Eamonn McCann reviews A Complete Unknown, the new film about Bob Dylan.
There are some things about Bob Dylan’s music so obvious they are much misunderstood, including by trained Dylanologists on the lookout for mystical meanings.
In fact, there’s no mystery. Much as we’d all have been delighted had Dylan turned out a socialist troubadour, the cultural descendant of Joe Hill, he was, as he said himself, a song-and-dance man – wonderful songs, dance, if that’s what it was, dreadful. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Who’s to say?
He also once claimed that he’d run away from school to join a circus. Again, probably meant as a joke. But then, with Dylan you never could be sure. The contradictions which he carried in his rucksack from Hicksville, Minnesota, to the Greenwich Village, NY, in its days of beatnik pomp, were to jostle and rub against one another throughout his career, sparking billows of fireflies in his imagination.
All of this is evident or at least discernible in the new Dylan film, “A Complete Unknown”. Many reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have refused to believe that this story of a young man from Hicksville, Minnesota, making his way through the hurly-burly of Greenwich Village in the days of its beatnik pomp with a guitar slung across his back, then his free-wheeling years as poetical social commentator, and now a major mainstream star raking in millions a month from non-stop circuits of the world – that could be the simple truth of it.
“Simple” might be putting it a bit strong. There’s mischievous wordplay and layers of meaning in Dylan too. But the meaning is always in plain sight if you find its mindscape and fix your focus.
At the right age when his first LP appeared in 1961, many of us saw him as a prophet come among us speaking words of wisdom which only a select few could really understand. I recall telling any old folks who would listen that, forget about “The Rose of Tralee,” “Oh Ramona” is the best love-song ever written.
“Your cracked country lips I still love to kiss/As to be by the strength of your skin/Your magnetic movements still capture the minute I’m in/But it grieves my heart love/ To see you try to be part of/A world that don’t really exist/It’s all just a dream, a vacuum, a scheme/That sucks you to a feeling like this.
(The strength of your skin! Now there’s a line.)
It’s not a love song at all but a kiss goodbye to love song.
“All just a dream, vacuum, a scheme” is not a dismissal of the material world that presses down on the spirit, but a shrugging-off of the flights of fancy he increasingly now saw as airy indulgence.
“I can see that your head/Has been twisted and fed/By worthless foam from the mouth/I can tell you are torn between staying and returning/On back to the South/You’ve been fooled into thinkin’/That the finishing end is at hand/Yet there’s no one to beat you/No one to defeat you/’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad.”
Catch yourself on, give over your dreaming, it’ll only bring you down in the end.
Or: “Machine guns are roaring, the puppets heave rocks/At misunderstood visions and at the faces of clocks/Call me any name you like, I will never deny it/But farewell Angelina, the sky is erupting/I must go where it is quiet.”
Settle down and ignore the noise until you feel no discontent.
No poet or songwriter ever traced a downward arc of inspiration so accurately, brilliantly, unapologetically.
Throughout, he had a great eye for the glint of buried treasure and scavenged to find it and put on display.
“A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” is based on a 15th century Anglo-Scottish border ballad, “Lord Randall”.
“Where have you been Lord Randall my son/Where have you been my handsome young man/I have been to the wild wood/Mother make my bed soon/For I’m weary from hunting and I fain would lie
Dylan: “I have stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains/I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways/I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests…”
“Lord Randall” had already been recorded by Martin Carthy, Steeleye Span, Richard Thompson Burl Ives, Ewan McColl, Peggy Seeger, Buffy St. Marie, Harry Belafonte and a whole heap of others. It used to be on the Senior Certificate English curriculum in the North.
Many who gazed up on Dylan as their guru have been lately disappointed at his shift away from the purity of political folk into the star-splattered region where political ideas glow bright for a while before fading.
But that’s not it. It’s that despite all his twists and shimmies and turns Dylan kept right on to the end of his winding road, in a constant state of adaptation to the ever-changing reality around him.
He may not be a god but the spiralling uplift of his mind could dizzy you (almost) into believing.
Plunge your arm into any concoction of Dylan’s tunes, you’ll come up with a fistful of magic.
There’s no message, but a million ideas all awhirl.
Take what you want from it, you will anyway.
There’s one for everybody in the audience.
The movie is very good, incidentally.
