How unreleased recordings, vintage microphones, and period-correct Gibson guitars helped A Complete Unknown star Timothée Chalamet and Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter recreate Bob Dylan’s towering early music for the silver screen
Bob Dylan remains both pop’s greatest songwriter and its greatest enigma. In theaters from December 25th, Timothée Chalamet stars and sings as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s three-time Golden Globe-nominated movie, A Complete Unknown, the electrifying true story behind Dylan’s meteoric rise. New generations of music fans and Dylanologists alike will have the opportunity to experience his journey from the cafes of Greenwich Village to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, from where his groundbreaking and controversial performance reverberated worldwide.
Dylan’s artistic evolution was fast-moving, but Gibson acoustic guitars were a constant feature. A variety of Gibsons were used during the filming and recording sessions for A Complete Unknown, with the production team—helmed on the audio side by Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter—striving for pinpoint historical accuracy when it came to instruments, sonics, and signal chains. Ahead of the movie’s release, we caught up with Baxter to find out more.
After graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston with a degree in Music Production & Engineering, Nick Baxter headed to Los Angeles and honed his craft on Grammy®-winning Latin pop records, but it was the chance to work with film composers and orchestras that really blew his mind. “It was captivating, and pulled me into the film world,” Nick says. “There’s nothing quite like sitting in front of an orchestra.”
With an impressive résumé including Music Mixer and Score Recordist roles on the multiple Academy Award-winning movie La La Land and Music Producer on The Color Purple, CODA, and Maestro, Baxter found a niche that allowed him to bridge the gap between different, and often siloed, parts of the filmmaking process. He is a powerful advocate for recording music on set, so audiences see and hear a recording of a real live performance rather than a mime or overdub. Capturing those performances, however, takes great skill and is often far from straightforward.
“Paradoxically, the hardest scenes [to record] are the most intimate scenes,” Baxter reveals. “The easier ones are actually just stage performances. You’ve got the microphones up and there are a lot of ways to navigate that setting. And probably the second-easiest is a song and dance number where there are no musicians or a music-from-the-sky fantasy sequence. You can actually get some great vocals doing that; they have technology where they can put everyone in earwigs and you can get a pretty clean vocal recording.
“But harder than both of those is recording someone with a guitar, in a room by themselves. You’d think that would be easy, but you really have to be comfortable with the instrument and with the scene to get anything usable in that environment. It’s incredibly exposed. And there’s really no hiding a guitar; you can’t mime it, you have to play it. It makes noise, you can’t mute it. A piano you can mute, which we do all the time on film sets; you can bang away on it and still get a really nice vocal recording. You can’t do that with a guitar! A ukulele you can mute and even a banjo I’ve actually found ways to mute. But the guitar? You’ve got to string it up and you’ve got to play it.”
Image: Nick Baxter, Executive Music Producer on A Complete Unknown
We wonder if costume and makeup make capturing great musical performances more challenging or if it actually makes it easier for actors to inhabit a character and rise to the occasion musically.
“Sometimes it can get in the way, but sometimes it’s empowering,” says Nick. “A lot of times when someone gets on set and they are in the scene, things fall into place. I think we found that on this movie, for sure. When you’re in the world of the scene with a Woody Guthrie, a Pete Seeger, a Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash… when those characters start to come to life, and they can interact and bounce off each other, amazing things happen that are tough to recreate in the studio.”
Nevertheless, when recreating iconic recordings and performances by music icons beloved by millions, there’s an inevitable sense of responsibility. “It’s a huge weight,” Baxter admits. “But we started with a clear directive from Jim [Mangold], which was really helpful. I went through the whole script with him and a lot of the emphasis early on, especially with the Dylan stuff, was on the rawness. Dylan’s guitar playing is so unique; it’s sort of messy and violent but also incredibly technically advanced, too. He’s a great player. When you hear some of these early recordings, you can tell he’d been playing guitar all the time, for many years. The technique is there, the playing is there, but there’s a rawness to it. If you don’t capture that, it sounds wrong immediately.
“I was listening to a lot of music with Jim and with Timmy [Chalamet] to try to pick apart some of the magic in these recordings. On the Dylan side, we were given a whole library of unreleased stuff from Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, which was incredible. Hours and hours; I think it was almost 16 hours of recordings of him in hotel rooms, apartments, and studios—little tape machines that he turned on one day. I think Timmy listened through pretty much all of it, which is an incredible undertaking.
“We found alternate versions of all these iconic songs—‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Girl from the North Country,’ ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’—some of the first recordings. It was so cool to have access to all that stuff and to see the progression of the songwriting. I think you realize pretty quickly that he never plays the song the same way twice and we wanted to draw from it. The iconic version that everyone is used to hearing on those records was really just one moment in time for him. They pushed record one day, he stepped in front of the mic and played it that way, but there’s no way he’s ever going to play it that way again. It’s sort of daunting but also freeing; we don’t have to be super-dogmatic or rigid about what we’re doing with the songs. We wanted to capture the essence and the spirit of it, but not get too bogged down in the minutiae, which Jim was clear about right away, too. So that was liberating.”
Lightning in a bottle
With more than 50 onscreen music performances during the course of the movie, Timothée Chalamet and the other cast members had an enormous amount of material to learn, but it was important to channel the creative energy of Dylan’s most terrifyingly prolific period and not be too well-rehearsed.
“I don’t know how they did it, especially Timmy,” Baxter remarks. “It’s an incredible amount of lyrics to wrangle. He has a ridiculous memory, first of all, and was just a student of the character and of the music. But at the same time, in these early writing scenes, it’s almost better if it’s raw in your mind because you can pull in different lyrics and rearrange things—it feels like he’s creating in the moment. You actually don’t want to over-rehearse for some of these scenes. For example, there’s a ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ duet in the movie between Bob and Joan Baez [played by Monica Barbaro], which is one of the many unique duets that we put together that there’s no real analog for. What if these two people were in a room together, and they played this song? What would have happened? We didn’t really want to rehearse it with the two of them together too much, if at all. When we finally did it on set, there was that first-time rawness to it.”
Perhaps the most enjoyable assignment for Nick Baxter during the filming of A Complete Unknown—and also the most hands-on—was recreating the sound of Bob Dylan gone electric; the “Thin, wild mercury sound,” as Dylan himself described the elusive music in his mind, at its most vivid in the legendary grooves of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
“The movie is predominantly acoustic music, but it’s sort of bubbling towards this electric climax, so we do have a good amount of band-driven music as well,” Baxter reveals. “We were able to get the original four-track multitrack of most of the band songs in the film, including all the Dylan songs. To hear those four-tracks isolated was incredible and revealing—they sound amazing. You realize a lot of fidelity was lost in the mixdown process.
“We were able to really get crazy and try to match all these sounds as religiously as we possibly could, which was just a really good time. We had incredible players in the room, lots of different options for drums and guitars and amps. We were in great studios—The Village and Sunset Sound—and there are good records for those sessions, too. Jeff Rosen again was able to hook us up with the Columbia Records notes from the day. A lot of times there’s microphone lists, so we could put up all the same microphones and recreate the signal chains. We really did try, whenever there was information, to get it as close as possible. Some of the piano sounds were incredibly unique; that sort of honky-tonk, detuned, super-bright and aggressive piano sound on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ that I’m sure everyone is familiar with. To recreate that was fun, just to get the piano the right amount out of tune and find the right instrument for it.”
Image: Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, with one of two Gibson J-50 models made for A Complete Unknown
It’s something that is rarely heard in the quantized perfection of modern pop, but on those mid-1960s recordings, you can hear occasions when members of the band fumble chord changes—or arrive at the chord change slightly late because they are watching Dylan feel his way through a new song in real-time. Again, replicating this spontaneity was key.
“It’s the ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ vibe you get from everyone on the track,” says Baxter. “They are sort of floating, and they are in it together trying to find the song. You really can hear that, and we really did try our best to recreate it. A lot of times the problem was like, ‘You guys are just playing too good! You know the song too well! Forget the song! We’ve got to try to chase each other and vibe this out and make it feel fresh.’ Which is a challenge, it’s hard to do. Especially for studio musicians that have refined their craft to such an extent that they really can play perfectly at a minute’s notice.”
Old-school sonics
In addition to working with Timothée Chalamet to replicate Bob Dylan’s raw approach to playing the guitar and persuading first-call LA session musicians to color outside of the lines, from a production standpoint, there were times when Nick Baxter had to find ways to persuade beautiful guitars and microphones to sound less hi-fi and pristine, and more in keeping with the original Dylan masters.
“A lot of the time it was about how we get the guitar to sound almost worse, in a way,” Baxter laughs. “For most of the songs, you need old, dead strings for sure, or else it does not sound right. And a lot of times on these recordings there’s just a sort of dead quality to the guitar. It’s not super-resonant. That’s not to say it’s not good; there’s a really cool feeling to a guitar when it’s dead in that way. You can attack it differently. It sort of emotes differently. But recreating that was a challenge.
“In the studio, we had to experiment with all kinds of different strings and different recording techniques. We used vintage mics, but the mics sounded too good! Small-diaphragm condensers, beautiful Neumann tube mics, KM series mics. If you put them in front of a guitar, it sounds incredible—it could be on a pop song today—but that’s not the sound! They sound too clean and you have to find chains of things to put them through to give it more character and deaden the sound.
“We were very grateful to Gibson for giving us a whole bevy of guitars! There were two custom J-50s built for the movie to match Dylan’s original guitar, which I believe was a 1946 model. We got them three or four months before we shot and we would just hammer away on them, send them to the shop to get set up, then hammer on them some more. Those guitars were great, and they got even better over time. We had those two guitars on set and used them for a lot of the recordings.
“We really did try to follow the progression of his guitars; we wanted to honor that. A little less than halfway through the film we switch to a Nick Lucas Special, which Gibson provided as well. It’s a very, very different guitar to the J-50. It’s a much smaller body, almost parlor-style. They couldn’t be more different, so it’s really interesting to hear that transition in the film. The J-50 is tougher to play, it’s a bigger-bodied guitar, it requires more finger pressure and it really needs to be played hard. The Nick Lucas is a little bit more buttery and easier to play, so switching over to that was interesting for Timmy.
Image: Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, complete with Gibson SJ-200
“I was also sent a bunch of J-45s to experiment with; they were super-useful for different things. I had one set up in a different tuning because there were a lot of open tunings that Dylan used. Sometimes I would leave one in Open G, or I would set one up really muted, with a piece of tape on the bridge, just to have as an option. Or one of them would have really old, aged strings on it, so whenever we were experimenting, we could try different colors. The last Gibson guitar we had was an SJ-200, which we used on a lot of the Johnny Cash stuff. Johnny [Boyd Holbrook] gives Bob his guitar at the end of the movie for a final song, and that’s another performance that’s Timmy live on set, really singing and really playing that guitar.”
It’s fitting that this portrayal of one of pop history’s most singular and complex figures was produced in such an uncompromising fashion, with great care taken to stay true to the trailblazing spirit of original Dylan recordings and performances. For Nick Baxter, it was the bravery of James Mangold’s approach that brought out the best in the talented cast and the stellar team around him.
“Jim was really fearless in the way he approached this film,” Nick affirms. “He empowered us to take risks, empowered Timmy to take risks, and the whole cast to really go for it. Every day on set, the conversation was like, ‘Alright, here’s the correct way to do it, the safe way to do it. And here’s the riskier way to shoot this scene.’ He was always, ‘Let’s go for it! We’ll figure it out later!’ To have a voice like that, which empowered us and was fearless in the filmmaking, I think is a lot of what makes this movie different. And I think that’s a big part of what makes this film so unique and memorable.”
Shop a specially curated selection of Gibson instruments inspired by guitars from A Complete Unknown, in theaters from December 25th in North America and January 17th in the UK & Republic of Ireland.
