Dylan’s Idiot Wind: Still Blowing, From the Fires of L.A. to the Capitol
By Stuart Mitchner
Blowing through the buttons of our coats / Blowing through the letters that we wrote / Idiot wind / Blowing through the dust upon our shelves….” The next lines, and the last, of Bob Dylan’s song are “We’re idiots, babe / It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”
If the Dylan of Rough and Rowdy Ways truly contains multitudes, “we’re idiots” means everybody. In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan claims that his 1975 album Blood On The Tracks was “based on Chekhov short stories,” a reference that resonates in the Chekhovian sensibility behind that line. It’s said that Dylan’s revised the lyric over the years, but however you read it, the wording covers a lot of beautiful and unbeautiful universal ground, not just the relationship between the singer and his wife.
Meanwhile the idiot writing this column has been busy for days on an article about the new film A Complete Unknown. Besides being fixated on New York in January 1961 when the city was buried in snow and you could ski on lower Fifth Avenue, I’ve been staring over my shoulder at the devastation the idiot winds of Santa Ana have inflicted on my wife’s Pacific Palisades homeland.
Meanwhile the idiot wind roused by Monday’s New York Times (“They’re planting stories in the press”), which supposedly carries in its fitful gusts all the news that’s fit to print, has once again blown me in an unexpected direction (“everything’s a little upside down”) with a spectacular page one photo of a view Turner would come back from the grave to paint. The caption — “The Palisades fire blazed through the hills of Mandeville Canyon on Saturday in West Los Angeles” — takes in the house on Banyan Drive my wife lived in before we were married, also the scene of a family gathering we attended a few months after a New York wedding.
“A Complete Unknown”
I’m still hearing echoes from “Idiot Wind” (“What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good”) three days after seeing James Mangold’s biopic about Dylan’s progress from obscurity to fame. What’s good is Timothée Chalamet’s performance, what’s bad or at least disappointing is the apparent impossibility of impersonating the demonic genius behind the living and writing and singing of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the joyously angry anthem that gave the film its title. Possibly no actor on the planet could have uncaged the “lion” or the “howling beast on the borderline” mentioned in “Idiot Wind.” Maybe the Willem Dafoe of 1990’s Wild at Heart could have clawed his way deeper into the character; or better yet, the Walton Goggins of Justified and The Shield, an actor Dylan himself might have conjured up in a fever dream.
Few actors could look the part as well as Chalamet, who delivers the first song of the film with just the right mixture of shyness, pride, ego, and reverence in a scene where he and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) visit the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). Some reviewers have complained that the real Dylan never actually sang his song about Woody to the real Guthrie while the real Seeger looked on, struck by the singing and songwriting power of the Complete Unknown. What matters is that the sequence works. Capped when Guthrie shows his approval by banging three times, hard, on the nearest surface, that moment alone was worth braving the cold wind on my way to Princeton’s Garden Theatre last week.
Feeling It
It makes sense that Chalamet’s closest encounter with the essence of Dylan comes when he sings “Like a Rolling Stone,” briefly, in the recording session, which was rightly focused on Al Kooper (Charlie Tahan) who made Dylanological history when he commandeered the organ. Chalamet sang still more of the song during the Electric Moment at Newport. Whatever it was — the explosive subtext, not just the exultant liberation from folk music, but the emergence of a force of nature — Chalamet sang the song as if he was near to feeling what Dylan felt when he sensed he was making something new under the sun.
What puts the singer into the song is the repetition of “How does it feel.” To sing that line to life what you feel is Dylan singing about himself, his story. The dynamics of “Like a Rolling Stone” leave no doubt that in the end, it’s all about Dylan.
Where’s New York?
James Mangold’s film provides an effective impersonation of early to mid-1960s Greenwich Village, in spite of the fact that the New York scenes were shot across the river in Hoboken, Paterson, and Jersey City. The fact that I didn’t know about the Jersey locations while I was watching the film shows how well the fabrication worked. Even so, I’m troubled by the slighting of the city, its enduring authenticity and relevance. One excuse for the subterfuge is that the Village streets of the 1960s have undergone changes, like the addition of trees and the disappearance of certain landmarks. A visit to the Village Preservation blog offers then and now versions of the Jones Street location used for the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The only appreciable difference between the street Dylan and Suze Rotolo are walking down is the snow on the pavement and the lack of trees. The street is what it is, its essential New York City self, whether the year is 1963 or 2024.
At the Chelsea
Maybe the reason I felt like cheering when the actual, undeniable Chelsea Hotel appeared on the screen reflects my awareness that here at last was the real thing. Of all Dylan’s New York songs, the one that evokes its city-in-winter intimacy is “Visions of Johanna,” composed in a room at the Chelsea, where “the heat pipes just cough,” “the country music station plays soft,” and “there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off.” In the film, however, there’s none of the late-night mood that haunts “Johanna.” Instead, Mangold uses the setting for an edgy scene between Chalamet’s Dylan and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, perhaps intended to offset Chalamet’s inability to convey the way Dylan’s arrogance drives his take-no-prisoners singing style. But having Baez tell him off doesn’t do the job, and although she uses a casual profanity, it’s nothing compared to the moist metaphor the real-life Baez once used to describe the shimmering immensity of the Dylan ego.
Newport Looming
I haven’t read Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric (2015), the book on which the film is based; all I know is that I began feeling restless and uneasy once Newport 1965 was looming, which coincides with the sudden, awkward appearance of Dylan’s eventual sidekick Bobby Neuwirth (Will Harrison), who seemed little more than a blustering projection in human form of his master’s boorishness. Another casualty of Dylan’s rising fame was Dakota Fanning’s version of Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo), who was reduced to a series of sad-faced close-ups once Dylan got involved with Baez.
“It’s All Over Now”
I might not have watched Don’t Look Back the night before I saw A Complete Unknown, except that the 1965 D.A. Pennebaker documentary happened to be streaming on the Criterion Channel. The difference between Chalamet’s impersonation and the feral reality is dramatically in evidence during a scene Sean Wilentz describes at length in Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday 2010). Dylan is hunkered down in his suite at London’s Savoy Hotel amid “a gaggle of English folkies and hangers-on” when “someone offers to turn him on to some things.” Dylan wants to know if there are “any poets like Allen Ginsberg around,” and sarcastically dismisses the only suggestion (for reasons Wilentz explains), causing an uptick of tension in the room (as there usually is around Dylan anyway), which is seemingly broken when Donovan, “the latest British folk sensation” delivers “an impromptu performance of his ditty, ‘To Sing for You.’” Dylan responds by singing “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” When he gets to the line “Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / Crying like a fire in the Sun,” you’re seeing and hearing the demonic genius in action, as Dylan diabolically savors the moment, while Donovan looks devastated, like an upstart at an Elizabethan poetry slam who realizes he’s gone up against Shakespeare. For Wilentz, the point of the scene is that Dylan was “on the cusp of something new, and he wanted to hear Ginsberg’s poesy.”
January 20
A week from the Monday Times front page dominated by that image of the fires burning in Los Angeles, the new president will be inaugurated and Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” will be there: “Blowing like a circle around my skull / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” That’s the line that helped bring Ginsberg and Dylan together. As Ginsberg recalled, “I had dug the great line in the song ‘Idiot Wind,’ which I thought was one of Dylan’s great great prophetic national songs, with one rhyme that took in the whole nation, I said it was a national rhyme.”
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Note: On Thursday, January 16, Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz, who discovered Dylan’s music as a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village, will be at the Princeton Garden Theatre to talk about Dylan ahead of the 7 p.m. showing of the film. The author of “Bob Dylan in America” will also do a short Q&A following the screening as well as a book signing in the lobby starting at 6:30 p.m.