“A Complete Unknown” leaves out an important part of 1960s history

Ttowards the end A complete unknownIn the new film about Bob Dylan’s early career, Pete Seeger and young Dylan have a quiet but tense encounter. Anticipating Dylan going “electric” at the 1965 Newport Festival, Seeger offers Dylan an extended metaphor about people working together for social justice, each bringing a spoonful of sand to offset the power of injustice. Dylan, Seeger says, brought a shovel with him with his powerful folk songs like “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Dylan rejects Seeger’s sermon, takes the stage and beats up the old folk establishment with his electric Stratocaster.

According to the film, the Seeger-Dylan conflict reflects the broader conflict between a musical tradition born out of the Old Left that combined folk music and social justice, and the emergence of a new musical sound that is more experimental and far less political. and more attuned to the angry feelings of young Americans. It was, as the book on which the film is based says, “the night that broke the sixties.”

Not quite. Besides rock ‘n’ roll, there were many other things that derailed the 1960s: black power, second wave feminism, drugs, and perhaps most significantly, the war in Vietnam, which also divided the world of folk music. While popular memory of the 1960s assumes that folk fans and performers marched hand in hand with the anti-war protesters of the 1960s, in reality this was disrupted by the political climate of the time, as well as the increased commercialization of the folk music alliance.

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I have a historical interest in these events and also a personal connection. My father, Irwin Silber, was a co-founder Sing loudly! magazine in 1951 along with his close colleague Pete Seeger. Late 1950s Sing loudly! had become the go-to source for countless folk folk – like the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary; newer artists like Tom Paxton; and the “star” of the folk movement, Joan Baez. Has long been committed to left-wing causes, Sing loudly! was also linked to struggles for racial justice and international peace. My father wrote an angry review of Dylan in November 1964, chiding him for turning away from “protest” songs as he clung more to the “paraphernalia of fame.”

But what concerned him most in the summer of 1965 was not Dylan, but Vietnam. In 1964, after receiving congressional support to promote U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, the LBJ had dramatically increased the U.S. troop presence in Vietnam from 23,000 to 184,000 and began an intensive bombing campaign against North Vietnam in February.

Silber sensed the urgency of these events and wrote to Pete Seeger ten days before Newport to discuss plans for a major concert against increasing military escalation in Vietnam. Silber hoped to feature multiple genres of music, including the Paul Butterfield band, several members of which would be part of Dylan’s electrified backup band in Newport. At least in the eyes of this “traditional” folk, there was no meaningful separation between acoustics and electrics. Rather, it was about mobilizing music, no matter in what form, to protest against the war. In this way, Silber, like Seeger, looked back on a tradition of connecting music with political causes, be it the “Hootenannies” who protested the “Red Scare” in the 1950s or the songs of the Black Freedom movement . The music in these cases was generally defined as “folk music,” although it often included blues as well as singers performing updated versions of popular standards.

The concert, which took place in the fall of Newport on September 24, 1965 at Carnegie Hall and was eventually called “A Sing-In For Peace,” was held before a sold-out crowd of over 5,000. Supporters included Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, music critic Nat Hentoff, and over 60 musicians, some of whom leaned more toward “rock” than “folk.” At the end of the evening event, hundreds of participants marched downtown to Greenwich Village to press their demands for military de-escalation. Silber praised the way the artists helped and supported one another, with each artist contributing to a larger “pattern that would most effectively address their government in a moment of urgency.”

This was an overly optimistic view of silver; The Vietnam issue had already divided people in the folk scene. Peter, Paul and Mary, committed artists for black freedom, were conspicuously absent from the event. Concert planners heard that the folk trio feared that their civil rights work would be less “effective” if they took a stand on Vietnam. Former supporters of the “Sing-In”, including Dylan and Odetta, were also left out in the end. What is remarkable is that they were led by Albert Grossman – an extremely unsympathetic personality in A complete unknown– who probably believed that anti-war protests were bad for business. By 1965, civil rights work had received public recognition, even from the White House. The opposition to the war in Vietnam clearly had not done so.

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Not only did some artists and their managers object to a connection between folk music and anti-war messages, but also many readers of Sing loudly! Some were outraged when they found foreign policy topics in its pages. While the memory of Soviet actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in the minds of the population, many viewed the U.S. war in Vietnam solely as a fight against Soviet-style communism. These readers had cheered Sing loudly!China’s position on racial justice, but Vietnam signaled a break.

It traces Bob Dylan’s career in the early 1960s, culminating in his electrifying performance in Newport. A complete unknown hints at the political chaos of the time, mostly with glimpses of the assassination of JFK or the March on Washington in 1963. The film has even less to say about Vietnam, making it difficult to fully understand the substance behind the tensions of that moment to understand.

In the summer of 1965, Vietnam was, for some, a topic to avoid: it was a messy political issue that also potentially had a negative impact on business. But for many others, the summer of 1965 was a moment of reckoning: it was not about choosing acoustics or electrics, but about responding to a brutal and unjustified escalation by the US military abroad.

Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University. She is currently writing a book about her family and the folk revival of the mid-20th century.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.