Bob Dylan was having none of it as he rode with my colleague’s uncle from the Iron Range back to the University of Minnesota one Sunday night in 1959.
“Bobby, don’t you think you should go to class once in a while?” Dylan’s concerned classmate asked.
As we all learned after watching the Oscar-nominated Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” Bobby, seemingly, ignored everyone’s advice as he zipped off on a well-chronicled joyride, tarnished by a humiliation or a motorcycle crash here and there.
Like the subject of any film, Dylan would have been a nightmare for human resources. HR likes to toss around terms like “company culture,” lest someone starts to call it “mindless compliance.”
No one makes a film about the compliant, although I suppose “The Stepford Wives” took a good shot at it.
I didn’t ask my colleague what became of his uncle, but we know films aren’t made about people who melt into the system.
Heck I once heard a co-worker tell someone that “most people have a work personality and a non-work personality, but you just have a nonwork personality.”
No one’s going to make a film about a “work personality.” No one’s even making a film about Bobby Vee.
The Fargo kid was not quite 16 when he replaced rock ‘n’ roll spark Buddy Holly at the Moorhead Armory Winter Dance Party on Feb. 4, 1959. The Beechcraft Bonanza that Holly sat in had crashed near Mason City, Iowa, the night before.
The scramble to find local talent spit Vee onto a stage to front his older brother’s band — because Vee was the one member of the group who knew all the lyrics to their songs.
“The fear didn’t hit me until the spotlight came on, and then I was just shattered by it,” Vee said years later. “If I opened my mouth, I wasn’t sure anything would come out. But it was my big break, and I had to go for it.”
If you started noodling Vee’s story for a film treatment, you would cement Vee’s underdog role in the scene where the Winter Dance Party promoters don’t even pay him.
That screenplay gets even better in the next scene, when the group releases a record. Then? Yowza!
You write that Vee’s group brings in an unknown, pianist calling himself Elston Gunn. Gunn, 18, has never played with anyone who recorded a song and will enroll at the University of Minnesota that fall.
It turns out that Gunn is Robert Zimmerman, working through his identity crisis before calling himself the cipher that is Bob Dylan.
Sadly, your Bobby Vee film treatment becomes a paper wad at the bottom of the garbage pail when you portray Vee for what he was: A sincere guy with a nice voice who could write a song and croon some tunes.
Moms and dads didn’t view Vee as a threat, even though they knew rock music was sending Americans into the arms of Communists.
Worse for the script, Vee ends up married to the same woman for more than half a century.
Hey, sounds like he would have gotten along fine at the office, though.
Rockin’ out is how Dylan would have begun his career if not for the fact his willowy frame, pale looks and finger-in-socket hair deposited him outside the Bobby Vee/Ricky Nelson/Frankie Avalon dreamboat category. So Bob went the folk route.
That decision gave “A Complete Unknown” screenplay adapters a chance to have Bob go electric at the Newport Folk Festival with his Marty McFly Stratocaster, portrayed as a message to his folkie fans as to just what they could do with their company culture.
The Newport crowd in the film behaves as if they were the ones who certified Dylan’s musical Powerball ticket, although in real life the New York Times’ next-day recap mentioned no civil disobedience.
Well, a little embellishment is why it’s called a biopic. Hard to stop the stories from growing.
No matter. We pay to see films made about people like Bob Dylan. People who could never get past HR.