A few days ago was a perfect day to see a movie in a movie theater: steady rain falling, temperatures dipping into the 30s and a movie diving into the past, specifically the early 1960s and a young man named Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman.
Most critics and a portion of the public have turned “A Complete Unknown” into a lauded box office hit. In his review, my colleague Michael Phillips called it “a Hollywood love letter to Bob Dylan” but wished it “had as much nerve as it did craftsmanship.”
It’s a fine movie, but I wish that it had given more time to Chicago, which Dylan visited before conquering New York and fueling controversy by “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Before that, he performed at a club called The Bear, which was on Ontario Street near State Street, and spent a remarkably engaging WFMT-FM 98.7 radio hour with Studs Terkel.
But it would have been nice to get a little more about two of the most important people of his early years, both Chicagoans. Those would be manager/entrepreneur Al Grossman and guitarist Michael Bloomfield. They are in the movie, but relegated to minor roles. Still, they are compelling (mysterious?) enough to prompt and reward further exploration.
Grossman (played in the film by Dan Fogler), was a tough West Sider now best known as Dylan’s manager, for a short time. He was one of folk music’s most notorious impresarios, who opened what is generally considered the first folk night club, the Gate of Horn, where performers dressed in suits and ties and his audiences came from the suburbs. He arranged for Dylan to perform at The Bear, of which Grossman was a co-owner. Grossman would manage Dylan only for a short time and would have much longer business relationships with Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens and The Band. He died in 1986.
Acclaimed journalist Nick DeRiso has written a fascinating piece on Substack in which he quotes Dylan about the first time he met Bloomfield, saying, “I was playing in a club in Chicago … A guy came down and said that he played guitar … and he played all kinds of things … he just played circles around anything I could play.”
That was Bloomfield (played in the movie by Eli Brown) and he and Dylan would collaborate over the next few years. At Newport, into rock. “]Dylan moved from folk into rock. “Credit his outsized ambition, his roving muse, his hard-headed unwillingness to yield to convention,” DeRiso said. “But credit Bloomfield’s flinty guitar, too. That’s the actual electricity running through everything — and Dylan knew it would be.”
There are some alive and well who knew him. The very active Corky Siegel told me a few years ago, “I always thought Michael was a special being. Just look at his photographs. You can tell. He didn’t even need to play guitar. There were always sparks coming out of his head. Anyone who knew him would understand completely what I’m talking about. … I don’t care about his guitar. I really miss Michael. What a beautiful one. There was no rise and fall. Just rise. But he rose so high he bumped his head on a cloud, and that was that.”
Some of us of a certain age are able to recall seeing Bloomfield. Filmmaker Rob Reiner has said, “With all due respect to Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King … and so many others who are in the pantheon of blues greats … Michael Bloomfield was simply the best blues guitarist I’ve ever heard.”
You can still listen to him, of course, on various internet sites and recordings. You can also find and read “Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero.” It’s a definitive biography but not a happy story, since it ends with Bloomfield dead at 37, but it brings him out of the shadows.
It is written by Ed Ward, a journalist and historian who writes for various publications, is a frequent contributor to NPR’s “Fresh Air” and is one of the founders of the South by Southwest music confab in Austin, Texas.
The biopic “A Complete Unknown” is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric.” Timothee Chalamet stars as Bob Dylan. (Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures)
In a few days, you can visit the 65th Annual University of Chicago Folk Festival, which is presenting folk music in workshops all day Saturday at Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.) and in concerts at 8 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Mandel Hall (1131 E. 57th St.); more information at www.uofcfolk.org.
It has been said and written that Dylan first came here for the initial Folk Festival in 1961, wandering the campus with his guitar and harmonica. But with many things Dylan is it hard to separate truth from myth. “A Complete Unknown” adds to that but it’s also, as Phillips writes, “Not a biopic’s job to stick to the factual record, only to distill and dramatize its own ideas of authenticity.”
I’ve got no problem with that and if this movie winds up leading you to Mike Bloomfield, all the better.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
