Like many millions of moviegoers in recent weeks, I found “A Complete Unknown” a delightful film and deserving of the acclaim it has received. The re-narration of the most studied period in Bob Dylan’s long life still felt fresh, hinting that the hidden key to the story lay in Dylan’s relationship with the folk hero Woody Guthrie.
Although I once saw Bob Dylan play at the New Orleans Jazz Festival 20 years ago, being born in the 1970s meant, for all practical purposes, growing up with the feeling of having just missed out on the most essential musical action. And with no disrespect meant toward the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin or any other popular act, nobody can really dispute the claim that Bob Dylan more than anyone fused the pop cultural and the religious experience into one.
My own relationship to Dylan’s music was given a significant boost when the first three volumes of the “Bootleg Series” landed in my lap. At the time, around 1992, I was transitioning from tapes to CDs and getting ready to relocate from California to Boston to begin college. In those months, I listened to the “Bootleg Series” more than any other CD in my meager trove.
No song moved me more—despite a few that seemed to map onto my multiple aborted romantic mishaps—than “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” a poem written shortly before he recited it in concert for the first and last time in April 1963.
“A Complete Unknown” portrays Woody Guthrie, dying in his bed of Huntington’s disease, as a bedrock of authenticity as well as a sort of muted sage. In Catholic terminology, Guthrie seems to embody the saint or holy figure with whom we stand in an imitative relationship—we imitate the ones who imitate Christ.
In the film, Guthrie can sense that Dylan, not Pete Seeger, is his true imitator and thus heir. The most common complaint about the young Dylan was that he was a faker whose relationship to folk music was merely an affectation. Guthrie himself, however, seemed to fake it at many crucial junctures, as Pauline Kael already sussed out in her 1976 review of the film “Bound for Glory,” based on Guthrie’s autobiography. Guthrie seemed to take more inspiration from the Californian John Steinbeck than from any personal experience of the Dust Bowl—he even named one of his children Joady.
Dylan probably sensed that Guthrie himself was involved in mythologizing—and likely saw that as part of Guthrie’s artistry. And this hunch did nothing to take away from his reverence for Guthrie.
It is not surprising that “A Complete Unknown” did not utilize “Last Thoughts on Woody,” which, despite the oversaturation of Dylan biography, has largely been forgotten (the best discussion on the internet comes via a Reddit forum). The film, however, inspired me to listen to it again, for the first time in at least 20 years. And to keep listening, along with my poetically-inclined nine-year-old, to each mesmerizing verse.
The poem expresses the theme of despair, not born of the Dust Bowl but instead set in the key of the 1960s existentialism more familiar to Dylan:
And there’s something on your mind you wanna be saying
That somebody someplace ought to be hearing
But it’s trapped on your tongue and sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when you’re laying in bed.
One could find such musings among dozens of poets or artists, but nobody before Dylan had made these feelings come alive so nakedly. After a series of similarly piercing lines, the poem pivots to a sweeping critique of a consumerist society, but not before describing what Hopkins called an “inscape,” or as Dylan puts it:
You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more.
I was 20 years old when I first heard this, and not only intensely interested in religious experience but also experiences in general—whether they be sexual, intellectual, physical or conversational. It is impossible to convey how powerfully these words struck me. Nothing was more valuable than authenticity, and nothing more deplorable than phoniness. But Salinger was in his mid-thirties when he wrote Catcher in the Rye, whereas Dylan was the same age as the average student on my campus when he wrote this poem.
The main bend in the poem comes about halfway through, when Dylan introduces the virtue of hope: “You need something special alright/ You need something special to give you hope.” After naming the desire for transcendence, Dylan hints at the divine source of this longing. As soon as he drops the hint, however, he cautions against any inauthentic simulacrum: “But hope’s just a word/ That maybe you said or maybe you heard.”
One might genuinely desire transcendence—“But that’s what you need man, and you need it bad/ And your trouble is you know it too good”—but one might also lack a clear path to achieve it.
Despite his humdrum Minnesota upbringing, Dylan (all of 21 at the time) already knew that none of the consumerist or capitalist attempts to meet this human desire would ultimately satisfy. He exhorts, “And it ain’t on a Macy’s windowsill/ And it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map…/ And it ain’t in no cardboard box house/ Or down any movie star’s blouse.” There is something of the modern “ethics of authenticity” in the poem, but as a young person from a family of lawyers, not knowing whether I wanted to be a hedonist or a Christian, an intellectual or a professional, I felt like the words spoke directly to me, like an oracle:
And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Saying, ‘Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain’t there no one here that knows where I’m at?
Ain’t there no one here that knows how I feel?’
Although I had no experience with significant struggles, I did have experiences of real pain; the most recent example at that time was learning the day before I left for college that a parental death from early childhood had in fact been self-inflicted. Nobody knows how anyone else really feels, unless it is told to him, but who could be told in a brand-new town? The author of these verses seemed like someone to confide in.
After pleading that transcendence or hope cannot be found in such a culture, Dylan leads the reader to a fork in the road: “Where do you look for this hope that you’re seeking?/ … / And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads.”
He adds:
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
at sundown.
When I began college, I immediately returned to weekly Mass-going after a year away. Even so, I could not help but side with Dylan, feeling that the more likely encounter with God would come on a visit to Guthrie, or some other saint.
Thirty years later, it’s the “or” that sticks with me. Why not both? It would be another 15 years before Dylan’s “Christian phase,” but many of his most ardent admirers found the religion of the early songs better than his underrated but still inferior Christian lyrics.
In “A Complete Unknown,” Woody Guthrie’s disabled body is still the sacrament of folk truth. In the Catholic tradition, the saints make Christ present to those around them in a singular and exaggerated fashion. Dylan’s final lines in “Last Thoughts” offer an exalted status to communal religious practice, but find the source of transcendence better reflected in Guthrie’s withered body than in Sunday worship. Maybe the point of the song, then, was not either-or; after all, they’re both found in the Grand Canyon, at sundown.
