It’s One Great Escape From The Cold Winter & Bad News
A Brief One from Doug Draper
Posted January 14th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
The cover of the now-classic 1963 album, ‘The Freewheelin’ Dylan’, showing Bob Dylan and his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down one of the snowy streets of Greenwich Village, New York.
I have sometimes asked myself the following – ‘If I could travel back somewhere in a time machine, where would it go?’
One of the places and times near the top of my list is Greenwich Village in New York City in the early 1960s when it was one of the world’s great meccas for poets and other writers, and for young musicians like Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
Earlier this week my wife Mary and I went to a movie theatre at the Pen Centre in St. Catharines/Nagara and saw a movie called ‘A Complete Unknown’ that brought me about as close to realizing that dream of going there than just about any other book I’ve read about that exciting time and place.
The film begins with a very young Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York City in 1961 where he travelled from his hometown in the mid-west to visit his hero, the legendary folk troubadour Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized with a debilitating and ultimately deadly form of Huntington’s Disease.
It follows him through established folkies like Pete Seeger hearing him perform in some of the local Greenwich Villiage clubs and helping him score a recording contract with Columbia Records.
Legendary folk singer Joan Baez and Bob Dylan back in the Newport Folk Festival days of the early 1960s when their romance was just beginning to blossom.
Along the way Dylan meets Joan Baez and other folk greats of the day where, through his own trials and tribulations, he perfects the art of writing musical anthems like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘The Times They’re A Changin’, ‘Masters of War’ and one of his most popular classics, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
The acting by everyone in the film is superb and the film itself puts you right there in the streets, music clubs and coffee houses during that magical time.
If you are in to Dylan and that great slice of musical history, it is a great way to escape for a few hours.
Just go on the internet and search the local film theatres across Niagara for the film ‘A Complete Unknown’ and see it before it goes.
To watch the trailer for the film, click on the screen immediately below –
NIAGARA AT LARGE Encourages You To Join The Conversation By Sharing Your Views On This Post In The Space Following The Bernie Sanders Quote Below.
“A Politician Thinks Of The Next Election. A Leader Thinks Of The Next Generation.” – Bernie Sanders
Niagara At Large 