The reason Bob Dylan fell out with Pete Seeger
In James Mangold’s 2024 Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, Pete Seeger is almost as essential a character as Dylan himself. The story of the troubadour’s emergence and rise is almost essentially a story of their friendship and of Seeger’s mentorship to the young artist. Sure, some of it was fabricated for cinematic effect; they needed to hype up the drama, somehow. But, in reality, the two shared a very real friendship that collapsed in line with a change in Dylan’s career.
In the film, Seeger essentially finds Dylan and gives him a home, but it wasn’t quite like that. However, he was an early fan. The former happened to see one of Dylan’s earliest performances when he landed in New York and began playing around the Greenwich Village scene. As he was already more established as an artist, he had the ability to open doors, and after hearing some of the songs and lyrics penned by this kid he thought would be the bright new star of the world he existed in—the world of left-leaning folk protest music—he wanted to help.
He not only made friends with the star and offered him any advice he could, but he also started bringing the right people around. He was a key player in putting Dylan in front of the right suits, including John Hammond, an A&R man at Columbia, to whom he not only introduced the folk star but also encouraged him to produce his debut album.
It wasn’t just a one-sided thing. Dylan, back then, clearly revered Seeger and cared about his opinion. They were friends, and Seeger was by his side during the dizzying skyrocket to fame that undeniably shook him up and seemingly made him pretty uncomfortable.
However, the foundation of their friendship did come down to one thing—politics, or more accurately, political folk music played on an acoustic guitar with words people could hear, understand and act on.
When Seeger first found Dylan, that’s what he was doing. In a similar way that Joan Baez was utterly won over, ‘America’s Tuning Fork’ was impressed by the youngin using his talent to talk about issues of government corruption, racism, poverty and all manner of injustices. He was writing protest anthems like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and that’s exactly the kind of song Seeger thought the world needed and, so, wanted to platform; he wanted to do that at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was on the board.
But, as we know in hindsight, Dylan went to Newport and didn’t do what he was supposed to. Instead, in 1965, he showed up with a full electric blues band and shocked Seeger and the board so much that they threatened to pull the plug. In Mangold’s movie, he’s literally seen heading towards the sound desk with an axe.
Once again, it was never that intense, but it was pulled from a quote Seeger gave about the day. “I couldn’t understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, and the sound was distorted,” he said, “I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, ‘Fix the sound so you can hear the words’. He hollered back, ‘This is the way they want it’. I said, ‘Damn it, if I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now’.”
By the time he gave that statement in 2001, Seeger claimed his protestations were never about the electric sound. “I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, ‘You didn’t boo Howlin’ Wolf yesterday. He was electric!’ Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great,” he said, but the damage was done.
There was likely a part of Dylan that felt betrayed by Seeger, who failed to stick up for his evolving image. But mostly, the latter was merely another person the folk star was willing to sacrifice to evolve. Similar to Baez and the whole protest scene, ‘The Bard’ burned a lot of bridges when he turned his back on both protest music and traditional folk music.
It was a refusal to prioritise their friendship on both sides. Seeger wouldn’t put it over his dedication to protest music, Dylan wouldn’t put it over his dedication to moving forward, and so the connection that had been so formative before crumbled in the face of principles.
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