One unexpected delight watching the Dylan bio-pic, A Complete Unknown, came from learning about the relationships between Dylan and other artists. As noted by my previous article(s) on the movie, I knew that he crossed paths with the Beatles, but I didn’t expect an appearance by them, given the focus and time frame depicted in the movie1. I had no idea that he was pen-pals with Johnny Cash, which was very entertaining. I vaguely remembered that he was “involved” with Joan Baez, but knew none of the particulars or circumstances. But the one name that jumped out at me (and understandably no one else) was Bob Neuwirth, whom Dylan met, in the movie, in an elevator as Dylan was leaving a party, unhappy that he felt forced to play music for the party guests, dumps his girlfriend and end up trying to watch Neuwirth play with his band at a local pub before getting punched.

Neuwirth probably isn’t a household name, but I recognized his name because I did a review of his album, Back to the Front, when I was writing for the media section of the student newspaper, The Daily Titan, at CSUF in 1988.2 I actually intended to write about Neuwirth when his name popped up in 2022 in an obituary in Rolling Stone magazine. But like many things in 2022, it just didn’t happen. Ugh. Anyway, I had no idea the two had known each other, much less that Neuwirth acted as Dylan’s road manager when they were touring in the late 1960s and 70s. Rereading my review of the 1988 album, it’s kind’a embarrassing that I wrote and published that article ignorant of the Dylan connection.

Here’s a copy of the article in all it’s uninformed glory:

“An unknown folk-singer on an obscure record label,” really?! Also, it might have been helpful if we had posted an image of said album cover to help promote the article. Even in 1988 we had that technology. Oops. Here’s the album cover:

Bob Neuwirth - Back to the Front
Bob Neuwirth – Back to the Front

In preparation for this article I pulled out the old LP and gave it a listen (also burning an MP3 copy to enjoy later). When I was putting the LP back in the album sleeve the liner notes and promo materials fell out. Re-reading the liner notes it’s pretty clear that I didn’t even bother reading them when I wrote the 1988 article. Or maybe in my haste I didn’t see them in the album sleeve. Either way, the Dylan connection is made pretty clear and I recognize many other names like T-Bone Burnett and his then wife, Sam Phillips (formerly Christian musician, Leslie Phillips). Ugh. This is really embarrassing.

There’s a scene early in the movie when Dylan is riding in a car with Pete Seeger and Dylan asks if it’s okay if he turns on the radio and they proceed talking about the different musical genres that Dylan likes. Casual music fans and music marketing gurus pretend that music and the artists who make said music exist only in these strict categories, like blues players would know nothing about Classical or that folk musicians would never be caught dead listening to Swing Music. Alas, when I wrote the 1988 album review I don’t know if I yet understood that those who love music are not likely to limit themselves to just one genre of music. And if they have a career of any length they are likely to move across multiple genres and develop friendships and relationships with fellow musicians also moving across this vast expanse of music. 

Dylan certainly wasn’t one to allow himself to be limited by whatever the music marketers or his managers wanted (how many remember his venture into Contemporary Christian Music???). Along the way, besides meeting his heroes, like Woody Guthrie, he influenced and was influenced by Johnny Cash, Joan Baez and someone who was hardly just an unknown folk-singer, Bob Neuwirth.

Bonus video: Here’s a clip of Bob Neuwirth talking in 2016 about Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash and the pompousness of marketed folk-music:

Source: 

Tags: Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, Correcting a Writing Error, Dylan’s Friends, video Tuesdays 

Creative Commons License

JosephBruceBustillos.com (website) by Joseph Bruce Bustillos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

FOOTNOTES:
  1. As noted in those previous articles, I learned about the interaction between Bob Dylan and the Beatles courtesy Peter Brown’s book, The Love You Make, in which Brown claimed that Dylan introduced pot to the Beatles, all of which for some reason did not make an appearance in the movie[↩]
  2. I remembered writing the album review because over the past year I’ve been updating my portfolio website posting all of my work from my many years at my many universities and not because of any amazing memory “abilities.”[↩]