The Author Behind the Hit Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’

The multiple Oscar-nominated movie is based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Tufts alum Elijah Wald

It’s been almost a decade since Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! was published—but it recently hit the New York Times bestseller list. That’s the power of a movie tie-in—in this case, 2024’s A Complete Unknown, nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best directing, and best actor in a leading role. The book was the main inspiration for the film.

Wald, AG15, has been pleased with the new attention—especially from Bob Dylan himself, who said in a tweet seen 8.9 million times that movie is “a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.” 

“I was flabbergasted,” Wald says. “Early on, I had asked his office if they had sent a copy to Dylan, and they responded, Bob doesn’t read Dylan books. He hasn’t in any way recommended a Dylan book since the Anthony Scaduto biography in 1972. So this was completely unexpected—and thrilling.”

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties tells the story of how music-legend Dylan turned the folk music world on its head by playing an electric set at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and how it divided the music world between the acoustic past and the electric future. 

Book cover for Dylan Goes Electric!

After the book was published, it was optioned for a movie by Dylan’s organization. “My immediate reaction was, why do you need me? You’ve got Dylan. The story of Dylan going electric had been told lots and lots of times,” Wald says. “The new idea that I had was making it the story of Dylan and Pete Seeger, and that’s what they focused on for the movie.”

The screenwriters “invented much more of a personal relationship than existed in my book,” he says. “I’m tracing those as parallel stories. But in the movie, they turn them into a story where they’re constantly interacting with each other.”

How did Wald like the movie? “I enjoyed it,” he says. “Like a lot of people who were there and lived through that, I went into the movie expecting to be bothered by a lot of mistakes, and was absolutely floored by how much they got right.”

Wald, who has written a number of books about music—his most recent is 2024’s Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories—was “really pleased that there’s so much music in the movie and it’s done so well. I mean, that’s the first hurdle,” he says. “And my God, did they clear that one, not just with Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, but with Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Ed Norton is unbelievable as Pete Seeger.”

The Back Story

Wald decided to write the book back in 2014 when he realized that the 50th anniversary of the electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival was coming up the next year. “I called my agent and said, if I did a book on Dylan going electric and could get it out in time for the 50th anniversary, could you sell that? And she said, hell yes. But I only had six months to research and write it.” 

Elijah Wald plays an acoustic guitar, with candles on a mantle in the background

“I’m as interested in who was in the audience at Newport as who was on the stage,” says Elijah Wald. Photo: Joaquin Daniel Vieira, ©2024

At the time, he was nearing the end of his studies in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program at Tufts—a perfect academic home for him. Wald had dropped out after a year of college in the 1970s to take up music, and never looked back. But after writing a number of well-received nonfiction books centering mostly on music history, he wanted to go to graduate school.

“I’d always been fascinated by sociolinguistics, and this was an opportunity to study that,” he says. His dissertation title shows how his studies dovetailed with his interests: Reinventing Ranchera: Music, Language, and Identity in the Southwest.

But he put the Ph.D. on hold for those six months and got to work, managing to research and write the book at record speed. He could do it quickly because “social history is what I do,” he says. “This one concentrates on a couple of people in particular, but it always is trying to place them in context. I’m as interested in who was in the audience at Newport as who was on the stage.”

Because so many of the people involved had already given interviews at the time, he reached out to people like folk singer Jim Kweskin and George Wein, the director of the Newport Festival, for their views. “I also talked to Bill Hanley, who designed the sound system, because there’s been all this talk about how the problem with going electric was actually with the sound system—I wanted to understand what the technical situation had been,” he says.

He also searched for people who’d been in the audience. “The Holy Grail,” he says, “which I did find one example of, was an 18-year-old woman who kept a scrapbook that weekend, writing down her impressions as it was happening.”

The book he’s working on now, though, probably won’t be made into movie any time soon. It’s a history of rock and roll, for the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction” series. But it won’t be his last writing project. “I’m always working on a new book.”

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