For anyone who saw A Complete Unknown and wondered how close it resembled the actual Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan amped up his music, a new documentary will help answer that question.
Among the many films just announced as part of the annual Venice Film Festival in September is Newport & the Great Folk Dream, which documents the legendary (and ongoing) festival in the pivotal folk-to-rock years between 1963 and 1966. The doc includes footage of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — some of it from the same 1965 festival where part of A Complete Unknown was set — alongside previously unseen live clips of blues, gospel and folk legends, including Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, John Lee Hooker, Judy Collins, the Staple Singers, Bill Monroe, and many others.
According to director (and writer and historian) Robert Gordon, Newport & the Great Folk Dream had already been completed before the release of A Complete Unknown, but he waited to gauge the reaction to that film first. “I have to praise Timothée Chalamet and [director] James Mangold for expanding our audience tremendously,” Gordon tells Rolling Stone with a chuckle. “A year ago, my friends’ kids weren’t really interested in Newport, and now they know all about it.”
All the footage in Newport & the Great Folk Dream comes from the archives of the late documentarian Murray Lerner, who shot Newport for years. (His footage of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival has resulted in separate docs on performances there by Leonard Cohen, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and others.) In 1967, Lerner released Festival!, a compilation of his footage from Newport between 1963 and 1966. According to Newport producer Joe Lauro, Lerner had planned to make an expanded Newport movie himself but died in 2017, by which time he’d sold his archive to Lauro’s Historic Films company.
Newport & the Great Folk Dream repeats only a few clips from Festival! Most of it consists of newly unearthed and restored footage, including Hooker romping through “Boom Boom”; Joan Baez and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary singing the traditional “Lonesome Valley”; Van Ronk doing the Reverend Gary Davis’ “Cocaine” (familiar to those who know Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty); and the Staple Singers rocking out gospel with “I Wish I Had Answered.“
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“Festival! was about 95 minutes, and Murray shot about 100 hours, so an extraordinary amount of musicians and music were filmed,” says Lauro. “It’s the greatest archive of Americana music that’s existed.”
Although it wasn’t entirely set at Newport, A Complete Unknown recreated some of its major moments during the years Dylan first played there. Newport & the Great Folk Dream allows us to see real-life- counterpart clips of Dylan and his band warming up for his going-electric moment, a different cut of his “Maggie’s Farm” that night, and performances by a gaunt-indeed Johnny Cash (“Big River”) and Baez (Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”) from the same festivals in A Complete Unknown.
One of the Mangold film’s antagonists, folklorist and Newport overseer Alan Lomax, is seen and heard debating the idea of purity vs. commercialism in folk music. “A Complete Unknown was great, but it was a Hollywood movie,” says Lauro. “They had the fight with Lomax and [Dylan and Butterfield manager] Albert Grossman happening during ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ It happened during Butterfield’s set, so we set the story straight.”
To further tie in A Complete Unknown with his doc, Gordon moved a clip of Cash to the beginning of the film. “It worked out great, and it’s a way to connect the two films,” he says. “There’s the thrill of seeing the Hollywood film come to life in a different way. There are a lot of the same tensions.”
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The Newport Folk Festival first launched in 1959 and soon became a destination for anyone wanting a full immersion into folk, country, bluegrass, gospel, and other vernacular genres, although rock and singer-songwriter music also crept in. This year’s gathering — taking place this weekend in Newport, Rhode Island as always — was curated by Nathaniel Rateliff and is a vivid demonstration of how much the festival’s scope has expanded. Its three days are scheduled to include sets by Luke Combs, MJ Lenderman, Jack Antonoff & Bleachers, Jeff Tweedy, Lukas Nelson, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Margo Price, Bonny Light Horseman, and both Geese and Goose (the latter joined by Kenny Loggins, of all people).
Future release plans for Newport & the Great Folk Dream have not yet been finalized, but Gordon feels it will have a place in today’s fractured world. “We talk about diverse groups of people, but what we see here is an extremely concerted effort to represent songs from all kinds of lifestyles, work and play,” he says. “I know this sounds corny, but the story is about harmony.”
