Berb and The Biopics

Tim Chalamet has been unveiled as Bob Dylan and is currently doing the rounds pushing the forthcoming biopic A Complete Unknown.

Or to put it more accurately than it is being put at the moment, the finest actor of his generation has just done a film playing the finest actor of his.

Rimshot, cymbal.

Here all week. Try the veal. Tip your waitress.

A biopic is a film about someone’s life. Biopic actually means ‘biographical picture.’

(For the hard of thinking, a biography is an account of someone’s life written by a third party. An autobiography is a self-written record of one’s own life.)

We’ve all seen blurbs like The Shocking Unauthorised Biography of [insert name of celebrity here]. And they can be shocking. Who didn’t know before reading Tom Bower’s unauthorised biography that the Beckhams were obsessed with money, status and power? There’s literally nothing in either’s history to suggest as much. It was quite the bombshell, although I feel the author missed a reflexive trick by not titling it My Right Foot - a reference to what Becks built his footballing career on, Bower could have allayed any fears he was muckraking gutter rat with a cute reference to actual literature: Yes, I might say that at a party once ‘David was probably in the same room as people who might have used cocaine’, but look, I know about Christy Brown and My Left Foot.

But there are rules about biographies.

They have to stay within touching distance of a verifiable chronology, events and facts. Paul Ricœur - a name that I can only spell after a couple of attempts, largely because of dyslexia, but partially because I can never remember how to do joined letters on a keyboard - once said that historiography, the writing of history, is chronology plus causal explanation. I’m paraphrasing a little because Time and Narrative unfolds over three long and not particularly helpful volumes. Like Derrida, Ricœur believed in taking fairly simple ideas and then taking great pains to make them as complex and obscure as possible, bless him. It’s a French relativism thing, which is cute and interesting wordplay for just after the Second World War when the world needed some simple fun in its life, but is less cute and interesting when you realise it leads to women having their hard-won rights and opportunities removed once again by men.

Sport for all, people, but we have categories for a reason.

The way I explain it to my children is this: the dates, events, and known facts are like telegraph poles stretching back through time. The causal explanations are the wires connecting one telegraph pole to another. We haven’t got onto how agendas inform the wires that connect the telegraph poles yet - the whole Indian Mutiny of 1857 vs. First War of Indian Independence stuff. They’re currently learning about the Vikings and the Tudors respectively, but even when dealing with men setting fire to monks and the Royal Family killing one another for the Crown the basic visual holds good. Known dates, verified facts, established events, evidence = telegraph poles. Explanations of how we get from one to the next = connecting wires.

You know, the stuff that Graham Hancock doesn’t bother with.

All of this also goes out the window when it comes to the music biopic.

Music biopics tend to lean towards the sort of self-mythologising that pop stars have been indulging in since the Big Bang that was Elvis changed the world and whose echoes are still reverberating around the culture (and being sold over and over again by the music business. Clue is in the second word of the title. Business.) They tend to have only a sketchy relationship with the facts and are perfectly happy to shift them and events and people around to suit the myth. They have done ever since the form was invented; and given who this biopic is about - a man who has spent his entire career making himself up over and over again - it’s likely that it’s going to continue in A Complete Unknown.

The music business currently survives on a combination of streaming income and reselling things that we, the people already own. We don’t need another series about The Beatles. We actually need another Beatles, a band of their time representing their time in this time. Instead we get the continuing repackaging of the Fabs to drive traffic and revenue. I’ve noted this before. I’m sure David Hepworth has, but David actually gets paid for making pertinent points about pop culture while I’m just a practitioner working out where my practice fits in the current landscape. As I explore in the post linked above, the amazing thing about The Beatles is not their success, but that none of them were meant to succeed. They weren’t supposed to change the face of popular culture. They were factory fodder from Liverpool. They were supposed to live quiet little British lives and then die. The most extraordinary thing about them is that they were completely ordinary. That they reshaped Western culture from this position should be the thing we wonder at rather than yet another discussion of how Paul wrote Hey Jude or whether Yoko disrupted their gang. The answer to the latter is yes, but then they were always going to break up. Bands are always uneasy alliances of different agendas, most only stay together for the chance of stardom and then if stardom happens then the money and the idea of the band as teenage gang only lasts until those involved start to grow up, which happens even in the state of suspended adolescence that is rock n’ roll.

The reason why we want Paul McCartney telling us how he wrote Yesterday in his sleep again (and boy does it sound like it) is because human beings are story machines. We like stories. We like stories we recognise. They make us feel safe. So, the industry prints the myths - again - and rakes in the cash.

And the musicians involved generally go along with it.

Why?

Lots of reasons. Probably the most pertinent, if we aren’t going to get into pop stars largely being fame-hungry narcissists who will and do sell their Mums for glue if it means the adoration continues, is Tony Wilson’s comment that musicians are morons: they make the art form that means the most to most of us and yet none of them are capable of talking about how they do what they do or explaining it remotely coherently. You made the song that saved my life. How did you do it? Oh, we just jammed it, man. For another, although Frank Zappa was overrated (his son turned out to be a blindingly good guitarist, mind), he was right when he quipped that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. This is why most books, bios, biopics and documentaries about music add almost nothing to the enjoyment of the music itself. It’s also why novels about music don’t work - whether it’s Powder, The Thrill of it All, Utopia Avenue or [insert title here.] A great song goes straight through the intellect and into the feels. A band we love we love because they reflect who we think we are back at us. A novel reflects very little but the writer at us, and the way that writer feels about music is not the way we feel it. The Commitments works because it tells us how the music makes the people in the story feel, which we recognise sympathetically, rather than tells us how we’re supposed to feel about the music.

But if we are going to go down the musicians collude in lying about themselves because they’re narcissists who’ll do anything for fame route, the other reasons musicians lie about why they are, their pasts, and themselves is because … they’re narcissists who’ll do anything for fame. Even the rejection of fame is a claim for recognition. All of those punks in 1976 who said they were doing it for themselves? They said those things in interviews, to the press, into microphones, into TV cameras and they all played to paying audiences. This isn’t pop-psychology - although all psychology is, given it’s a soft interpretative science. Just look at the average musician that you’ve heard of. No-one needs millions of people they’ve never even met telling them they love them who is balanced, sane, and loves themselves.

No-one.

Which is why they tweak their narratives - to come out of it looking more like their press releases and imaginings and less like themselves.

The biopic helps them do it - and it’s been helping them do it ever since the form was invented.

Take Hank Williams.

Hank Williams invented modern country. He died in the back of a Cadillac from a mixture of whisky, chloral hydrate, morphine and years of substance abuse and hard living.

Hollywood got in the act quite quickly for Hollywood standards, releasing Your Cheatin’ Heart in 1964, barely eleven years after Williams died.

Their tagline was The One and Only … Hank Williams.

If Hank Williams is a one and only talent, then why’s George Hamilton playing him?

And if he’s a one and only kinda guy and George Hamilton has played him then why did Tom Hiddlestone reprise the role over half-a-century later? Nothing against Tom. I’m sure his children love him and he seems like a decent if tightly-stretched sort of bloke, but how can an Eton and Oxford-educated member of the British elite accurately portray a white trash lying, cheating, drug-taking, alcoholic, womanising bs artist.

Ah.

The reality is that biopics exploit the details of an artist’s life, often in collusion with artist. Bohemian Rhapsody? I cried at the end for the waste of a magnificient talent, but Freddie didn’t die of AIDS because he got involved with bad people. Freddie died of AIDS because he had repeated unprotected sex within the demographic most likely to catch HIV at that point in history. Biopics also pigeonhole musicians. Johnny Cash will now always be Joaquin Phoenix having a redemptive arc. Biopics homogenises and sanitises musicians. Jamie Foxx shooting up as Ray Charles on film looks cinematic. There’s none of the squalid realities of drug or alcohol abuse there. No throwing up, no loss of bowel control, nothing about the lasting physical and psychological damage addicts cause to themselves and their families. Biopics lie. Patsy Cline died in a ‘plane crash West of Nashville. Her biopic has her crashing into the desert in Arizona, probably because the film’s producers thought it looked more cinematic (and / or) it was cheaper to shoot. And the screenwriters of biopics routinely attribute character changes and developments to specific events in the artist’s life, as if life happens in an easily recognisable narrative of cause and effect. But life doesn’t happen that way. In the film Ray, Ray Charles becomes a heroin addict because his brother died. In fact, Ray Charles became a heroin addict because he started taking then kept taking heroin. But then addicts always have a reason why they keep taking what they’re addicted to rather than a reason to stop. It’s called addictive uniqueness, and it’s bs.

People listen to music because it takes them to a different emotional place; or it supports or enhances the emotional place they’re in. People don’t listen to Johnny Cash and think of Joaquim Phoenix pretending to be Johnny Cash. They listen to Johnny Cash because the man’s music means something to them; because it’s transformative; because it reaffirms how they think of themselves.

And finally and crucially, actors and actresses do biopics because they’re paid and because they’re Oscar-bait. They might spout about respect and love and honouring the artist in the junket interviews but they’re there for the cash and the statues. No, I don’t believe the line you’re spouting about your biopic turning new people onto the artist you’ve just impersonated’s music. If you need a biopic to get turned onto the music of Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Queen, Elton John, Chess Records, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors or (heaven help you) The Grateful Dead or the hundred other biopics that have been made about musicians, then you’re a low-level sheep grazing on the hillside of culture. Their songs are literally a click away on your device. You don’t need a movie to find them. You can click play, close your eyes, and let your imagination run its own movies. Biopics are actors and actresses standing in front of the mirror with a tennis raquet and miming to their favourite songs. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. I still do it. But I don’t record it and ask for an Oscar for my efforts.

Which brings us by degrees back to Tim is playing Bob.

Tim’s tennis racquet is a period-specific guitar; his dress-up is period-specific and sourced clothing and apparel from the time; and his dialogue coach will make sure his accent is roughly right.

But it’s still dress-up and make-believe.

The title tells us what to expect. How A Complete Unknown changed the world. The clue again is in the title. And it’s also in the fact that we know the story the music biopic tells us - how one person’s singular genius changed the world. How that person escaped their background, how the suits didn’t get it, how the hep-cat daddios did, how genius and talent and expression won out over convention. How authenticity and self-belief and talent and uniqueness won through, despite all.

So far, so like everything you’ve seen so far.

And in Bob’s case, how completely wrong.

Bob, or as I’ve called him ever since hearing him actually speak, Berb is more manufactured, mannered and corporate than the blandest and most groomed (in every sense) of any bright and shiny pop band.

The standard biopic arc can be seen as hard childhood, move away from home, early struggles, introduction to drugs / alcohol, recognition of talent by manipulative ‘suits’, rise to fame, crisis (usually because of drugs, but sometimes of faith), love of a good woman, resurgence, finis.

Berb doesn’t have this arc. His was a fairly comfortable and indulged childhood when, inspired by Elvis, he decided to become a pop star, latched onto folk music as a vehicle, sociopathically rewrote his past history and invented himself as arbiter of cool and now. Like every wannabe will do anything to be someone, like a young Geri Halliwell, Berb was out for fame and success at any price and at any cost from a young age. He wasn’t the travelling carnival hobo he affected when he arrived in New York. He was an indulged middle-class kid who wanted to be cool. Berb adopted the collar up James Dean rocker look and started calling himself Elston Gunn long before he left Hibbing, Minnesota. He played in local bands and posed on the Harley his parents bought him. So far, so impoverished. Playing in local bands made Berb realise he was better off going solo. Bands take management, which means work, which Berb wasn’t prepared to do; and the dynamics of the group collective means that pretention is soon squashed. It’s what makes them work when they work well - the drive to achieve a shared ambition compounded by people pushing and pulling in different directions - but it meant that the young Dylan couldn’t get away with the strokes he was trying on at the time. Elston Gunn? Pull the other one. You’re Bobby Zimmerman. We know your Mum and Dad.

This is why Berb latched onto the Folk genre. While being an entirely invented form just as full of charlatans and chancers as any other, Folk music prizes itself on its authenticity. Berb isn’t the only young man or woman who’ve found themselves in a narrow world and dealt with it by fantasising and daydreaming about a better or more exciting one - it’s a healthy part of the healthy psychology of a healthy individual. But when this starts to push up against a constraining reality, like bread dough rising out of the sides of the tin on a warm radiator without ever getting to the oven, it can spill over into a sticky, unformed mess. Had he stayed in Hibbing, Bobby Z would have just been a small town eccentric, tolerated and teased in equal measure. By latching onto Folk and heading to New York, he transferred that overinflating sense of himself as a man of destiny into a bigger tin, a tin that would not only tolerate his delusion but add further yeast and heat to it.

This is an extended metaphor, yes. To put it more simply, Berb invented the life he thought he should have, and then inserted himself right at the centre of it. There’s a saying at the moment that we are the stars of our own stories. It sounds cute and empowering until you realise that it’s just another bro-science meme that isn’t actually true. As human beings, we’re actually better when we’re in the service of something bigger and better than ourselves. A cause, a challenge, our community, our families all make us better and more productive and fulfilled than serving our egos.

But that’s what Berb did. His small daydreams became songs. His small problems became songs. His infatuations became romanticised in songs, elevating often tawdry and self-serving behaviour into something noble and poetic when it was, in fact, still just tawdry and poetic. The man used women, just like he used other people.

Leaving Hibbing and going to university taught Berb something. It didn’t teach him about the lyric tradition, or critical reasoning. It taught him that in a place where no-one knew him, he could say anything he wanted about himself and enough people would believe him to give it credence and currency. Berb could lie about who he was, sing about it, and it would hold the attention of a room long enough to give him what he wanted: attention. Berb dropped the rocker garb and started affecting workingman’s clothes, even though he’d never actually done a day of work in his life. He’d later claim that he’d read all of the greats - Faulkner, Graves, Machiavelli - even though there was very little evidence that he actually bothered attending classes. There’s no-one more optimistic and willing to believe than the young - which is a superpower but open to abuse by the manipulative, and Berb was a manipulator. A wolf among sheep, he tried his act out on them, developing the schtick that fame would inflate into evidence of his gnomic genius. He started doing the secret smile thing that conveyed to others the idea that he knew something they didn’t and never would. When questioned, he’d either be randomly vague or incredibly specific. And he’d lie constantly and compulsively about who he was, what he represented, where he’d been and where he was going.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It has nothing to do with whether you had a good childhood or a bad. Most people going away to university or away from home for the first time will try it to a greater or lesser degree: the act of foregrounding certain parts of your life you want to emphasise while downplaying or hiding others; the retelling of a story that paints you in a slightly better light. But what Berb was doing was something more akin to what people like Hitler and Mussolini did - the hoodwinking and entrancing of a community for his own ends via the complete rewriting of who he was.

Who Berb said he was was taken from others. The three chords of Buddy Holly became his musical metier. Woody Guthrie’s actual life became Berb’s. Guthrie had visited places, travelled long and lonely roads, learned hard lessons, hopped trains, fought with bulls, stood up against Fascism and generally roused and rumbled and roistered from sea to shining sea. Berb didn’t bother living Woody Guthrie’s life. That takes commitment and conviction. Far easier to just say he had and then let others agree with him.

Again, the desire for a different life, a life you imagine to be better than the one you have, is a powerful driver at any stage of life. It sends refugees across the seas in search of it. And acts of reinvention aren’t as dramatic as they sound. Life is a constant process of change and who we are at the start is often not who we are by the end. Furthermore, being born a King doesn’t mean you’ll die one; just as being born in a ditch doesn’t mean you have to stay in it. It’s just that in a musical form like Folk whose entire reason for existing rests on the authentic intent of the performer, of their representation of a lived experience, what we have here is larceny. It’s like early Hollywood pretending that their screen star is the product of a liason between a French nobleman and an Egyptian princess when really they’ve just plucked the latest desperate hopeful out of the flophouse on Santa Monica.

Maybe it’s an American thing - America is a land built on reinvention, the rewriting of histories, on second chances, and so on. Most of its national history is a lie so it makes sense that many of its individual histories are too. Joan Baez is generally held up as a beacon of American folk authenticity but Joan actually got her entire act and look from a girl she was at college with, justifying it to herself that the girl in question didn’t look like she was going to use it. Fame is not based on talent. It’s based on whether or not you will climb over the bodies of everyone else to get to its glittering prize. No-one becomes famous by accident. You have to want it. That girl didn’t, and Joan did.

So did Berb.

Berb took his act to New York. Berb wasn’t ‘discovered.’ Berb networked furiously, telling the same lies about his past as he had at university to scenemakers like Fred Neil and Izzy Young and Jac Holzman and Alan Lomax. Berb knocked on every door, and told them all what they wanted to hear. Berb sought and accepted patronage from people like Albert Grossman, who in turn made sure that tame journalists knew all about him and wrote all about him. Given that The New York Times had a daily readership of around 1.5 million at the time, Sheldon’s review put Dylan into the consciousness of more people than ten years of playing in coffee houses ever would have. Sheldon went to town on his angelic looks, passed his fake backstory off as true, and emphasised his specialness, importance and difference. JFK had just suggested that the torch was being passed from the World War Two generation to the post-war generation. Here, Sheldon implied, is your torchbearer.

What’s salutary about this is not the act of selling involved in any artistic transaction. We all know about this. It’s that we all know about it, but we all think we’re the only ones smart enough to see through the act. Everyone else is taken in by the ‘hype’ but us. We see through it. The people around Berb all knew that he wasn’t who he said he was. He hadn’t played with Gene Vincent and Bobby Vee. He hadn’t been born and raised in Gallup, New Mexico. A one-eyed bluesman called Wigglefoot hadn’t taught him how to play the guitar. And he’d never travelled and worked in the carnivals from thirteen through nineteen. He’d been at home, being coddled by his Mum and Dad, back in Hibbing. Berb was a bs artist, a scammer, a chancer. But they all listened straightfaced and then supported the lies.

It helped that the songs weren’t just good, but the right songs at the right time, which is more important than being good - even the ones he’d borrowed from others and rewritten to suit his personal psychodramas. And it helped that the perception of popular music was moving from performers like Elvis and Sinatra to writers - an important shift where the songs are reflective of the writer and the writer is reflective of the songs; that both are indivisble from each other.

But it was an all act, an act that Berb has continued to sustain throughout his life. There’s never been any big reveal. There’s never been any explanation, which adds to the mystique and intrigue and there’s never been any moment of I made it all up, folks. Because to do that is to finally give the meaning to the songs that people have been looking for ever since they landed: what does it all mean? Nothing. I made it all up.

The film The Usual Suspects says that the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was to convince people that he no longer existed. The greatest trick Bob Dylan ever pulled was to suggest that there was an intrinsic meaning behind the straight-faced peddling of an act. The reality was that the songs did take on a meaning for those who they spoke to, if for no other reason that the meaning of a text is supplied by the reader. Those songs did change the world because they changed the perception of the world for those whose perception of the world around them they changed.

But if you think that any of this will be in A Complete Unknown, you’re wrong. Because that doesn’t sell anything. It doesn’t sell the continuing mythology of Dylan. It doesn’t sell his back catalogue. And it doesn’t make those involved more money.

But Berb and The Biopics would be a great name for a post-punk New Wave band, wouldn’t it?

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The Origin(al) Stories Journal was launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind decision here. It has continued as a collection of posts drawn from my personal diaries, project journals, and process notes. Showing how I’ve found a path to doing something, often via experimentation, missteps, false trails and blind alleys, these posts do not offer definitive insights into any of the projects on The Landing Stage. They are just postcards from the ongoing journey.

Have a great day, be a positive force, and tell those you love that you love them.