Dylan hasn’t always been a legend. Or at least not consistently. Joan Baez, in her poison-pen love-letter ‘Diamonds and Rust’, sang that he burst on the scene ‘already’ one. Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he travelled east in January 1961 to meet his ailing hero Woody Guthrie. He built on his early reputation as the most distinctive interpreter of folk ballads and traditionals on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit with a series of startlingly intense performances – at the March on Washington and the Newport Folk Festival – and a catalogue of original songs that grew in their energy and complexity, culminating in a world tour and a double album, Blonde on Blonde (1966), which dazzled the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and galvanised Hendrix and Springsteen and Bowie but angered a portion of his original fan-base, notably a second-year student at Keele University who, responding to what Dylan called this ‘very crazy thing’ of using amplifiers and a backing band, called out ‘Judas!’ at a gig in Manchester. That moment alone seemed to guarantee Dylan’s immortality as a pop-culture hero. Writing that summer, the seventeen-year-old Paul Williams, later a prominent Dylanologist, argued that talking and thinking about Bob Dylan was ‘perhaps the favourite indoor sport in America’. But down the decades, his claim to special status suffered a series of blows.

At the height of his fame and powers in 1966, Dylan used a minor motorcycle accident as the pretext for cancelling his commitments and retreating to a domestic life, creating in the process what Bowie called a ‘leadership void’. (‘Okay, Dylan’, he recalled thinking, ‘if you don’t want to do it, I will.’) When Dylan resurfaced, his efforts were often unwelcome. He became a country singer. He released an album full of covers and self-covers. He made a four-hour autofiction / home movie, Renaldo and Clara. He became a Christian. In the 1980s, George Melly said that he rated among ‘those wrinklies for whom the rasping, plaintive voice evoked their dope-sweet youth’; James Wolcott noted his ‘slipping’ prestige; Geoff Dyer observed that he seemed to care about nothing at all, even his own talent. At the end of the decade, an article in the Observer quoted a fan calling the ear-ringed, perm-haired, middle-aged Dylan ‘one of the most deeply unfashionable people on the planet’, while the academic Michael Gray reported trying to persuade a New York taxi driver that Dylan had done twenty-five years’ worth of work since the stuff best remembered: ‘“Haven’t we all”, came the retort.’ Worse still, Richard Williams, the leading British music journalist, noted that Dylan’s ‘present artistic impotence’ was causing people to question his original contribution – his place as, in the words of the journalist Richard Gott, ‘the single most potent force for good in late twentieth-century Western culture’, or in John Peel’s calmer assessment, ‘the single most important force in maturing our popular music’.

James Mangold’s lovingly mounted new film A Complete Unknown, which follows Dylan from January 1961, when he is nineteen, until July 1965, is the most visible product of a thirty-year-old effort, enabled by Dylan’s own creative recovery and abetted by baby-boomer collaborators and admirers, to restore his heyday to prominence. Collective memory of Dylan’s achievement was ignited by the success of his album Time Out of Mind (1997). Following wave after wave that paid him little interest, the mainstream was dominated by acts who made their admiration plain: Pearl Jam, Hootie and the Blowfish, Elton John, Radiohead, Alanis Morrissette. This wasn’t Dylan’s first comeback – in the space of barely two years in the mid-1970s, there had been Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, the Rolling Thunder Revue, the belated appearance of The Basement Tapes. But it was the first one he consolidated. A Grammy for Time Out of Mind was followed by an Oscar for ‘Things Have Changed’ (in Wonder Boys) and another celebrated album, ‘Love and Theft’.

That was in 2001, the same year David Hajdu brought out his popular group biography Positively 4th Street, which, like Dylan’s own Chronicles: Volume 1 (2004), Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), Mike Marqusee’s Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (2005), D. A. Pennebaker’s sequel to his fly-on-the-wall classic, Dont Look Back, 65 Revisited (2007), the lengthy documentary Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen put together with help from Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home (2005), Dylan’s cameo in the Edie Sedgwick movie Factory Girl (2006), and Suze Rotolo’s memoir A Freewheelin’ Time (2007), emphasised the early period. And though Todd Haynes – who has dated his serious engagement with Dylan’s story to the twenty-first century – widened the scope a little in I’m Not There (2008), touching on reclusiveness and the Christian phase that torpedoed the mid-1970s recovery, the majority of the running-time was devoted to Dylan as saviour-turned-apostate, the well-worn tale of the protest singer (played by Marcus Carl Franklin and Christian Bale) who ‘went electric’ (Cate Blanchett). Since then, the official series of Dylan’s ‘bootlegs’ has released versions of the recordings he did for M. Witmark & Sons between 1962 and 1964, as well as a twenty-hour collector’s edition of the 1965–66 sessions that produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. When Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, Hari Kunzru, a Gen X sceptic, tweeted, ‘Thanks for that baby boomers.’

The attempt to present A Complete Unknown as Dylan’s millennial or Gen Z moment overlook its continuities with this turn-of-the-century reclamation effort. Like Todd Haynes, James Mangold was born in the early 1960s and emerged with a prize-winning debut at Sundance. The script, based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, was originally written by Scorsese’s regular collaborator Jay Cocks, who covered Dylan’s visit for the Kenyon Collegian in November 1964. (Wald was born in 1959.) Timothée Chalamet delivers an amiable performance, or shifting series of impressions, and dozens of stirring musical moments. But the film as a whole doesn’t resemble the young John Lennon portrait Nowhere Boy or Mangold’s Johnny Cash story, Walk the Line – though Cash plays an absurdly outsize role in proceedings – Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about Keats, or Shakespeare in Love, so much as Wonka, another IP-boosting origin-story, starring Chalamet and teeming with musical numbers, about an arriviste who earned mainstream popularity in 1964 with an individual spin on a popular formula, though with the old-school folk purists replacing the Chocolate Cartel.

Mangold is wedded to the familiar notion of Dylan the chameleon-enigma, as reflected in the film’s silly title, so what he delivers is a conventional biopic or partial biopic that offers little in the way of themes or dynamics, causality or connective tissue. The film dramatizes a pair of struggles, very loosely related, between two women, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and two kinds of guitar music, protest singing as represented by Joan and the twinkly Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), whom Bob meets beside Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed, and rock ‘n’ roll, performed with what Seeger calls ‘electrified instruments’. But Mangold never establishes what Bob derives from either of these relationships or genres. 

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Harry Weber, a friend of Dylan’s from Minneapolis, disputed the idea of Dylan’s complexity or elusiveness. He was ‘a genius, that’s all’, he said. He seemed to possess an electrical receptivity to fresh stimuli. Liam Clancy compared him to ‘blotting paper’. The word ‘sponge’ was regularly used. Dylan had been raised, as he put it in Chronicles, in a ‘cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot’ – what Philip Roth, recalling the evolution of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), called ‘the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism’ of the post-war era. Dylan’s twenty-strong list of pathogens, in Chronicles, has considerable overlap with the one that Roth offered, though McCarthyism and television are the only direct matches. (Where Roth had Rotary Clubs, Dylan goes for Holiday Inns.) They had surprisingly similar misgivings about the three-minute pop song. Their main escape-route was the same – what Dylan called ‘the cosmopolitan riches of the mind’. Apart from Beat poetry, Dylan’s tastes were more backward-looking: the symbolists, the Romantics, Milton, Tacitus. (Roth read more Dylan Thomas than Dylan ever did.) 

In Mangold’s portrait, there’s no sense of Greenwich Village during the post-McCarthyite folk-revival working for Dylan the way the University of Chicago did for Roth or London did for Shakespeare, as a space of multifarious and notably international influence. (If you want to get out of America, it was said, go to Greenwich Village.) Chalamet’s Bob looks in the window of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center and notices photographs of performers with whom he is already familiar, including Guthrie and Seeger. To the young Dylan, folk music ‘glittered like a mound of gold’, and Folklore Center was the place to discover what it was ‘all about’. But Bob never crosses the threshold to encounter the esoteric records, the folios of sea shanties and Civil War songs, pamphlets and instruments which Dylan recalled with awe in Chronicles. Nor does he make any friends. Dave Van Ronk, the so-called mayor of MacDougal Street and Dylan’s mentor, the performer he ‘burned to learn particulars from’, has a cameo so brief that Van Ronk’s former wife and manager, Terri Thal, claims not to have realised who it was. He pops up to say where Guthrie has been institutionalised – Greystone Hospital, New Jersey (to which the penniless teenager travels in a yellow taxi). In reality, Dylan recalled, Van Ronk could ‘talk all day’ – ‘about socialist heavens and political utopias – bourgeois democracies and Trotskyites and Marxists, and international workers’ orders’. Asked about the Civil War, he said ‘It’s called imperialism’, and described a battle between economic systems which he insisted would have occurred even if the ‘elite Southern barons’ had willingly freed their captives. Dave Van Ronk did a lot more than give Bob Dylan directions. In a similarly odd move, Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is portrayed as incapable of speech.

Dylan’s first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, depicted here as Sylvie and played with wonderful delicacy by Elle Fanning against staggering odds, was the daughter of Italian Communists. (Her sister, Carla, was named after Marx.) In A Complete Unknown, Sylvie reminds Bob what CORE, where she works, stands for (Congress of Racial Equality), though the organisation isn’t mentioned again. She hands him a copy of Partisan Review, with a recommendation to read Dwight Macdonald’s contribution: ‘He’s contrarian. Like you.’ The topic isn’t named and we don’t find out if he reads the essay. What are we to take from this? And where on earth did the idea originate? Dylan didn’t read Partisan Review and even if he had, the only thing Macdonald wrote in that time was a ‘London Letter’ about the offerings in the theatre season, including a gimmick, unlikely to tickle the young Dylan, of describing the Chatterley trial as if it were a West End play. (He might have been more interested by Lowell’s translations of Baudelaire or Frank Kermode’s ‘Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev’.)

When Sylvie suggests going to see Guernica, Bob gives the gritted-teeth reply, ‘Picasso’s over-rated’. Rotolo and Dylan went to look at Guernica. It’s the first outing she mentions in A Freewheelin’ Time. ‘He was revolutionary’, Dylan recalled. ‘I wanted to be like that.’ (Rotolo, who was born Susan, named herself after Picasso’s collage Glass and Bottle of Suze, and credited some of her uncertainty about her relationship with Dylan to reading Gilot’s memoir My Life with Picasso.) Instead of paying a midtown visit to MOMA, they buy two tickets for Now, Voyager, a 1942 melodrama presented as the hot new offering. Again: why? It might have been thought relevant that the title is a quotation from Whitman – but then this is a film about Bob Dylan in which poetry doesn’t feature. Dylan went to movies all the time but not to that. They saw the Beat film Pull My Daisy, narrated by Kerouac, and were ‘transfixed’ (her word) by Truffaut’s anarchic comedy thriller Shoot the Pianist. (He was less keen on Last Year at Marienbad.)

By giving an inadequate portrait of Dylan’s immersion, via Van Ronk and Rotolo, in Greenwich Village, and neglecting altogether factors such as his relationship with the press, the strains of touring, and increasing drug use, Mangold deprives himself of what might be considered valuable explanatory resources. His Bob is just a guy with a harmonica and HB pencil who gets more accomplished, better-known, moodier. It seems odd to produce an account of Dylan’s progress at once highly fictionalised and devoid of ideas about creativity – or thinking of any kind – given the wealth of available facts and impressions, and the subject’s own conviction, extensively evident in his writing, interviews and participation in documentary projects, that his career yields to narrative portrayal, a biographical close-up against a social and cultural backdrop.

In the second and longest section of Chronicles, Dylan describes his search for a way of reflecting ‘a new type of human existence’. Towards the end, he circles back, to reveal how he believes he found it. It was Rotolo’s ‘world’ that served to broaden his. There was art, of course (‘giant oil-painted canvases… Also twentieth-century stuff’), and also ‘the Off-Broadway scene’. In the late spring of 1963, she started working as an assistant designer on a small-scale production of the musical revue Brecht on Brecht, with taped readings from Brecht’s appearance before HUAC, arranged by George Tabori, which opened that July. Rotolo remembers being especially keen for Dylan to hear Micki Grant’s rendition of ‘Pirate Jenny’ – ‘a compelling song of revenge’. Written for the Brecht-Weill musical play The Threepenny Opera, it is sung from the perspective of a cleaner who foretells that a black freighter will arrive and destroy all the people who have mistreated her. It begins, ‘You people’, and ends with Jenny aboard the ship as it sails away.

Rotolo recalled that Dylan paid the show his highest compliment: ‘Didn’t even jiggle his leg.’ She added, ‘Brecht would be part of him now.’ In Dylan’s own telling, ‘Pirate Jenny’ was the song that opened the door: ‘the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns… the ideal chorus for the lyrics.’ He compared its impact to that of Guernica and pointedly noted that Guthrie had ‘never written a song like that’. (He had performed his poem ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’ on 12 April 1963.) Dylan had written almost one hundred songs over the previous five years, but released barely a dozen: the single ‘Mixed-Up Confusion’, two songs on his self-titled debut (‘Song to Woody,’ ‘Talkin’ New York’), and almost all of the brand-new The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a collection of fresh, funny and piercing songs, among them ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, which he had recorded over the past year. During the following two and a half years, he made a run of five albums in which his range and tone changed beyond recognition.

In a letter that appeared in the January 1964 issue of the mimeographed topical song magazine Broadside, Dylan welcomed the recent appearance of three translated Brecht poems (‘two with music, one without’), adding that the poet, playwright and librettist should be as widely known as Guthrie and ‘as widely read as Mickey Spillane’ – ‘and as widely listened to as Eisenhower’. In February, he released The Times They Are A-Changin’, which named Brecht among the litany of idols – along with Villon and Yevtushenko and Modigliani and Ginsberg – in the free-verse poem included in the notes. His attitude was reflected on the songs he had started writing for the album the previous summer. In a recording of a July 1963 conversation preserved in his Tulsa archive, he asks a friend ‘Do you like the song “Black Freighter” that Brecht wrote?’, adding that in the United States, there are certain people who are to join the boat or ‘they’re gonna be blown away by the boat’. He responded to the vision of attack. The following month, he wrote ‘When the Ship Comes In’, the first and strongest sign of a new interest in nautical and aquatic symbolism. In ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, the most potently shaming and intricate protest song he had written until that point, he borrowed what, in 1985, he called the ‘set pattern’ of the song he mislabelled ‘The Ship, the Black Freighter’ and used the accusatory ‘you’ – ‘you who philosophize disgrace’. (He also claimed that the structure was from Villon.) And the New Zealand scholar Esther Harcourt (sometimes known as Esther Quin) pointed out that the standard translation of Brecht’s poem ‘Song the Moldau’, which has often been put to music, includes the claim ‘times are a-changing’ and the forecast ‘the last shall be first’ – in Dylan’s song, ‘the first one now will later be last’, ‘the slow one now will later be fast’. But the influence wasn’t purely rhetorical or lyrical. 

Over the next year, Dylan became a star (with The Times They Are A-Changin’) and his relationship with Rotolo ended. In A Complete Unknown, 1964 is represented by a single appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. The Sylvie break-up occurs off-screen. When we cut to the title ‘1965’ and encounter Bob in shades and leather, with bushier hair and darker tapered jeans, it’s unclear what brought this on beside his basic rebelliousness and a snide reference to aping The Beatles. The changes in Dylan’s approach, stridently announced on the part-electric Bringing It All Back Home, can be heard six months earlier, on Another Side of Bob Dylan. The network of compressed, abstract, irrational, paradoxical and apocalyptic images evident in earlier songs, such as ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and the discarded ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’, emerged as a driving force in ‘My Back Pages’ and ‘Chimes of Freedom’. An early site of Brecht’s influence was Dylan’s use of landscape and personnel. In ‘Song to Woody’ – the first song performed in A Complete Unknown – he referred to Guthrie’s ‘world of people and things / Your paupers and presents and princes and kings’. After encountering Brecht, he began to push this element further. In a recent book-of-sorts The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022), Dylan emphasised the presence in The Threepenny Opera of ‘unusual characters’ with ‘offbeat names’ like Polly Peachum, Filch and Macheath (‘Mack the Knife’). He describes it as ‘a world’ or ‘subculture society’ of thieves, pickpockets, drug runners, pimps, cigar-puffing killers.

In ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare’ on Another Side, he minted the satirical and surreal picaresque narrative technique, with a first person somewhere – often low – in the mix, which underpinned many of his greatest songs. The passion to dramatize and evoke was present in bud in ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, in its lists of where the narrator has been, what he has seen and heard, who he has met, and what he will do – the structuring principle of its five verses. But Dylan’s exposure to The Threepenny Opera combined with Brecht’s own models, Rimbaud and Villon, as well as the ‘lunatic bustle’ in the collages and paintings of Red Grooms, and Fellini, who didn’t show ‘monster freaks – just regular people in a freaky way’, enabling him to forge a new, more energetic kind of world-building. In 1964 and 1965, he invoked over a hundred figures, imagined and mythological, identified by name, job title, social position or a vague gender-based grouping, along with an endless array of props, a habit parodied in his claim that anyone should be able to understand songs about ‘pornographic ashtrays, green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps, hostile statues, charcoal’. Moving through a vast topos that encompasses Desolation Row and Rue Morgue Avenue and Housing Project Hill and Highway 61 and Maggie’s farm and the Gates of Eden, Brecht-inspired gargoyles such as Mack the Finger and Dr Filth rub shoulders with Mr Jones and Mr Tambourine Man, ‘the man in the trench coat’ and ‘the empty-handed painter’ and ‘Miss Lonely’, bankers’ nieces and Utopian hermit monks and a derby-hat-wearing milkman and the savage soldier, John the Baptist and Jack the Ripper. The weather is poor. Homelessness rates are high. Animals abound. You can hardly blame the narrator of ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’, who declares in the final lines that he’s heading back to New York City, where things exist on a less fevered and frazzling scale.

The central drama increasingly tended towards private sorrow. It’s clear that Dylan responded, or related, just as much to Jenny’s ‘point of view’, her sense of grievance – ‘where she’s coming from’ is ‘the driest, coldest place’ – as to the technique of the ‘wild’ and ‘heavy’ song that conveyed it. In November 1964, Irwin Silber wrote an open letter in Sing Out! noting that Dylan’s ‘songs seem to be all inner-directed now’. He was exactly right. Talking to Nat Hentoff during the recording of the album, an exchange that appeared in the October 16^th issue of the New Yorker, Dylan said, ‘From now on, I want to write from inside me.’ Rotolo emphasised Brecht’s dilemma as an artist working in a hostile context. But ‘Pirate Jenny’ didn’t have the collective or commitment-minded implications for Dylan it did for her, or its author, or for Nina Simone, who sang it at her Carnegie Hall concerts in the spring of 1964. (Micki Grant was also African-American.) In Chronicles he wrote that though he was ‘totally influenced’ by ‘Pirate Jenny’, he stayed ‘far away from its ideological heart’. And in a moment that comes from nowhere, he mentions a friend telling him it’s harder to put ‘deep feeling into words’, as Faulkner did, than it is to write Das Kapital.

Dylan’s work, trading as it did in enduring melodies and transhistorical archetypes, had never dealt in direct statement, narrow responsiveness or rational analysis. Declaring that ‘the answer is blowing in the wind’ seems an unlikely message for a protest song. He stressed from the start that ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ wasn’t about atomic fallout. His concern was personal freedom, not social justice. Brecht – or Pirate Jenny – gave him new courage to relinquish a sense of obligation, in various forms. Listening to Guthrie properly for the first time, he responded to his ‘fierce poetic soul’ and felt as if he had discovered ‘some essence of self-command’. The model that replaced him functioned, somewhat ironically, as a catalyst for a more fervent pursuit of abstraction and individualism.

Dylan told Hentoff that he no longer wanted to write ‘finger-pointing’ songs. As it turned out, writing from inside involved a lot of pointing, albeit of a hectoring, not hortatory, kind. Silber had noted his new work could even be ‘a little cruel on occasion’. One of the things that struck Dylan about ‘Pirate Jenny’ is that it’s ‘nasty’ and has ‘no love for people in it’. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, he writes that ‘Mack the Knife’, a ‘murderous ballad’, ‘keeps on modulating till you think it will go through the roof’. Of the songs on Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are A-Changin’, the one that most overtly presaged this strain was ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, written as a response to Rotolo’s resented six-month trip to Europe, mainly Perugia, during the second half of 1962. (The film sends Sylvie to Rome for twelve weeks.) Freewheelin’ must be the only album in which a partner lovingly represented on the cover – arm-in-arm with Dylan on snowy West 4th Street – is accused by the singer of wasting his ‘precious time’. The last three songs on Another Side are all caustic or ungrateful acts of valediction to Rotolo: ‘I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)’, ‘Ballad in Plain D’, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. As he sings on the extraordinary, terrifyingly relentless ‘She’s Your Lover Now’, recorded in 1966 but never released: ‘pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?’ Or as he put it with a straight face, of ‘Ballad in Plain D’: ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ 

Only that? The musician Al Kooper, depicted in the film as the organist on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, though stripped of his role as the owner of the police whistle used at the start of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, later called Dylan the king of the ‘Nasty Song’. In ‘All I Really Want to Do’, the first track on Another Side of Bob Dylan, one repeated line professes a desire for friendship. The rest is given over to itemising the forty-three less pleasant possibilities that Dylan makes a point of saying he has shunned. He would engage in many of them over the next year or so, to some degree on ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ but especially on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Ballad of a Thin Man’: competing, beating, mistreating, classifying, denying, defying, frightening, bringing down, dragging down, dissecting, inspecting, rejecting, taking-out. He says that he isn’t asking the subject to ‘feel like me, see like me, or be like me’. But by the end of ‘Positively 4th Street’, recorded for Highway 61 Revisited though released as a standalone single, he is wishing that the unnamed target could ‘stand inside my shoes’ – in order to ‘know what a drag it is see you’. 

It was clear that the more overt aggression of Dylan’s lyrics called for a more varied, vehement, harder, faster sound. On songs like ‘I Don’t Believe You’ and ‘Ballad in Plain D’, you can hear him straining against the constraints of the form. He knew that electric instruments would ‘get more power’ out of something like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, the first song on Bringing It All Back Home. (He also made the point that he now had the ‘bread’ necessary for paying musicians.) Always a fan of Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Faron Young, Elvis, he had gravitated towards folk music due to its greater seriousness or literary ambition, though he aspired to play with a more modern, ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ attitude. By the time he was writing songs as intricate and ambitious as ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ – the ultimate diss tracks – he was long past needing to worry about any of the dangers that attended the genres, be it one-dimensionality of worldview or sentiment, sincerity or frivolity.

Brecht wasn’t just a spur to this hyperactive evolution but a mainstay. On the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan is shown surrounded by objects and artefacts that matter to him, including an album of Lotte Lenya singing Berlin theatre songs by Weill and Brecht and Georg Kaiser. In a press conference in December 1965, asked who he liked to listen to, he offered Lenya as his first answer. The same month, in the magazine Books, the Beat novelist John Clellon Holmes called Dylan ‘an American Brecht’, noting ‘the same cold humour, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are’. Of course, there was a difference – in the parameters of his vision. ‘I don’t know anything about “new left” or students very much at all’, he said during the press conference. In an interview around the same time he explained, ‘I don’t even think in terms of “society”’, and his work was about to become more inner-directed than ever.

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A Complete Unknown ends in the summer of 1965. It moves the recording of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ forward by a few weeks, and the ‘Judas!’ incident by almost ten months. Dylan’s third Newport appearance, the film’s climactic sequence, was the moment where going electric became a problem, but Dylan hadn’t yet quite completed his trajectory from Guthrie imitator to the sole occupant of an otherworldly musico-existential landscape – free of influence and even ‘roots’, in Dylan’s own description – created initially with the help of Al Kooper and the Chicago-based blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield (glimpsed in the film) and later, on Blonde on Blonde, with Kooper, Robbie Robertson, the producer Bob Johnston and the ‘A-team’ of Nashville session players.

There’s nothing in Dylan’s nasty songs about how he’s feeling, unless you count ‘what a drag’. But starting in the summer of 1965, he introduced a new emphasis on what it was like to be, in the words of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, on his own, or as he put it on two songs on Blonde on Blonde, ‘to feel so all alone’. ‘Don’t my gal look fine / When she’s comin’ after me?’ he asks on ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, from Highway 61. There was just one problem – she never is… The shift is there in ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ recorded for Highway 61 but released instead as the next single after ‘Positively 4th Street’. His questions had been challenges or rhetorical taunts: ‘how does it feel to be on your own?’, ‘something is happening here, do you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’, ‘If you’re so hurt, why then don’t you show it?’, ‘Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem?’ Now they became pleas: ‘Where are you tonight, sweet Marie?’, ‘Why didn’t you just leave me if you didn’t want to stay?’, ‘you know I want your lovin’ / Honey, why are you so hard?’ The last song, ‘Temporary Like Achilles’, also wonders, ‘is your heart made out of stone? Or is it lime? Or is it solid rock?’ – none of them great options. 

In Rimbaud’s ‘Season in Hell’, the Verlaine figure asks whether he would understand his lover’s expressions of sadness any better than his ‘jokes and insults’. In Dylan’s case, the answer is yes. The brutal pathos of Blonde on Blonde reveals his aggression as an initial, thin-skin-salving response to the pain of being an outsider or reject or subject of criticism, the supplicant or would-be seducer, going after her and being frustrated or messed about, being left to wait ‘inside the frozen traffic’ (‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’) or standing ‘inside the rain’ (‘Just Like a Woman’). Blonde on Blonde was originally named ‘I Want You’, after what became the fifth track. The opening song doesn’t offer a narrative, only a list of the ways and scenarios in which ‘they’ll stone ya’, a sort of smudged inversion of all the bad things the narrator claims he doesn’t want to do on ‘All I Really Want to Do’. But the title of the song – possibly identifying the ‘they’ – is ‘Rainy Day Women #12 and 35’.

The lovers and targets in the songs are often playing tricks – breaking like little girls, acting like they’ve never met, turning out to be younger or a different gender than he had been led to believe. The subject of ‘She Belongs to Me’ has ‘everything she needs’ and is ‘nobody’s child’. When Romeo enters in ‘Desolation Row’ moaning, ‘You belong to me I believe’, he is immediately told to get lost. He tries to insist how little he’s demanding – not wanting to be a boss, not asking you to change. He offers himself to the addressee of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ (on Highway 61 Revisited) as ‘somebody you don’t have to speak to’ – in implicit contrast to her intrusive mother, father, sister and ungrateful children, as well as the flower ladies who want back what they have lent her, the clowns she has commissioned, the bandits (with bandanas) she has turned her other cheek to, the advisers who heave their plastic at her feet to convince her of her pain. But it seems that Queen Jane won’t come see him no matter how many times he asks – ten in all. 

Even at their most nonsensical or at least non-narrative, the songs articulate a pronounced obsessional despair about the possibility of intimacy or even physical proximity. In ‘She Belongs to Me’, he invoked the image of ‘peeking through her keyhole / Down upon your knees’. Things got a lot worse. In ‘Pledging My Time’, he expressed the repeated and plainly doomed hope that, in the context of the title claim, the addressee will ‘come through’ too. Sweet Marie has a ‘railroad gate’ the singer cannot jump. The subject of ‘Temporary Like Achilles’ has a ‘second door’ and deploys Achilles as her ‘guard’. There’s often an interloper, a source of jealousy or envy. The only time a door is left open it reveals the woman with the leopard-skin pillbox hat having sex with her new boyfriend. When Johanna on ‘Visions of Johanna’ – originally titled ‘Freeze Out’ – persistently, perhaps literally, ghosts him, somewhere nearby he sees Louise and her lover ‘so entwined’. When the girl is more yielding, he recoils. The lover in ‘Fourth Time Around’ says, ‘Don’t forget / Everybody must give something back for something they get’. But the narrator doesn’t play ball, asserting: ‘I never asked for your crutch / now don’t ask for mine’. His idea of gallantry – though he’s hardly alone in this – is to give a girl his ‘very last’ piece of gum. (One music magazine noted that he was responsible for more anti-love songs than anti-war songs; asked by Studs Terkel to sing a love song, a ‘girl-meets-boy’, he offered what he calls a ‘girl leaves boy’ instead.)

Blonde on Blonde is not on the whole a clubbable piece of work. The narrator’s only friends are Queen Mary, fifteen jugglers and five believers. The sole reference to ‘people’ describes them ‘getting uglier’. Yet ‘One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’ contains a vignette that evokes eagerness, even desperation, for connection or just acquaintance:

I couldn’t seeeee
How you could know me
But you said you knew me
And I believed you did

The other person who says she knows him is identified as ‘some French girl’. (He immediately tries to send a message to find out ‘if she’s talked’.) And though he knows – or ‘knew’ – Baby in ‘Just Like a Woman’, he asks her not to ‘let on’. 

Dylan’s first single, ‘Mixed Up Confusion’ – recorded with electric instruments – expressed a desire for ‘a woman / Whose head’s mixed up like mine’. Sometimes the borderline can be hard to make out – not just who’s to blame but who is who. He sings that the visions of Johanna ‘have now taken my place’. An early version of ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)’ had the lyric ‘I did it so you wouldn’t have to (do it)’. In ‘One of Us Must Know’, another title that narrows that gulf between the lovers, it’s unclear if his efforts ‘to get close to you’ faltered due to his inadequacy or the unreachability of the addressee – for wearing the scarf that ‘kept your mouth well hid’, for clawing out his eyes… In ‘She’s Your Lover Now’, he asked, ‘Why’d you have to treat me so bad?’ Repurposed for ‘One of Us Must Know’, it became ‘I didn’t mean to treat you so bad’. (A similar slippage, between censure and confession, was evident across the Rotolo break-up songs on Another Side.)

This essential ambiguity may have its origins in a fear of rejection that places a severe limit on what may comfortably be offered. By all accounts, Dylan lost interest in Edie Sedgwick, the unhappy Warhol ‘superstar’ with whom he spent time between late 1964 and 1965 when they both lived in the Chelsea Hotel. But she is the unrequited-love object or ‘steady hatred’ target of possibly half-a-dozen songs. ‘She Belongs to Me’, ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ were all inspired by Joan Baez, whom Dylan, in his words, ‘rode on’, then dumped. Writing to her sister, while she and Dylan were in London in May 1965, Baez itemised his typical nocturnal routine: ‘Has tantrum, orders fish, gets drunk, plays his record, phones up America…’ She isn’t invited to share his limousine, or to sing with him on stage – ‘even when the kids yell out my name’. The gulf between this conduct, evident in the concert-tour documentary Dont Look Back, and the seemingly yearning songs recorded between January and November 1965, is explained by Dylan’s retrospective comment that he was ‘very hung up on Joan’ but ‘just trying to tell myself I wasn’t hung up on her’. (He is wearing a gift she gave him, a pair of translucent pink cufflinks, on the front of Bringing It All Back Home.) Reflecting on the footage of his eccentric behaviour, Dylan said that he was ‘very obviously confused then as to what my purpose was’. Elsewhere he said, ‘you can’t be wise and in love at the same time’.

Blonde on Blonde – and that period of Dylan’s work – ends with ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, a love song to his new wife. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion Dylan married Sara Lownds in secret in November 1965, part of the way through recording the album, to bring an end to the kind of emotional disruptions he suffered during his more precarious relationship with Rotolo and his time as a bachelor. Dylan’s tour manager, Victor Maymudes, recalled that Dylan said that he had married Lownds, and not Baez, because ‘she’ll be there when I want her to be there’. In the 1978 Playboy interview where he described his mid-sixties albums as achieving ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound’ that he heard in his head, Dylan was asked about his attitude towards women in his songs. He replied that initially he was writing ‘more about objection [sic], obsession or rejection’, adding, almost illuminatingly: ‘Superimposing my own reality on that which seemed to have no reality of its own.’ But he insisted that he had abandoned the notion of the ‘pretty woman as a goddess’. (On a visit to the UK in late 1963 he had discovered Robert Graves.) 

What about the album’s title? Dylan was certainly not immune to blondes. His first song was written for Brigitte Bardot. In the imaginary conversation with President Kennedy on ‘I Shall Be Free’, the last song on Freewheelin’, he tells him that what will make America grow is ‘Brigitte Bardot’ and ‘Anita Ekberg’; Rita, in ‘Motorcycle Nitemare’, is said to look like she stepped out of La Dolce Vita. Edie Sedgwick, as well as ‘amphetamine’ and ‘pearls’ and a leopard-skin pillbox hat, had blonde hair. But the singer’s own name is surely in there too – in the acronymic ‘BoB’ and as near anagram, through the letters b-o-b d-l-n. After all, this is an album that ends with a song that flattens the name, Lownds, into ‘lowlands’. ‘If I haven’t been through what I write about’, he told Hentoff, ‘the songs aren’t worth anything’. (Quinton Raines, the stage manager and set designer of Brecht on Brecht, said that Dylan ‘seemed to structure personal tempests to give himself the inspiration to write’.) There is a first person in all fourteen of the album’s songs, as well as in the four more or less completed ones he ended up discarding. On a record heaving with session musicians – playing organ and trumpet and trombone – Dylan’s voice and harmonica predominate. And of course, the formula has a precedent in the double self-title, itself a little curious, of the musical revue which seemed to reveal the possibilities of modern song – as a vehicle or stage for evocation, recrimination, dramatized revelation, pained confession, transcendence, flight.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows’, NLR 57.