Bob Dylan fans are abuzz about the new biopic 'A Complete Unknown' starring
Timothee Chalomet, depicting Dylan's emergence in the early 1960s.
Much has been made of Chalomet's resemblance to the young Dylan and his insistence on doing his own singing and playing in the movie. I've linked to the movie trailers at the foot of this piece.
I'm interested to see how the film, which opens on Christmas Day, portrays the relationship between Bob and Joan Baez. It's a love story with an enduring fascination. Although their romance ended in the mid-60s, they have performed together many times over the years.
Baez nurtured Dylan's career early on, allowing him to share her stage and introducing him to the wider folk music world outside of Greenwich Village. She became his muse and musical sidekick and he was more than happy to use her as his jumping off platform.
In later life, Dylan acknowledged the debt he owed to Baez, but he did a poor job of repaying it at the time. For her part, Joan was guilty only of blind devotion.
For anyone who wants to delve deeper into the Bob and Joan backstory, I'd recommend David Hadju's excellent
book 'Positively 4th Street'. Hadju weaves Bob and Joan's lives in with Joan's sister Mimi and her partner Richard Fariña. Mimi and Richard had their own musical partnership and Fariña was also a budding novelist. What separates the book from the many other Dylan biographies is the insight to how their everyday lives were intertwined and how their careers developed in quite different ways.
Early in the story, Baez takes great pride in showing off her boyfriend to the folk music community and to the civil rights and peace movement (Ban The Bomb!) of the early to mid 60s. Their duets at Newport and concert halls across America are rightly held as historic moments.
As Hadju's book notes: "This gorgeous woman, who is an icon in her own right, latches onto you and says, I'll be your everything, including being your lover. She adopted him. She found this guy who gave voice to all that powerful stuff, and she nurtured him in that role. He made out on every level."
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| Baez and Dylan in 1963 |
The candid
chat between Bob and Joan in Martin Scorsese's '
Rolling Thunder Revue' movie, where they discuss how their
lives diverged, is poignant because it's clear even then (1975) that
Joan still holds a candle for him. Joan’s love for Bob goes way beyond the music, but it's really not clear how far Bob's love for Joan extends, beyond fond memories of their time together.
As we saw in D.A. Pennebaker's movie 'Don't Look Back' about his UK tour in 1965, when Joan accompanied him to the UK, it was fairly obvious he didn't want her there. On that tour he didn't - as she had expected - reciprocate by inviting her onstage to perform with him.
Bob would later say he was just trying to deal with the craziness of his life at that point. He had created this monster, the voice of a generation. Everyone looked to Bob for the answer and his response was to be increasingly cryptic and surreal. Contemporary
reviewers referred to Dylan as a poet - how he "knew" and how he was
"telling it like it is". But as NME writer Mick Farren noted in a
retrospective mid-1970s assessment of Blonde On Blonde, "If Dylan was
really telling it like it is, we'd all know exactly what he was talking about."
But Hadju's
book is not a story about doomed love. It shows a relationship in full bloom, noting how Bob and Joan had a similar
sense of the absurd, and at times it appeared as if they were having a private
joke against the world.
"A lovely thing was happening and I didn't want it
to end," Joan said later.
Hadju's story does have a tragic ending, with the death of Richard Fariña in a motorcycle accident in
1966, just as he was launching his first novel. It was his partner Mimi
Baez’s 21st birthday.
Three
months later, Dylan came off his bike near his home in Woodstock, New York. He
knew he could have died on his motorcycle, as Fariña had. Ironically,
the accident offered him the perfect excuse to go into hiding.
Dylan
wrote, in his memoir, Chronicles, Vol 1: “I had been in a motorcycle accident
and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the
rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about
everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held
any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different
glasses.”
Hadju wrote: “For a year and a half after
the accident, Dylan stayed in seclusion in Woodstock, while rock musicians
absorbed and drew upon his ideas.
Of Bob's classic mid 1960s albums, Hadju concludes, “The trio
of records uniting poetry with elements of folk and rock and roll – Bringing It
All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and the double Blonde On Blonde, came to be
acknowledged as pop masterworks and charted a whole new style of music."
Today, it seems that Bob and Joan are no longer in contact, but she harbours no bitterness towards him, recognising that what they did together was unique and in many ways historically significant.
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A Complete Unknown - movie trailer
A Complete Unknown featurette
Bob Dylan & Joan Baez - It Ain't Me Babe (Live
1964)
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