Mike Gonzalez
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.
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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, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/another-complete-unknown-pete-seegers-communism