Dylan: Greenwich Village before him. Revisiting ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’
January 18, 2025
Andrew Curry writes: A Complete Unknown is not the first time that Hollywood has wandered into the world of the early-60s folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village.
The Coen brothers’s film Inside Llewyn Davis, released in 2013, is a fictionalised version of that pre-Cambrian folk world just before Dylan arrived.
It tells the story of a few weeks in the life of Llewyn Davis, who’s trying to make it in the folk scene. Davis, who’s played by Oscar Isaac, is not having a good time.
He’s beaten up by someone outside of the Gaslight Club. He’s got a married friend pregnant—Jean is played by Carey Mulligan, just as she was becoming a star—so needs to raise some money quickly for her abortion. Justin Timberlake is her husband, Jim, and we see the two of them singing early on as part of a trio.
His former singing partner, Mike Timlin, has committed suicide by throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge. Davis missed out on the royalties of a hit song he plays on. He cadges a lift to Chicago in the hope of getting a recording contract (he doesn’t), and has to hitchhike back in the snow. And all the time he is couch-surfing across the city, a day here, a day there.
And when he tries to quit the folk scene because he’s not getting anywhere, to rejoin the Merchant Marine, he fails at that too.
This might make it sound like a tragedy, but the stakes are too low for that. It’s really a black comedy.
This sense of comedy is under-scored by a meandering subplot about a cat, Ulysses, which escapes from an apartment where Llewyn Davis is staying early on in the film.
The Coen brothers bought the rights to Dave van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Van Ronk, who died a decade before the film was released, was a leading figure in the Greenwich Village folkscene, and the film draws on the ambience of the book, and a few scenes, and a bit of background. Van Ronk, like Davis in the film, was also in the merchant marine.
The music of the film draws strongly on van Ronk’s repertoire, which the Coen brothers took as their starting point when they were writing the film. The first song we hear Llewyn Davis sing is van Ronk’s Hang Me, Oh Hang Me; Dink’s Song, also associated by van Ronk, which in the film was part of Davis’s repertoire with his dead partner, is a small flashpoint in the film.
We also see the cover of Davis’s LP, Inside Llewyn Davis, which is more than a nod to van Ronk’s Inside Dave van Ronk.
But it should be said that the character of Llewyn Davis does not draw on Dave van Ronk. Van Ronk was by every account likeable, generous, and well-liked, whereas Llewyn Davis is—no other word quite captures it—an asshole.
Van Ronk is one of the first characters to appear in A Complete Unknown, and there’s a second connection between the two films.
Elijah Wald, whose book Dylan Goes Electric provided the source material for A Complete Unknown, was the co-writer of The Mayor of MacDougal Street. And, like Dylan, the young Elijah Wald spent months sleeping on Dave van Ronk’s couch.
In an article written for the film’s website, Wald writes about some of the specific reasons why the folk scene flourished in New York at that time. Some of these are down to the particular rules the city imposed on its entertainment sector.
Rules about “incidental music” in clubs, for example, said that no licence was needed
for groups that had less than four people and did not include wind, brass, or percussion instruments.
So poets and folksingers could feature without having to worry about either the licensing laws or the costs of additional licensing fees. And although bars “had to close at one”, a coffeehouse could “stay open as long as there were customers.”
This had bad and good effects. On the downside, performers would end up playing five or six sets a night. On the upside, they’d learn a lot, quickly, about performing live:
Van Ronk remembered them as the most grueling places he ever worked—but also as a terrific training ground: “We had so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong, and go back and try it again.
The soundtrack of Inside Llewyn Davis feels reasonably authentic, and one of the reasons for this is that the songs were mostly sung live on set. You also feel when you’re watching that the impresario who tells Llewyn Davis that he’ll not make it as a solo performer has his judgment right.
And (spoilers, except that the film is more mood than plot), right at the end, at the Gaslight Club, the camera pulls back to show Dylan (Ben Pike) singing Fare Thee Well. A Complete Unknown is about to steal the limelight.
The recording of Dylan above, one of the earliest, made at the Gaslight Club in 1961, only exists because Dave van Ronk and his wife Terri plugged a reel to reel tape recorder into the Gaslight’s PA system.
I think Van Ronk had his moments of asshole-dom but, there again, don't we all?
I was lucky enough to see him perform at an Ontario folk festival in the mid-'80s. He was an electrifying performer - a superb instrumentalist and his voice had a beauty all its own. He even sang "House of the Rising Sun," which he'd tended to avoid since Dylan's and The Animals' versions.
Headliner at the festival was Joan Baez. The organizers dragooned her into having a news conference. I felt sorry for her. All anyone really wanted to know was whether the rumours were true that Dylan might make a "surprise" appearance.
Surprise, surprise, they weren't and he didn't. But when Baez got up on stage and sang "Farewell, Angelina," she did one verse in a cruelly accurate impersonation of Dylan. She was laughing with the crowd, but I think she was also laughing at them, just a little.
Posted by: Bill Taylor | January 18, 2025 at 07:34 PM