Tangled Up in Bob
For a Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan sure knows a lot about professional wrestling. "A Complete Unknown" recounts his most famous heel turn: stabbing his leftist folk music fans in the back in 1964-65.
From my movie review of A Complete Unknown in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
January 01, 2025The musical biopic A Complete Unknown competently depicts the most famous of the heel turns Bob Dylan has amused himself with over his long career: how he stabbed in the back his purist leftist folk music fans by going to their 1965 Newport Folk Festival and playing “Like a Rolling Stone” loud, fatally wounding the folk craze.
“Heel turn” is a professional wrestling term for when the audience’s hero, the “face,” suddenly turns into the villain, the “heel.” The influence of professional wrestling on this Nobel laureate in Literature with his august standing as the voice of ’60s authenticity, the auteur who proved you don’t have to be able to sing to be a singer-songwriter, is seldom brought up.
To his credit, however, Dylan has often been up-front about the flip side of his commitment to authenticity: the pervasive influence on his art of old, weird Barnumesque all-American showbiz hokum. For example, Dylan’s memoirs cite his brief meeting with Gorgeous George, the most infamous pro wrestling heel of the 1940s and 1950s, as galvanizing to his audacity. (Muhammad Ali was another American original inspired by encouragement from Gorgeous George.)
Dylan’s other heel turns include discombobulating his Jewish rock critic enthusiasts by temporarily converting to evangelical Christianity in 1978 and turning his back on leftism just as the protest movement was ascendant in the mid-’60s. As early as 1964, he sneered at his “Blowin’ in the Wind” days in “My Back Pages”:
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
You can’t say that Dylan was just a creation of the critics because his impact on other musicians was so seismic.
One of the strange aspects of growing up GenX is that adult boomers would teach us about their childhoods as if it were history as important, formative and heroic as the revolutionary and civil war periods. In the late 70s/early 80s, from the reverent tones, I assumed Dylan was as dead as Hendrix. I was pleasantly shocked in the late 80s when he had a hit.
My parents were too old for rock and roll. The most contemporary they got was the folk craze (or the second folk craze, maybe the folk revival). The songs were simple, catchy and unlikely to offend the parents, but it doesn't make any sense to write new folk songs. Folk songs have to evolve over time based on audience response. They're like the Iliad; let the rhapsodes try out the stories in the small comedy clubs for a few centuries before you commit the final version to paper. So what were they writing, things that seemed like they could be folk songs? Things that had some of the characteristics of folk songs? Pre-folk songs?
Thus, in my mind, the folkies were as phony, if not more so, than the rockers. After a few years folk music was an obvious dead end for any creative.
Rock music, OTOH, far from being limited to the original Rock & Roll, was more the intersection between the revolution in electronic instruments and the rapidly expanding potential of analog tape studio production. Dylan would have been a fool to eschew the two great musical advancements of his lifetime.
Terrific piece. I recommend listening to Bob’s Nobel lecture, in which his Goodreads-esque dives into MOBY DICK, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and THE ODYSSEY (download this speech, Christopher Nolan!) suggest that there is a lot more Harold Bloom than Jim Morrison inside Bob.