A Complete Unknown

On March 25, Bob Dylan delivered his first performance of the year in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour enters its fourth year running. At 83 years old, there was no guarantee Dylan would keep performing live. At the start of the year, there were no new dates listed on his website. Then, in early January, one performance popped up. The show was to be held at the Tulsa Theater – an important location for the performer, as the city is home to the Bob Dylan Center, located in the downtown art district. Tulsa also has a reputation as a musical destination through which almost every legendary folk, rock, country and blues artist has toured. Dylan is no exception.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has opened worldwide to largely positive reviews. Negative ones have focused on the silly quibble that fiction is not fact: the story told in the movie of Dylan’s rise to fame, from his January 1961 arrival in New York City as an unknown, folk-obsessed teenager from the Minnesota Iron Range, to his electrified electrifying performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, does not strictly hew to actual biography. Recently the New York Times made the unfathomable decision to take A.J. Weberman, best known for going through the Dylans’ garbage when they lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s (and getting thumped by Dylan for stalking), to see A Complete Unknown.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had watched the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. That interview, yes — the one with all the sweating and the pizza in Woking, in which he definitely didn’t meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre but he did single-handedly crash his reputation, and Emily Maitlis, like the Medusa of journalism she has since become, just let him tie his own noose. Of course I’ve watched it. I’m a journalist. And a twenty-first-century citizen. Who hasn’t? My friend, for one, though she pointed out that she can just watch the three-part Amazon dramatization of the whole affair, A Very Royal Scandal, which is even juicier than the interview. (“I’m the son of the sovereign,” bellows the Duke of York, played by a soapy Michael Sheen.