful in these efforts: think Langston Hughes, Howard Fast, and Paul Robeson.
And think Seeger, whose career survived the blacklisting sparked by the House Un-American Activities Committee and so was available to mentor the young Dylan when he arrived in New York from Minnesota with the goal of meeting folksinger Woody Guthrie—another Party member and Seeger project. But Guthrie never captured a wide audience, though he did write “This Land Is Your Land,” whose lesser-known verses denounced private property.
One can only imagine Seeger’s infatuation with Dylan, who was not only a left-wing protest singer but also a budding pop idol from the Heartland (his adopted surname disguising his Jewish background) whose car would often be mobbed, as in the film, by frantic fans. That Dylan was making a sharp turn in another direction is clear in A Complete Unknown, when the Dylan character, played down to the nasal singing voice by Timothée Chalamet, sets the stage for Newport when he says, “What am I gonna do? Play ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ the rest of my goddamn life?”
Instead, he conjures stunning, blues-infused art music, which somehow becomes wildly popular—to the point that “Like a Rolling Stone” would be hailed as the greatest rock song ever by the magazine of the same name. As one who lived through that time, I recall being first disconsolate over the change in my idol, and later a stunned appreciator of Dylan’s unsurpassed Highway 61 Revisited album. One can only wonder what a self-righteous Seeger would have made of the title song, which imagines God and Abraham, as well as a promoter called on to stage a “next world war,” surrealistically portrayed as Beckett-like characters on the highway that runs from Dylan’s home state through the Mississippi Delta: Beat poetry meets Al Kooper’s rock ‘n’ roll Hammond organ. Yes, Dylan referenced Highway 61 because of its centrality to the origin of the blues, but he also understood it as a setting for great American drama—à la Faulkner.
Unfortunately, America has not turned away from Seeger and his weapon of culture. Bruce Springsteen, in particular, has channeled left-wing politics so effectively into anthems such as “Born in the USA.” The expectation that pop singers should be involved in politics is as current as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris.
Not Dylan. He keeps moving on, even now—from covering Frank Sinatra tunes to winning the Nobel Prize. Electric, indeed.
Photo: Alice Ochs / Contributor / Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images