Interview #29: Elijah Wald

Dylan bio drama author speaks

A MUSICIAN, author and scholar, Elijah Wald is a highly-respected commentator on American popular music, whose books on Robert Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton have been well-received. His challenge to the orthodox history of the Fab Four in the US – How the Beatles Destroy Rock‘n’Roll – made waves in academic circles and beyond.

Now, his landmark title from 2015, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties, is seizing headlines of its own as it forms the inspiration for an acclaimed new movie A Complete Unknown, a Hollywood re-framing of the early years of Dylan in New York leading up to the amplified explosion of the Newport Festival in 1965.

Pictured above: Elijah Wald, writer and musician. Image, Sandrine Sheon, 2008

It is not the first time film-makers have courted Wald. In 2005, he collaborated on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the autobiography of Greenwich Village legend Dave Van Ronk, a life story in print which was the springboard for the Coen Brothers’ bleakly brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis.

Last week, Rock and the Beat Generation re-visited Dylan Goes Electric!, as interest in A Complete Unknown, premiering in the US next week and in the UK next month and with Timothée Chalamet in the central role, reaches fever point. Now, we talk exclusively to Elijah Wald himself about the background to this fascinating association and the early Oscar chatter surrounding a picture which director James Mangold dubs not a biopic but ‘a fable’…

Simon Warner: How's life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, today?

Elijah Wald: I've moved out of Cambridge. I'm now in Philadelphia.

SW: You’re in Philadelphia? That’s quite a switch, isn't it. I had visions of you still in that legendary folk music territory and now you’re in Philly.

If you’ve been in LA, as I also was for a few years, Philadelphia looks a lot like Cambridge! And I grew up in that legendary territory. The first concert I ever recall attending in my life was a children’s concert there by the Kweskin Jug Band.

SW: So have you been buckling under the level of interest being taken in your contribution to this new movie?

EW: I’m amused. I mean, I’m enjoying it. It’s fun. I'm getting a lot of enquiries from random people. You are someone whose name I know, so I appreciate it...

SW: It’s not often Hollywood comes a'calling like this, is it?

No, I’m thinking this is my second round in a field where I never expected a first round.

SW: No, that’s fantastic. So tell me: you must’ve seen A Complete Unknown. What do you think of it?

EW: Right now, I’ve seen it twice. I like it.

SW: What do you like about it?

EW: I mean it’s 2 hours 20 minutes long and it feels like an hour and a half. It’s a very engaging, fast-moving movie. And I like movies. I’ve been to the theatre three times this week. I’m predisposed to like a movie which keeps me entranced. I also think the film-maker James Mangold did something smart in the way he structured the piece.

First of all, I was completely confused when…I don’t know if you know but this whole project started with Dylan‘s people. They’re the ones who optioned the book

SW: I didn’t know that…

EW: Dylan’s people optioned the book then brought Timothée Chalamet on board then brought director James Mangold in and, when they first optioned the book, my immediate reaction was ‘Why do they need my book? They’ve got Bob Dylan!’

SW: Exactly. This is what, in an intriguing way, was confusing me, too. To have a journalist or a writer privileged or foregrounded in this way is quite unusual, isn’t it?

EW: It is. Having seen the movie twice now and thought about it, I do understand what happened. I mean I don’t understand exactly how it happened. Dylan‘s tweets about it suggest that he may have read the book and just wanted to throw some money my way, because he does that with people's work he likes. I’ve no idea whether he had yet read the book at that point but that’s a possibility. But have you seen the movie?

SW: Sadly not yet. It doesn’t come out in the UK until January. But I’ve watched the trailer and I feel a genuine sense of electricity and excitement about it.

EW: Having seen it, what they took from my book is that I turned the story into a two-hander with Dylan and Seeger and that’s the story they took and ran with, inventing a lot of scenes in which Dylan and Seeger in fact are in the same room from the moment of Dylan‘s arrival to a final consultation the morning before Dylan goes electric. So they’ve taken that idea that it’s Dylan and Seeger, not just Dylan, that is the story and made that into a movie.

The way Mangold phrases it is he was always a Dylan fan but until he read my book he didn’t think…He didn’t see a story. The story he has put together is largely fictitious in its particulars but feels to me very true to the characters and to what happened.

SW: I was highly entertained by the New York Times picture caption correction, ‘Edward Norton plays a character called Pete Seeger not Bob Seger’! Did you see that?

EW: Yes, people had shared on Facebook the original version. One of my friends pointed out that both were up for reviving old time music. [Laughs]

SW: Do you feel as if the movie is true to your book? I think you’ve already indicated that you believe it is…

EW: Yes, I really do. When Hollywood gets its hands on something, you always worry. But, to me, the movie is full of little winks to people who actually know the stuff. A perfect example…there's a scene completely invented where Bob Dylan is supposed to be on Pete Seeger‘s Rainbow Quest television show. He doesn’t show up so they bring in a black musician, who's played by Big Bill Morganfield, Muddy Waters' son, and then Dylan shows up and the two of them start jamming on the blues.

Pete reaches for his banjo and I was already prepared for this to be the moment when he can’t fit into that world and, by God, he picks up his banjo and starts playing the kind of blues that Seeger played when he was jamming with Memphis Slim on the blues. It’s things like that that I really didn’t expect them to get right but they really do pretty well all the way through. I mean the music they get right from beginning to end. For me that means a lot.

SW: How about the star singing in the Dylan style? How does he deliver in this production?

EW: Look, first of all, his singing was not what I was concerned about. I mean, singing like Dylan is a job a good actor can do. The person I was worried about in terms of singing was Monica Barbaro because singing like Dylan is an actor‘s job; singing like Joan Baez is a whole different thing. The instrument itself is extraordinary and she does a really good job.

On Chalamet, honestly the thing that blows me away is the guitar and harmonica. I’m a guitar player. If you want to understand how Dylan played, you can watch Chalamet. I mean all of the music is done live. Those of us who try to figure out how Joseph Spence played, or how Gary Davis played, and I’m one of those, you recognise that you’ve got it right when you make the mistake and it sounds like the mistakes they made when they were playing. And Chalamet is that way with Dylan‘s guitar playing. It’s astonishing the level to which he has immersed himself in that.

Apparently we got lucky because of the pandemic. They were supposed to film in 2020 and, because of the pandemic, it was postponed for four years. And as a result, he had four years of simply playing this stuff over and over and over. The film, they not only filmed everything live, they filmed entire concerts. I mean Newport, the final Newport going electric, they apparently, and I’ve talked now to people who are on the crew, they actually had the act before him, then the introductions, then he came on and he did the whole concert. They did it several times that way, then they chose the take they liked best. I mean nobody films that way, but they did.

SW: Were you actually ever on set, Elijah? Did you see any of the filming?

EW: No, I made no attempt. I mean the previous time a book of mine was optioned, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, it was the Coen Brothers and I wanted to meet them. I’m a fan. Mangold and Chalamet, I hoped they would do a good job but I didn’t have any personal…it was not like, as we used to say, I’m not a star fucker. There are people who I'd love to meet and there are people who I would just seem sort of silly to try to horn in on. I didn’t need to horn myself into this one.

SW: Did you meet or talk to Dylan about the project?

EW: I’ve never met Dylan. I have a good relationship with Dylan‘s office but I haven’t even tried to talk to Dylan. I mean I was writing a book about the 1960s. It there's one subject that he doesn’t ever need to be interviewed about again it’s the 1960s. I did read Chronicles. You know Dylan‘s memory’s better than a lot of people's. But you know, memory is memory. I was looking, I was trying to find what people had said back then by and large.

SW: But do you think Dylan‘s path might cross with yours in the coming weeks?

I think it's very unlikely. Honestly, if I ever sit down with Dylan, it would probably be because I wrote a book on Robert Johnson. Or possibly the book on Jelly Roll Morton. I mean, my understanding for people who have spent time with Dylan is that that’s what he likes to talk about not Bob Dylan.

SW: Would he like to talk to you about Dave Van Ronk?

EW: I don’t think so. No, y'know. he had his own Dave period. He might be interested in talking to me about Robert Johnson because I mightshe be able to fill him in on something. I can’t fill him in on anything on Van Ronk. Dave Alvin, who has had the pleasure of sitting down and having dinner with Bob Dylan, y'know what he wants to talk about is Ramblin' Thomas. That’s blues talk, he was an extremely obscure Texas blues guitar player of the 1930s.

SW: Does Dave Van Ronk feature in the movie?

No. He is a character. There is an actor who is on the cast list as Dave Van Ronk and when you see him, you know that's it’s him. Y'now, he’s got the beard. But, no, this is a very tight little movie. It makes no attempt to cover the breadth of that world. For example, Cambridge doesn’t exist. I mean Joan Baez is in New York as is Bobby Neuwirth. It’s a tight little movie happening in small rooms in Greenwich Village mostly. Van Ronk wouldn’t complain about this.

The people who, if I was them, I would be feeling passed are the remaining members of Peter, Paul and Mary, who are also completely not present, though it’s hard to imagine what Dylan‘s career would’ve looked like without them. I mean, in the movie, it is Joan Baez who’s going to take 'Blowin' in the Wind' and run with it.

SW: I also understand that the 'Judas' moment happens with Newport…

EW: This is not one of the ones I’m going to get excited about. The fact that a tape recorder happened to capture somebody yelling 'Judas' at one concert in...where was it?

SW: Manchester

EW: The fact that one tape recorder caught one person yelling that word in Manchester is a charming little coincidence. Whether someone yelled 'Judas' at Newport, there were 17,000 people there, it’s perfectly possible someone yelled 'Judas'. I don’t know.

No, the difference in Newport and Manchester is Manchester was a much smaller room and better mic’d. The thing that, I ventured this in my book, because a lot of people don’t seem to understand: you don’t hear the crowd noise in Dylan‘s electric set on the tape because the amplifiers were so loud that they pulled the mics all the way down. In Murray Lerner's film, he actually takes the booing from after the set. He takes it after 'Maggie‘s Farm' to create the illusion that was captured on tape, but it wasn’t.

SW: There’s been some talk in England at least that there could be Oscars awarded to this piece of work. Is that going to change your life?

EW: No. There are no Oscars for writing a book something was based on…

SW: Should there be?

EW: This year I think there should!

SW: I bet you do [Laughs]

EW Oscars are for film and I have nothing to do with this film. They give out a Grammy for liner notes and I was lucky enough to get one and I’m pleased about that. A lot of this I feel lucky about.

SW: Well, Elijah, I loved returning to your book, I’m looking forward to the movie and I hope this project brings you continued to pleasure and rewards.

EW: Let’s just say honestly what this has brought me that was completely unexpected was that tweet from Bob Dylan?

SW: What did he say?

EW: He described the book as 'a fantastic retelling of the events leading up to the fiasco at Newport'. That’s the first time Dylan has publicly said anything, put any seal of approval on a Dylan book, since the Scaduto biography in ‘72. So, I mean, that for me...I can retire now. That was nice.

SW: And, just finally, this is a website where the Beat writers are a core topic of interest. What is your own take on that literary circle?

EW: With the Beats, I have mixed feelings. I liked a lot of people on the fringes of that world, but generally not the ‘great’ writers. I generally liked Corso's work, liked Di Prima's memoir (the real one, not the porn one), shared a lot of their tastes, and appreciate their influence on the broader culture, but a lot of the writing feels lazy or pretentious to me.

I often have the feeling that people cared more about living the life of a writer than about writing well, which I completely understand since I was that way myself. I devoted more energy to being a rambling folksinger than to mastering my instrument, and have no regrets about that, but understand why some of my peers think I'm not a first-rate musician.

See also: ‘Book review #36 : Dylan Goes Electric!’, December 11th, 2024