The Stories Behind Timothée Chalamet’s Surprising ‘SNL’ Bob Dylan Covers
When word came out that Timothée Chalamet was pulling double duty as both the host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, the obvious assumption was he’d perform a couple of familiar Bob Dylan songs that appear in A Complete Unknown and its soundtrack album. After all, this appearance was meant to both plug the movie and appeal to Academy Award voters deciding whether or not to give him a Best Actor trophy. But during the monologue at the top of the show, Chalamet offered a tantalizing tease of his plans. “You might not know the Bob Dylan songs I’m performing,” he said. “But they’re my personal favorites.”
At that point, it seemed more likely we’d hear deeper cuts from the movie, like “I Was Young When I Left Home” and “Song to Woody,” as opposed to more obvious picks like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” It turns out Chalamet was planning something significantly more daring: three super deep cuts that only truly hardcore Dylan fans would recognize. Two of them are so obscure that Dylan has never sung them live. (There’s a slight asterisk next to one of those, but we’ll explain that in a bit.) Here’s a breakdown of the three songs he played on SNL.
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“Outlaw Blues”
A Complete Unknown is largely the story of Dylan’s decision to abandon his folk roots and play electric music at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The public first saw him perform with a rock band that July at Newport, which is the climax of the movie. But his first electric studio session took place Jan. 14, 1965, during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions. He cut “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Outlaw Blues,” “She Belongs to Me,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” and “On The Road Again” that day with a group of studio pros.
Chalamet kicked off his SNL set by playing “Outlaw Blues” while dressed up like Zoo TV-era Bono. The lyrics are quintessential mid-Sixties Dylan (“Well, I might look like Robert Ford/But I feel just like Jesse James”), but this is one of the most obscure tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. It’s also one of the two songs from that album that Dylan never sang live, along with “On the Road Again.”
“Outlaw Blues” was occasionally played by the White Stripes, and when Jack White came out as a surprise guest at Dylan’s show in Nashville on Sept. 20, 2007, they did “Outlaw Blues” together. But White handled all the singing. The same thing happened the day before with “Meet Me in the Morning,” another song Dylan had never done before and hasn’t done since. These technically count as Dylan performances since he was onstage when they took place, but he didn’t sing a note of either of them. Oddly enough, Chalamet now has more experience singing “Outlaw Blues” to a live audience than Dylan does.
“Three Angels”
“Outlaw Blues” was a pretty big surprise, but it made sense since it was one of Dylan’s first electric songs, and it was recorded in the time period covered by the movie. But a little more than two minutes into the song, Chalamet ripped off the sunglasses and kicked into “Three Angels” with James Blake on the organ. This is the moment where hardcore Dylan fans all across the country went “What the fuck?” all at once. If given 100 guesses as to what song Chalamet was going to play on SNL, few would have picked this one.
That’s because “Three Angels” is so obscure that it makes “Outlaw Blues” feel like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The gospel-tinged, largely spoken-word song appeared on 1970’s New Morning, and describes a trio of angels observing a typical day in New York City. “One U-Haul trailer, a truck with no wheels,” Dylan observes. “The Tenth Avenue bus going west/The dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around/A man with a badge skips by.”
Dylan didn’t tour behind New Morning, but he did play a few of the songs in the years that followed, including “The Man in Me” and “If Not for You.” “Three Angels” isn’t one of them. There isn’t even some random one-off where Jack White did all the singing. This is, far and away, the most attention it’s ever received.
“Tomorrow is a Long Time”
As A Complete Unknown shows, Dylan’s tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie) inspired many of his early love songs. One of the most beautiful and tender is “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” which he wrote in 1962. He played it live at several of his early shows, most notably at New York’s Town Hall on April 12, 1963.
It never appeared on a proper album, but the Town Hall recording was included on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II in 1971. Five years before that, Elvis Presley cut a rendition of the song on the Spinout soundtrack. It’s also been covered by Rod Stewart, Judy Collins, Odetta, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, and Chrissie Hynde.
Dylan himself occasionally played “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on the Never Ending Tour, but he hasn’t touched it since his Nov. 21, 2008, concert at New York’s United Palace Theater. The sparse Chalamet rendition on SNL is faithful to the original.
Chalamet will appear at the Oscars on March 2, but the Academy has already announced that there won’t be any musical performances this year. That’s a bummer, since it could have been a platform for Chalamet to break out “See You Later Allen Ginsberg,” “Julius and Ethel,” “7 Deadly Sins,” or “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One.” Those may sound like ludicrous proposals, but how many of you saw “Three Angels” coming?
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