We finally watched "No Direction Home," "A Complete Unknown," the movie about Bob Dylan's early years in New York. It was excellent, a study in elusiveness of genius and the quest for freedom. Given what Sanity Goddess and I have seen so far (not all of them), it was the best picture of the year.
But I have notes.
I wrote the authorized biography of Woody Guthrie. It was published in 1980. I interviewed everyone from Woody's bandmates back in Pampa, Texas, to his sister, to his various wives and lovers...to Alan Lomax, to Ramblin' Jack Elliot, to Woody's agent Harold Leventhal...to Pete Seeger, and thereby hangs a tale. (By the way, Zimmy wouldn't give me an interview, but I'm told he liked the book.)
Woody's kids, Arlo and Nora Guthrie encouraged me to write it. "No one else will tell the truth," Arlo said. He was referring to the fact that many of the people who survived Woody were unreliable narrators. Some of them had been members of the Communist Party. These were arrogant, obnoxious, self-righteous people. Their smug myopia has trickled down to the American Left today.
Alan Lomax, the folk music curator, was a dreadful human being. In the film, accurately, he was the one who had the punch-up with Albert Grossman at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Seeger wanted to "take an axe" to the electric cable feeding Dylan's new sound; he later claimed it was because of the poor sound quality, which was nonsense. Rock music involves a certain amount of distortion, which Dylan embraced. But Pete lied about a lot of things.
When I first visited Lomax, at his -- of course -- Upper West Side apartment in New York, he said that I was from the "wrong part of Europe" to write a biography of Woody Guthrie. Meaning I was Jewish. This was part of the Stalinist anti-semitism that infected the Communist Party. Jews were too easy converts to left extremism. They were idealists; they tended academic and professional rather than proletarian. Their presence in the movement might hamper the recruitment of riper targets. Lomax -- and Seeger -- hoped eternally to convince the white working class to go Left. Does this sound familiar? It's the left's fantasy to this day. (Lomax also later admitted that he'd been wrong about me; he loved the book.)
But Pete Seeger was the worst. The film hinted at, but avoided, the truth of this. He was a member of the Communist Party, a Stalinist. His sense of folk music was political. It was the people's music and the proletariat had to be left. "There's never been a right-wing folk song," he once told to me.