With A Complete Unknown opening tomorrow (Wednesday, 12.25), consider a brief riff on Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home, which was first unveiled at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival:
“I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s career was in ’60 or ’61, “I don’t get it” — i.e., what was the big deal about this guy?
“That’s because Dylan didn’t really come into full flower until ’63, and because Part One of No Direction Home (roughly the 110-minute mark) ends with Dylan’s triumphant performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when the heavy journey really began, and when the tectonic plates began to shift.
“People forget that Dylan wasn’t fully free of his lefty-social-protest folk troubadour chapter until Another Side of Bob Dylan (8.8.64). And for many (including myself), he didn’t really hit the brass-ring zeitgeist jackpot until Bringin’ It All Back Home” (4.10.65).
It was almost exactly 63 years ago when Robert Shelton’s N.Y. Times article about Bob Dylan, a then-unknown 20 year-old folk singer who was performing nightly at Gerde’s Folk City (11 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012), appeared in the 9.29.61 edition.
The author of the Times article was a respected chronicler of the folk music scene.
The Chicago-born Shelton was 35 when he wrote the 9.29.61 Dylan review. His Dylan biography, “No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan“, was published in 1986. Shelton died in 1995 at age 69.
From Jon Pareles’ Times obit of Shelton, dated 12.15.95: “During the McCarthy era, Shelton was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee that had intended to subpoena a man named Willard Shelton, a nationally known columnist. Even though he was summoned in error, [the music critic] refused to answer any questions and was convicted of contempt of Congress.”
Wiki follow-up: “In 1955, Shelton was one of 30 New York Times staffers subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, who were informed by Times counsel Louis M. Loeb that they would be fired if they took the Fifth Amendment.
“Because he did not plead the Fifth, Shelton was allowed to continue working at the Times but was transferred away from the news department onto the less sensitive entertainment desk, where he became a music critic. Convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, he appealed his conviction and had it reversed on a technicality, only to be indicted, retried, convicted, and have the conviction overturned on a technicality again.
“After several years of appeals in which he was represented by noted civil liberties lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. the case was finally dropped in the mid-1960s.”
