Over one month since my last post already! The end-of-year, holiday season consumes time and effort, at least from writing. But it’s time to return to the canvas of WordPress.com to tell another story.
In the interim, I celebrated Thanksgiving with family but more entertaining was watching “A Complete Unknown” one day after Christmas. I have to say that it is probably the best movie I have seen in the last 25 years, not since the days of “The Big Lebowski” in 1998.
Growing up my older brother played a lot of Led Zepplin, The Beatles and Boston on the radio but never Bob Dylan. My interest in his music didn’t start until I drove to Burlington, Vermont in October 2007 after a failed relationship with a Yonkers, New York gal.
A music shop on the streets of Burlington, Vermont featured numerous CDs by Bob, eventually purchasing his inaugural album and “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” is powerful and played often, but my favorite song on that album is “Bob Dylan’s Blues, especially when he sings about early childhood friends he’s never seen again.
Then in 2017 I had the chance to see him live on stage for the first time. I bought tickets for me and a good friend in Manhattan, a fellow Dylan acolyte, to see him at the Beacon Theatre. It wasn’t Newport, 1965 but still an opportunity to hear live a setlist including “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Things Have Changed.”
The acting in “A Complete Unkown” is superb, and not just Timothee Chalamet, but Edward Norton’s portrayal of Pete Seeger is vivid and compelling. I read Dylan’s “Chronicles: Volume One” in 2010 and I was immersed in his story, as well as the story of New York of a bygone era.
I gravitate towards old New York because of familial connections: my aunt and uncle lived in the same rowhouse on West 51st between 9th and 10th Avenues in Hell’s Kitchen from 1956 to 2020. That neighborhood didn’t feature the stalwarts of Greenwich Village of the 1950s and 1960s but interesting characters who worked the waterfront.
But that’s where the tension is. I wish I had familial connections to the likes of Greenwich Village characters, the ones who either sang on stage of the Gaslight or who were in the audience. Less so from Hell’s Kitchen.
Nonetheless, watching the movie I was glad to be transported back to the heights of folk music popularity, only to be redirected by Dylan in ’65 at the Newport event.
A powerful scene in the movie is the duo of Chalamet and Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez, singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” To read Dylan’s struggles with continuing his folk trajectory or not is evident in his Chronicles tales, only to be completely convincing in the movie when a musical colleague exclaims a musician of his stature needs a band.
Seeing the audience in the movie respond to his electric “errors” is palpable, but while Dylan is playing “Like a Rolling Stone” you can see segments of the audience digging the new format.
From an outsider who has absolutely no connection to that era, or the people involved other than reveling in the artistry of the folk and electric tunes it is still enthralling to read the accounts of those halcyon days of 1960s folk.
The movie makes it more enthralling because it’s sort of a validation of the written accounts. Also noteworthy is that the movie places the events of Dylan’s life in New York with world events, like the assassination of John F. Kenndy and the ongoing civil rights struggles in the South.
So that’s my account after a brief writing hiatus, which is explained by, maybe like Dylan, redirecting my efforts to another interest, namely building personal computers and server system units as I embark on the path of passing certifications like the CompTIA A+ and Network + exams.
I was a network administrator for a credit union in New Jersey over 20 years ago; now I want to re-enter the sector as, unlike then, I can configure Active Directory and domains!
