The Story Behind 'A Complete Unknown'

When the notoriously private Bob Dylan recommends a book about himself, you should probably read it. 

In a December 2024 social media post before the release of biopic A Complete Unknown, the iconic musician wrote: “The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric—a book that came out in 2015. It’s 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.”

Suffolk University History Professor Bob Allison took heed. He admired popular music historian Wald’s meticulous research, and the way he blended different sources together to tell a compelling story, so much that he reached out to the writer. What followed was a collegial correspondence that led to Wald joining Allison’s Gateway to the Past class—and Advertising and Public Relations Professor Bob Rosenthal’s Media and Pop Culture students—for a lively discussion of American history and music. 

Wald described the process of researching and writing his book Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties—and what it’s been like seeing his text adapted into an Oscar-nominated screenplay and film.

One major challenge, Wald stressed, was the elusive nature of the main subject: “We know less about Dylan’s personal life than we know about the life of any other celebrity.

“If you find someone who is genuinely close to Dylan,” he added, “they won’t talk about him. That’s how you stay genuinely close to Dylan.”

So Wald dug into primary source materials, including interviews and recordings from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the scene of the film’s climax in which Dylan flouts folk convention by playing an electric set. The reality he found was much more complex than it’s often portrayed.

“Were people booing because he went electric? Were people booing because it was a really lousy set? Were people booing because he’d only done three songs, and they paid their money to hear Bob Dylan, and now he was leaving the stage after three songs? I mean, there are an awful lot of different answers, and that’s why I wrote a whole goddamn book.”

Still, when a student asked whether it bothered him that the filmmakers took creative liberties with events documented in his book, Wald was candid. 

“Would I be glad if it was a more boring movie? No. It’s a good thing that they have dramatized a lot of stuff in a way that works on the screen.”

Wald wove stories from his diverse career into the talk, including insights from writing a dozen books on music and culture, a longtime gig as a music writer for The Boston Globe, time spent as a musician himself, and his experience winning one of music’s most coveted honors, a Grammy Award (for his liner notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box: The Journey of Chris Strachwitz).

He urged students to look beyond the internet in their research, and to study primary sources directly, not just potentially biased prior analyses of those sources. “History is always written in the present and is constantly changing, because what is interesting to us now about the past is different from what was interesting to people 20 years ago.”

For the aspiring historians in the room, it was a master class in how to balance scholarly diligence with narrative judgment. 

“History is not what happened in the past,” explained Wald. “History is the process of taking the infinite amount of stuff that happened in the past, and making stories out of it.”