BONNIE ON BOB: A VILLAGE VETERAN’S OBSERVATIONS ON 'A COMPLETE UNKNOWN'
Bonnie Dobson arrived as a 21 year old folk singer in Greenwich Village in 1961. Here she speaks on how the Dylan biopic portrays the scene they initially shared.
Back in 2013 I invited Bonnie Dobson and Tom Paley to a preview of the forthcoming Coen brothers film Inside Llewelyn Davis – both Bonnie and Tom were veterans of New York’s folk scene in its halcyon days, and both had subsequently settled in London. Thus I wanted their opinions on the Coens’ attempt at portraying striving, young NYC folkies circa 61/62.
Also: both Bonnie and Tom were recording again after many years layoff for a London-based independent label, Hornbeam Records – Hornbeam was launched by Mike, Les and Ski to record veteran north America folk singers (Hornbeam also released notable new albums by Spider John Koerner and Jim Kweskin before the decline in CD sales forced the label to close shop). Anyway, the three of us went to Inside Llewelyn Davis, then retired to a nearby pub to discuss the film.
They hated it. “The only thing they got right was the apartment interiors,” said Bonnie. I wasn’t born when the film is set so couldn’t comment on its accuracy, nonetheless I found Inside Llewelyn Davis abominable. It exists as an advertisement for the Coen brothers’ worst traits – smug, pretentious, cynical, self-consciously hip and really boring. If anything, it demonstrated once again how difficult it is to make a good film about musicians.
Portrait of a happy folkie: Bonnie Dobson.
Anyway, as soon as I learnt the opening date for the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, I suggested to Bonnie it was time for us to make another date for the movies (Tom Paley passed aged 89 in 2017 – he was a remarkable musician and I was fortunate to book him to play at Brixton’s Ritzy twice). So there we were, at midday going to the first public screening of A Complete Unknown at Picturehouse Central.
Picturehouse Central is the epicentre of the Picturehouse cinema chain and even an early afternoon screening ticket costs £17 so you’d expect the cinema to be spectacular. Well, we did find it spectacular in one way - spectacularly cold. On a chilly winter’s day it was colder in the damn cinema than outside – I zipped my jacket up to my nose! And this wasn’t a one off failure of the heating: I recall coming here years ago in the evening and staff handed out blankets as we entered…
Anyway, you have been forewarned – if you want to see A Complete Unknown then choose a different cinema complex/chain. And, unlike Inside Llewelyn Davis, A Complete Unknown is not a disaster. Instead, its a very well filmed, acted, edited, sound mixed music bio pic that is extremely conventional in approach and execution (the opposite of Todd Haynes 2007 I’m Not There, which I found a more imaginative approach to Dylan’s myth making).
At 140 minutes A Complete Unknown is way too long – so many contemporary films strike me as way too long – and way too solemn: considering its about a brat with a gift for writing songs that click with his contemporaries while singing them in the most nasal drawl imaginable, it should zip along and pack moments of hilarity. I mean, this is rock’n’roll, not rocket science. But A Complete Unknown is as solemn as Oppenheimer. The brat, like many ambitious strivers, is hungry for fame/ money/ women, yet A Complete Unknown is oddly bereft of the wit, libido and energy that power through films that capture the spirit of youth. This said, A Complete Unknown is, of course, not aimed at a young audience: Bob Dylan’s fans are largely pensioners and they will love it.
“I loved it,” said Bonnie as we left the cinema. Case in point. Which is good – imagine if she had spent almost three hours risking pneumonia in an ice box cinema and hated the damn film... I’d have felt awfully guilty. To get our circulation moving again we retreated to Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which has a very decent cafe on the 5th floor and remembers to keep the heating on. There over coffee and carrot cake Bonnie shared her memories of the Greenwich Village folk scene and young Bob.
“I first heard Pete Seeger in Toronto when I was 11 years old – my sister was in a young communist group that had a place on Cecil Street and Pete played and I asked him to sing Come All Ye Maidens Young & Fair and he said ‘you’re too young to know this song!’ Then, when I was 13, I wrote a letter of application to be a junior counsellor at a summer camp in Quebec – I fibbed and said I was 15 – and off I went. That summer Pete Seeger and Leon Bibb and Earl Robinson all came up and performed. They’d been blacklisted in the US so were regularly singing in Canada – the scene in the film where Pete’s teaching people to sing Wimoweh is perfect, that’s exactly how it was! Pete could get everyone singing, he was extremely gifted in that way. And such a nice man. The film portrays that side of him well – his warmth and generosity. My first TV appearance was with Pete and Tom Lehrer in 1961.”
Bob’s song honouring Woody Guthrie features in A Complete Unknown. As the cover here of his debut album demonstrates, when Hollywood make a biopic they always cast actors who are handsomer than the musician - Timothee Chalamet being the latest.
Bonnie’s career as a folk singer began in 1960 when she, aged 19, was discovered singing in Toronto coffee houses and sent on the road with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee – the popular country blues duo have a brief appearance in An Absolute Nobody and Bonnie recalls them fondly.
“I did my first tour with them and they were wonderful. They got on well - the bitterness that eventually split them must have come later. Sonny was a sweetheart. Get this: when I first started singing I was quite plump and then I just lost weight and one night I realised they were singing in Philadelphia when I was there. So I went backstage and Sonny, who was blind but had peripheral vision, says, ‘where’s your hips, girl?’”
She laughs at the memory. As for A Complete Unknown’s portrayal of the Village scene, Bonnie says, “It wasn’t an entirely accurate depiction of Gerde’s Folk City, but it was pretty close. I did my first gig at Folk City in ‘61, the same year Bob arrived in New York.