Toward the end of A Complete Unknown, a good biopic about Bob Dylan that opened on Christmas, there is a key scene in which Dylan manager Albert Grossman barks at folk music legend Pete Seeger, “You’re pushing candles, and he’s selling lightbulbs,” to which Seeger retorts, “You’re the only one selling anything here, Albert!”
The scene portrays the eve of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and it is pregnant with innuendo. They are all sitting in a hotel room, and Seeger is all but begging Dylan to play protest folk music at the festival the next day. Dylan’s music is so powerful that it might tip things societally — help end the Vietnam War, end segregation, bring social justice, etc. Or so says Seeger.
As we find out in the following scenes, Dylan does what he wants, and performs three songs on his electric guitar: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom Engineer.”
It was groundbreaking, but the crowd of 17,000, who had been waiting for Dylan to string out political deliverance, did not react well, some throwing projectiles at the stage. Seeger himself was despondent. Amid the chaos, he tried in vain to cut off the music, only to be stopped by his own wife.
Some people have called it “the night the ’60s died.” The movie itself, directed by James Mangold, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, which focuses on the 35-minute concert.
Others have seen it as a personal betrayal of Seeger, who had been Dylan’s mentor. David Ehrlich in IndieWire writes scathingly that “the Dylan this movie gives us seems less interested in being a disruptor than he does in being an a**hole.”
Dorian Lynskey, writing in Mojo, equally tells us that Alan Lomax, who founded the Newport Folk Festival, complained that Dylan “more or less killed the festival.” Lynskey despairs that it was not the electric sound, but Dylan’s attitude. “Here is the final victory of I over we; individual liberty over the greater good; the singer over the song,” Lynskey groans.
Er, not so fast.
Many things split the ’60s. Katharine Gorka and I argue in our book, NextGen Marxism, What It Is and How to Combat It, that the biggest split came when some protesters took up arms against the United States and created terrorist groups including the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers.
Oh, and we also argue that — alas! — the ’60s haven’t died and their destructive counterculture is still with us dressed up as wokeism, though there is some hope that the right policies will be introduced in the next few years to counteract it.
No, something else is at play. An exchange between Dylan and his paramour, Joan Baez, a believer in the counterculture movement (and a driver of it), is telling. After the debacle at the festival, they face each other.
Baez: Well, you finally got it.
Dylan: Got what?
Baez: Freedom from us and all our s***. Isn’t that what you wanted?
And that’s just it. Seeger is portrayed, as ever, as an idealistic easy-going free spirit. But Seeger lies in the exchange with Grossman at the opening of his column. Grossman was indeed selling Dylan, and, as his manager, that was his job. But Seeger was also selling something, and it wasn’t candles.
Seeger was selling communism. Yes, the Soviet-style variety, fangs and all, the communism of the Gulags, the mass trials, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That’s the “s***” that Baez reproves Dylan for liberating himself from — not out of conviction, but because Dylan wanted to do his own thing.
“Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever,” Howard Husock, now at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the City Journal in 2005.
In fact, the entire folk protest song movement was hardly the down-to-earth, organically grown American phenomenon, as it has always been portrayed. It “grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party’s ‘Popular Front’ effort to use popular culture to advance its cause,” Husock wrote.
Husock is hardly alone in observing that Seeger was the master creator, subliminally getting out his message in homespun sounds and lyrics.
Peter Stone writes that Wald himself “details how what was eventually called ‘the folk movement’ was pretty much [Seeger’s] creation and ultimately filtered through his political worldview.” Seeger would even “simplify his banjo and guitar parts because he didn’t want his instrumental prowess to interfere with the message” — probably why he hated Dylan’s electric energy.
That strategy was made in Moscow. “Adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front tasked communists in the West with building ‘progressive’ coalitions,” Husock wrote. “The Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some of them not party members but ‘fellow travelers,’ to use art, literature, and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture. … It took a while for the Popular Front’s strategy to get results in popular music—and Pete Seeger was the catalyst.”
Seeger joined the Communist Party in 1942 and, in time, learned to make his appeals to communism with subtlety. After the U.S. became a global stalwart in the fight against totalitarianism, “that pushed Seeger toward a more refined style.”
Seeger himself recalled that “as the labor movement kicked out the radicals, I settled for ‘Let’s get America singing’.”
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Husock doesn’t let Dylan off the hook, writing a decade before Wald’s book and two decades before this year’s biopic that his “Blowin’ in the Wind,” has “unmistakable, though implicit, references” to America being “no more just, and probably less so, than other nations.”
But Dylan wasn’t selling communism, Seeger was. None of this is evident in A Complete Unknown. But now that you’ve read this, it’s worth going to see it.