A Complete Unknown: Bob Dylan, the Stalinists and the Third Camp
I grew up on Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. My grandparents were American Communists, followers of Earl Browder (whose slogan was "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism") who embraced the first folk revival of the 1930s, a musical scene which emerged, to a great extent, from the Popular Front strategy of the Communist movement. My grandmother played the hammer dulcimer, and I'm pretty confident they were personally acquainted with the Almanac singers generation of New York-based folk musicians. My mother belongs to the Baez/Dylan generation, and her record collection shaped my early musical formation.
The Popular Front refers to the strategy outlined at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International which met in the summer of 1935. Here the strategy of class against class was abandoned in favour of a broad anti-fascist alliance which would bring together both the forces of the left and ‘progressive’ forces of the centre and right who were prepared to fight against the rise of fascism and for ‘democracy’ in its bourgeois form.
The Popular Front was a turn away from the idea of an ideologically pure proletarian vanguard to the embrace of cultural populism and coalition politics, and embraced a patriotic vision of vernacular culture. Part of that embrace in the US was of the diverse homegrown musics of America's labouring people: from spirituals, work songs and blues to bluegrass and cowboy music to sea shanties and dustbowl ballads - genres researched and collected by New York activists such as Pete Seeger's father Charles and drawn on creatively by artists such as Woody Guthrie.
Michael Denning claims that anti-Stalinists such as Irving Howe are largely responsible for the forgetting of this moment; the anti-Stalinists saw the Popular Front as kitsch and corny and criticised its use by Stalinists to get naive liberals behind the totalitarian regime in Moscow. For my part, I believe the anti-Stalinists were right to be suspicious of the opportunism of the party loyalists, and I think it's also worth remembering the anti-Stalinist history within the folk scene.
What the film doesn’t touch on was the role of the Communist Party — both in the UK and the US — in all this. Pete Seeger had been a party member for a time. Guthrie claimed to have been one, but that may not have been the case. Alan Lomax was probably not a party member, but was close to the Communists and suffered for it during the McCarthy era.
The Communist Party had strong views about folk music. In their eyes, the folk music that Lomax went around America recording was authentic music, “people’s music.” It stood in stark contrast to commercial music, like rock-and-roll, which was inauthentic. In their eyes, when folk singers like Dylan played anything other than acoustic folk music, they were betraying the cause. Dylan disagreed.
Though the film makes no mention of the Communist role in the fight for the “purity” of folk music, it makes clear that Dylan was prepared to stand up to the Stalinist bullies and sing the songs he wanted to sing. One of the last songs we hear in the film is “Maggie’s Farm” in which Dylan sings “I try my best to be just like I am — but everybody wants you to be just like them.”
Dylan’s songs from that period are often about freedom, artistic and otherwise, and they are just as “authentic” as the acoustic ballads being promoted by Lomax, Seeger and the others. This wonderful new film will introduce a whole new generation to Dylan and his music, which despite the best efforts of the Stalinists and their fellow-travellers, endures.
Bob Dylan and the "Third Camp"
By Daniel Randall
Eric Lee’s column in Solidarity 731 discusses the role of Stalinism in the cultural contestation around Bob Dylan “going electric”, depicted in James Mangold’s new film A Complete Unknown.
Readers of Solidarity, especially those interested in the particular theoretical heritage of Workers’ Liberty, the organisation which publishes the paper, may be interested to know that there’s a “Shachtmanite” connection to the story, too.
One of Dylan’s earliest champions in the Greenwich Village folk scene was Dave Van Ronk, whose wife Terri Thal became Dylan’s first manager. Van Ronk and Thal had both been members of the Young Socialist League, the youth organisation linked to the Independent Socialist League (ISL), which merged with the Socialist Party in 1958.
The ISL, as many readers will know, was formerly known as the Workers Party, the “Third Camp” half of the 1939/40 split in American Trotskyism. It declared the USSR was no longer any kind of “workers’ state”.
Van Ronk and Thal broke from the YSL as part of a group led by Tim Wohlforth, first joining the Socialist Workers Party, the “orthodox Trotskyist” half of the 1939/40 split, before being expelled and founding an independent organisation, which unfortunately gravitated towards the increasingly cultish current in international Trotskyism led by Gerry Healy. Wohlforth was interviewed by Workers’ Liberty in 2012, as part of a symposium of recollections of activists involved in “Third Camp” organisations.
As far as folk scene doyens went, Van Ronk was a far more libertarian character than the Stalinist Pete Seeger. That was reflected both in his politics (he had been a member of anarchist organisations prior to becoming a Trotskyist, and retained an affinity with the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World), and his attitude to music: he was involved in jazz and rock projects, as well as folk, rejecting the culturally conservative notions of party-sanctioned “authenticity” that often characterised Communist Party members’ approaches.
I haven’t seen A Complete Unknown yet, so don’t know how significant a role the Van Ronk character, played by Joe Tippett, has, or whether there's any allusion to his politics. Van Ronk was also a loose inspiration for the title character in the 2013 Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, which features perhaps the only line of comedic dialogue explicitly about “Shachtmanism” ever committed to celluloid.
I conclude by mentioning my familial connection to the events depicted in Mangold’s film: my mother, a card-carrying Greenwich Village folk scenester, was at Newport in ‘65. She was in a faction of the crowd trying to shout down the booers and hecklers with cries of, “Let him play!”, something that is, in my view, very much to her credit.
Readers interested to know more about the political culture of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s can read Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time (2008), and especially Terri Thal’s My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me (2023). Rotolo’s is the better book, but Thal’s contains more specific detail about the political commitments of Van Ronk, Thal herself, and others.
When Dylan blew the CP fuse
By Tom Harrison
You wait years for an article on Dylan and then like buses two come along at once in your last issue.
When Eric Lee writes about Bob Dylan and the Stalinists, I hope younger readers aren’t led to believe it was the name of Dylan’s backing band. Eric is keen to highlight the role of the Communist Party in Britain and America in denouncing Dylan’s decision to "go electric" as "a sell out".
In Britain one of Dylan’s most vociferous critics was Ewan MacColl, a long standing member of the CPGB and leading figure in the traditional folk music scene and married to Peggy Seeger, whose brother Pete wanted to cut the cables to the electric equipment at Newport.
MacColl dismissed Dylan’s "non-political’ songs variously as "doggerel" and "tenth-rate drivel" fit only for "a noncritical audience", so it’s safe to assume he didn’t go to any of the concerts on Dylan’s 1966 UK tour. However, other CP members did go as organised groups to barrack the electric part of Dylan’s set.
A couple of people have come forward claiming they made the notorious Judas! shout at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Maybe they are after some notoriety themselves, who knows? They might or might not have been in the CP at the time, but I know one leading north west party member who confessed to participating in the organised booing and slow hand clapping.
The idea that electric instruments have no place in folk music is of course complete nonsense. Five years before Dylan played there, Muddy Waters was doing so at the very same Newport venue. Chuck Berry ditto a couple of years earlier. True, there was a riot when Muddy played, but that was because the cops had tear-gassed an over enthusiastic audience!
What’s missing in both Eric and James Rink’s articles though is some kind of political evaluation of Dylan. He certainly made significant input as a folk artist into the civil rights movement, but not much after that. Subsequently there were songs in support of George Jackson and Rubin Carter. Workingman’s Blues from 2006 could also be considered a pretty good anthem for the American working class.
There again we have all the religious stuff from the 1980s and the ultra Zionist "Neighbourhood Bully". Well yeah that is precisely what Israel has become under Netanyahu!*
Yet all this really misses the point. Dylan is not and never was a card carrying member of a political party. He has artistic license even though he might stretch that license in direction we don’t sometimes like! Charges of misogyny have been levelled against him, but Nina Simone’s rendering of "Just Like A Woman" should dispel some at least.
Being a poor school kid in the sixties, I never had the money to go to concerts. Last November though, my son wanted to see Dylan as a birthday present, so I got us both tickets for Dylan's Liverpool gig. He’s 83 now, so I didn’t expect anything but a laid back performance. It didn’t help with the acoustics either that the concert was in an auditorium which could accommodate several jumbo jets.
Afterwards I met someone who’d seen Dylan in concert in 1966 at the Liverpool Odeon. The only song recorded there that’s available is a version of Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues. Unlike the booing in Manchester this was received with rapturous applause. But then Liverpool has always been open to innovations in music.
Dylan and some myth-making
By Burt Peters
A Complete Unknown is a very entertaining and watchable film about the early years of Bob Dylan's life in Greenwich Village in New York, culminating in the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where he famously "Goes Electric".
The film holds the attention by connecting early scenes through songs performed movingly and skilfully by Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. Monica Barbaro's performance and singing as Joan Baez are also wonderful.
Most of the main points of the story are represented in the film and the key theme of being true to one's own self in the face of pressure to conform is clear – Dylan choosing to face down some of the folk purists who saw him as a kind of new Woody Guthrie leader of the "counter"-culture, with his Guthrie clothes, acoustic guitar and solo performing .
That said, the film changes many of the facts. Some changes I could live with, while others kind of jarred.
The film has a fan shout “Judas” at the Newport Folk Festival when this took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966. Forgivable.
The director has Peter Seeger glance at an axe to deal with the myth of Peter Seeger grabbing an axe to cut the electric cables in protest at an electric band.
In reality, Peter Yarrow in his MC capacity said “He's gone to get an axe” when Dylan went to get an acoustic guitar to appease the Festival organisers . Some seemed to think Yarrow was referring to Pete Seeger. And Seeger did have to be calmed down by his wife Toshi – something the film shows.
So, again, poetic license has a place.
More worryingly Suze Rotolo and Johnny Cash are shown as being at Newport in 65 in the film, but neither of them were actually there. Cash had been there in 64. And by 65 the relationship with Rotolo was over.
Dylan's future wife, Sara Lownds, whom he began seeing in 64, is written out of the film. The Trotskyist Dave Van Ronk gets a couple of fleeting shots in the Village but in Chronicles (Dylan's autobiography) he is the guy Dylan sought out as being the most important figure to impress – something Dylan achieved.
Others written out of the Village scene include Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Len Chandler, Carolyn Hester and Terri Thai (Dylan’s first manager).
Joan Baez paid a visit to Greenwich village, but she was consciously not part of that scene. She was part of a Cambridge scene, seeing the New York folkies as going after the dollar.
And it's Al Kooper who purchases the police whistle heard on Highway 61 Revisited, not Dylan himself.
The fight scene shown in the film between Alan Lomax and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman at the Festival did take place. But it was news of the fight that led a Dylan who was in two minds to cast his doubts aside and get the Butterfield blues band to rehearse and play loud electric music onstage to a crowd that had mixed reactions to it, according to their own expectations and beliefs.
Alan Lomax's real gripe was that the Blues singers were white, not black. He was not anti- electric. In the film the fight takes place during the Electric set. Would dramatising the truth really have been any less entertaining?
There are other distortions and it would be interesting to know how much input Dylan had into the script.
He's a man who likes his myths. And it feels like he's probably got his way in the many discussions he had with the director James Mangold
It makes watching A Complete Unknown a bit like reading the Gospels to find out about the Crucifixion. It's entertaining, but you need to read other material to begin to get close to the truth.
As I was buying the ticket the young guy selling it said he knew nothing of Dylan apart from a couple of songs before seeing the film. He now knows a lot more and that’s a good thing. But if I see him again, I’ll ask him to read Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties.
The book is much more accurate than the Gospel according to Bob. But I want to stress that this is still a very enjoyable film.
*Final note: I think "Neighourhood Bully" is quite a perceptive song about Israel.
Previously: 'Folk music', folk music, trad jazz and the trad left (2007); This Land is Your Land (2007); Pete Seeger denounces Stalin (2007); Our humanly race (2008); Little Boxes (2009); Deportees (2009); Pete Seeger z"l (2014)
Further reading:
- Daniel Wolff "How Does It Feel? An Alternative American History, Told With Folk Music", 2017.
- Jim Denham "Pete Seeger's break with Stalinism", 2014.
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