A Complete Unknown (Bob Dylan), All Through the Night (Lou Reed - Not Attention Junkie)

Why A Complete Unknown should win the best picture Oscar:  James Mangold’s biopic – told very much with the backing of Bob Dylan – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with Blowin’ in the Wind. And that’s perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it’s an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man’s art can give people hope for change. 

A Complete Unknown might not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s already one of the great mainstream films about the visceral power of art – and at a time when the modern political moment is overwhelming any sense of cultural resistance. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan is so good that it’s been written off by some as no more than a feat of imitation. There are also impeccable supporting turns. Ed Norton is utterly taken by the kind utopian spirit of Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro repositions Joan Baez as a vital artist who exists separately from Dylan's shadow. 

Unlike in the movie, Dylan traveled to Italy in 1962 in pursuit of Suze Rotolo — named Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) — who had left New York to study abroad. In 1962, Rotolo left the Greenwich Village apartment where she had been living with Dylan and went to Perugia, where she attended the famed University for Foreigners. The Perugia institution has retrieved from its archives an enrollment document in the name of Susan Elisabeth Rotolo, and issued a statement in which professor Sabrina Cittadini claimed that “the love story between Suze and Dylan was full of painful searches.” Cittadini has done some interviews and gathered testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man emerged from a black taxi” in Perugia’s central Corso Garibaldi, near the university, “with a bouquet of red roses.” 

“It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia to look for his Suze,” who had moved to a different address, she said. Rotolo was 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, not long after his arrival in New York. A self-described “red diaper baby,” she was the daughter of two Italian immigrants: Gioachino “Pete” Rotolo, an illustrator and union organizer, and his wife Mary, an editor and columnist for the American edition of communist Italian newspaper L’Unità. Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who didn’t want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” 

Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo famously appeared arm-in-arm with Dylan on a slushy Greenwich Village street on the cover of his breakthrough 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” After their relationship drifted, as is shown in the film, Rotolo went back to Italy and in 1970 married Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian filmmaker whom she had met while a student in Perugia. Bob Dylan called Suze Rotolo his "Soul Twin" in his book "Chronicles" (2016).  Source: variety.com

WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A LOU REED MOVIE YET: I mean, usually Hollywood can't even wait for the body of a pop/rock star to get cold before the biopics begin to get on production. And Lou Reed's story is unique within the Rock world, full of twists, unexpected turns, and odd life experiences. If handled properly, it would make for a great musical film. So what are they waiting for? Maybe enough drugs but probably not enough sex, and very strange rock'n'roll? Maybe a theatrical release would never fill enough seats or maybe it's Laurie Anderson who acts like an angel custodian of her partner's legacy. There's certainly plenty of source material, like those weird and lengthy conversation between him and Lester Bangs, just imagine the glorious wreck of a set you could have with them. When Lou Reed was asked by VH1 in 1999 about some of his favorite songs, Reed picked “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Redding, “Stay With Me” by Lorraine Ellison, “Outcast” by Eddie & Ernie, “Belle” by Al Green, “I Can’t Stand The Rain” by Ann Peebles and “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies.

Lou Reed was one of the coolest and most vitriolic music artists ever. The stuff that rock and roll legends are made of. It would probably be impossible to make such a film without incorporating his attacks on rock journalists, and possibly offering some straightforward insight into the machinery of the music industry. After all, here is a guy who contributed to Paul Simon's One Trick Pony, which has its own harsh critique of the industry's marketing methods, so it wouldn't be certainly PC. So I really don't think any major studio would invest in a film based only in its ability to draw Lou Reed fans to the theaters. Lou Reed was a cult figure, and with the exception of Take a Walk on the Wild Side and his album New York, he spent four decades in a sort of well-publicized semi-obscurity. What would be the dramatic arc of a Lou Reed biopic? Besides, the most notable highlights of his personal life are probably events a mass audience could not assimilate easily. Another reason why a Lou Reed biopic has never been mooted might be due to some legal protections from Reed's sister Merrill Weiner and his widow Laurie Anderson. Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv

Lester Bangs: Lou Reed just may have a better perspective on this supposed upheaval in sexual roles than any of these Gore Vidals and Jill Johnstons. Dudes are coming outta the closet in droves and finding out they are heterosexual! Ha! After recording Transformer, Lou returned to his New York home and surprised the glam-rock fans in 1973 by getting married to a theatre actress named Betty (stage name Krista) Kronstadt. Today I'm going to walk into the dining room of the Holiday Inn, filled with expectation at finally getting to interview at length one of the musical and psychological frontiersmen of our time, Lou Reed. Although it does disturb his friends and fans to see him in such failing health, Lou can find a joke even there. 

At one point I asked him when he intended to die. Lou replied: "I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming." About the glam hysteria, he deadpanned: "The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won't necessarily involve to wear makeup. The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say that if my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something. But I don't feel that way at all. I don't think an album's gonna do anything. It's beyond the control of a straight person to turn gay or a gay person to turn straight. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?" —Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth (interview by Lester Bangs for Let It Rock magazine, November 1973)

The Bells is by turns exhilarating, almost unbearably poignant and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar anyone’s heard from him in ages. As for the lyrics — well, people tend to forget that in numbers like “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning” and “Oh! Sweet Nothing,” Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. This album is about love and dread — and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical death is ample reason to testify, but it’s love that brings both artist and audience, back from that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue empyrean ever. In “Stupid Man,” someone who’s been self-exiled too long, “living all alone by those still waters,” rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of Reed’s people on this record, he’s looking for love. “City Lights” isn’t only about Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in the world might not be enough to bring us together. In “All through the Night” Reed sings: “My best friend Sally. She got sick. And I’m feelin’ mighty ill myself. It happens all the time. All through the night. I went to St. Vincent’s. And she’s lyin’ on the ground. And I sat and cried. All through the night.”

“Families” is the most personal of all them: “And no Daddy you’re not a poor man anymore. And I hope you realize it before you die. There’s nothing here we have in common except our name. And I don’t think that I’ll come home much anymore.” With “The Bells,” like in “Street Hassle,” Lou Reed achieves his often stated ambition — to become a great writer, in the real literary sense. Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we’ll be your family. We promise to respect your privacy. It’s like what Tennessee Williams said to Dotson Rader when, as described in Rader’s Blood Dues, the latter made an anguished confession about wanting children. Williams just touched the head of a young artist sitting nearby and said: “These are my children.” Lou, you gave us reason to think there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. —The Bells Review by Lester Bangs (June, 14, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine

 

Lou Reed - America (Star-Spangled Banner song), 1992. 

Reed explained: “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus but they were wrong. It didn’t matter since I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore Schwartz’s funeral.” “Into the destructive element, that is the only way,” Schwartz had written on a note found in his hotel room. It proved to be a destructive guide Reed would follow for many years. Before The Velvet Underground, there was no such thing as alternative rock. You either had hits or you didn’t. “‘Lou Reed was a character, you know,” said Bob Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth, who ran into Reed at Max’s a number of times. “There was Lou the kid from Long Island, and then there was the public persona, the professional Lou Reed. But he was very casual. He wasn’t really an attention junkie. Lou didn't like being pursued by groupies like David Bowie or Iggy Pop. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dance on tables, much less so than people like Bowie and Iggy, who were more obsessed with enticing their audiences. Lou was much more dignified. I never found him to be in competition with anybody else. I never felt he was comparing his music to anybody else’s.” 

Reed and the Velvet Underground are often perceived as representing a kind of anti-sixties, a tough corrective to the era’s psychedelic utopianism. As always with Reed, however, that impulse in him was counterbalanced by his intense interest in transcendence. Reed attended the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In in March of 1967. Rob Norris from Hoboken, who would later join The Bongos, met Reed at the Boston Tea Party. “Lou would hold court,” Norris said. “Jonathan Richman was always there, very quiet. People would ask Lou stuff like, ‘How’s Nico?’ or ‘What’s Jackson Browne [who wrote for Nico on Chelsea Girl] doing now?’ Lou would say, ‘What do I look like, a billboard?’ I remember this fan girl who screamed at Lou, ‘You make me so crazy, I just want to kill you!’ Lou just looked at her very kindly and said, ‘Why don’t you just bake me a cake instead?’ It was the sweetest thing.” Jonny Podell, the agent who managed Reed in 1975, asked about Reed’s relationship with Rachel, replied, “You want me to tell you my real feelings? I almost feel bad saying this, but I mean it with real love. I think Lou was a total act. Look, we all present ourselves a certain way, and for me, he was Lou from Long Island seeing how far he could rebel against Daddy the accountant. I thought he became a drug addict because it was cool and rebellious. I thought he wanted to be with Rachel because it was shock and awe. Lou’s feelings about music were real, but the rest was shock and awe.”

Reed himself would later observe that “I always thought one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business. It was only kids trying to be outrageous.” According to his biographer Victor Bockris, Reed later denied any involvement in homosexual relationships, insisting he had seen Rachel as a woman. The edgiest moment of Rock'N'Roll Heart comes on its closing track, “Temporary Thing,” a grippingly dramatic confrontation between lovers that Reed acts out as if it were a play. The singer’s bitterness and angry insistence that the relationship is “just a temporary thing” suggest, conversely, that he’s much more deeply invested than he is letting on, and more than he even understands. The effect is powerful and unsettling. On a few occasions, Reed would admit to having done too many interviews while drunk or stoned. The anger he would often express to reporters was, in part, a projection of the anger he felt toward himself for having allowed himself to lose control. He felt humiliated and, consequently, lashed out. Reed once surmised, “You’re going to get interviewed, and you’d better figure out who you are right now, because that’s who you’re going to be forever for them.” That was a fate Reed viewed as a kind of hell, all the worse because he had condemned himself to it with his excesses. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis