example: Neil Young's
After the Gold Rush,
Sullivan Street, NYC

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Reference section:
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PopSpots in the media.

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To read Bob Egan's twenty-page illustrated children's book: Shakespeare and the Million Monkeys online - click here. To see the 30 minute video reading of SHAKESPEARE AND THE MILLION MONKEYS on YouTube, click here. PopSpots is a website about those places where interesting events in the history of Pop Culture took place; primarily album cover shots, places where movies and tv shows were filmed, and sites on which paintings were based. Many are from Manhattan, where I live. Manhattan is constantly being torn down and rebuilt anew, and I'm trying to find these places while they are still around. Thanks for visiting. POPSPOTS MASTHEAD Bob Egan / Creator, researcher, web producer Marie Fotini / Chief European Correspondent, researcher

  BOB DYLAN - A COMPLETE UNKNOWN - The Trailer - Annotated

The official movie trailer on YouTube, followed by individual frames brightened along with possible sources for the images.

TItle

1)

This looks pretty much like Dylan is walking north along MacDougal Street, along the west side of Washington Square Park. It's not the real location, but close.

1b)

This is what the west side of Washington Square Park looks like in real life. Pretty close.

2)

This is Ed Norton as Pete Seeger supposdly at Gerde's Follk City. In the following Gerde's picture below notice the similar droopy string of album covers along the ceiling that are on the left in this pcture.

Notice the red checkered tablecloths that were in the original location, too.

2b)

This is Gerdes Folk City from the 60's in Life magazine. The small stage, big enough for about three people is at left. I think that is Gil Turner playing.

3)

This is McAnn's Bar. There were several around the city, mostly in midtown, not in the Village, so I would say this would be near Times Square.

3a)

Here's a real McAnn's Bar, from 693 Third Ave between 43rd and 44th.

4)

Dylan is in front of the actual Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. The neon sign below is the bar/restaurant there called El Quijote.

The trailer is not chronologial. Dylan came to New York in 1961. He lived in the Chelsea around 1965 and 1966.

4a)

Here is the Chelsea Hotel and El Quijote restaurant today.

I don't know why they made the top right out of focus.

5)

Dylan is on MacDougal Street approaching the Cafe Wha? from the uptown (north) side.

The Cafe Wha? awning looks pretty accurate. The street is actually thinner and one way downtown.

5a)

This shot is of the awning back in the 60's taken from the uptown side.

6)

Dylan is singing in a venue that looks similar to Town Hall in New York which he played in April of 1963.

6a)

This is a picture of Dylan singing at Town Hall.

6b)

This is what Town Hall looks like.

7)

Timothee Chalamet looks pretty much like Dylan and holds his head in a way Bob does. Even sounds like him as he sings with intensity.

7a)

Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963. (Bob Scherman photo)

8)

Dylan walks up to the front door of the Cafe Wha? from Minetta Lane.

The Cafe Wha? is the first club in New York City that Dylan supposedly played at when he arrived in early 1961. Legend has it there was lots of snow on the ground which I don't see here.

This scene was filmed in New Jersey so the street signs are a little different than those in Manhattan at that time which were blue and white. There was no phone booth on Minetta. But the 6-story tenements across the street look like those on MacDougal Street.

8a)

Dylan walks a little further toward MacDougal. The cars look like late 1950's. The street goes the wrong way but no big deal. Hey, it's the movies!

There are three stores across the street: The Bagel (a tiny restaurant), a red newsstand with a white sign, and a store with a white sign that reads "Village Artists" and sells posters. The Bagel was actually two blocks away, and the other two were up the block on the same side of the street as the Cafe Wha? but the signage and typeface on all three of them, as we will see, are pretty much on target.

9a)

ThIs is a picture of The Bagel, a small 15-seat burger joint that was was actually across from Dylan's apartment at 161 West 4th Street. (photo via Al Ponte)

The awning color and logo are the same as in the film.)

9b)

Here's a blow-up of the Bagel from the film.

Also notice the red newsstand on the right with the white sign.

9c)

This shows the red newstand and next to it the "Village Artists" store that sells posters, as re-created by the film crew across from the front entrance to the Cafe Wha? They are almost a perfect match of the real ones as seen below (althought in reverse position on the street).

9d)

This is a shot of the actual newstand and the poster store taken in the sixties. They were both located at 119 Macdougal, just a few doors up from the real Cafe Wha?

9e)

Before we leave this scene, here's another shot of the Cafe Wha? as portrayed in the film.

Notice the sign on the right that reads "The Cafe Wha? The Village's Swingingest Cafe."

9f)

Here's the sign they copied from the 1960's.

9g)

Here's what the club looked like in the early 1960's

9h)

Here's a picture of the film set in New Jersey.

I would image it was way cheaper and easier to film here rather than try to cut traffic off on MacDougal film to shoot.

There's a blue awning in the back that reads "Elsie's Music Box." There was a club with that name on its awning, not on Macdougal, but around the corner at 121 West 3rd Street.

10)

Dylan became smitten by a young woman named Suze Rotolo who he met at an all day hootenany at Riverside Church in uptown Manhattan at West 122nd Street and Riverside Drive. This church looks very similar. (Suze was the woman with Dylan on the cover of Freewheelin')

10a)

Here's the interior of the real Riverside Church.

11)

In this scene it looks like Dylan has become pretty famous and people outside Gerde's Folk City want his autograph as he enters. It was filmed in New Jersey.

The real Gerde's was in kind of a scruffy area in a non-residential district of the Village, but the sign is pretty accurate. The sign looks more like the side door sign, but that is probably where the musicians entered from.

11a)

This was the side entrance to Gerdes which was at the located at 11 West 4th Street at Mercer Street.

11b)

This was the front entrance to Gerdes.

12)

In this scene "Dylan" is looking at "Joan Baez" (the frame before, not pictured) which will bring a wedge into his relationship with Suze.

13)

In this scene Dylan has become famous and fans are crowding around what seems to be the apartment house or hotel he is leaving from.

Early in his career, Dylan had stayed at the Hotel Earle off Washingon Square park. That hotel had steps like these but no doorman as it was inexpensive. But he wasn't famous then.

This could be portraying the Chelsea Hotel but the entrance and building facde does not look like this.

16)

Here Dylan seems to be driving upstate to stay at his manager's house in Bearsville, New York, right next to the town of Woodstock. (The festival was 60 miles away in Bethel.)

It could be an allusion to the motorcycle accident that he later had that would force him to cancel grueling concert tours, take life easy for a while, and enjoy the country and his family.

16a)

The film might have been trying to repture this well-known Dylan picture.

17)

This is a pretty accurate portrayal of the stage and striped fabric walls at the annual Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. He played there in 1963, 1964, and 1965. In 1965 he famously "went electric" by playing with an electric guitar and a backing band to the disapproval of many purist folk fans.

This could be that concert (which actually had a much larger audience (17,000) - at a place called Festival Field) or this could the '63 or '64 concerts (at Freebody Park) where his fame as a writer and singer were growing.

17a)

This was the set-up for the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That may be Dave Van Ronk playing. Dylan played on this stage at night.

17b)

This was the set-up for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival at which Dylan "went electric."

The festival had grown so large that the festival committee moved it to a large sloping field about 3 miles west of the original site, Freebody Park, which had been near the Newport Casino in "downtown" Newport.

18)

This is Ed Norton as Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi owned a small log cabin in upstate New York in a town called Beacon.

18)

This reminds me of the series of photos that fellow musician John Cohen took of Dylan at Cohen's farm also in upstate New York. Several were used in the interior of the Self-Portrait album.

21a)

This is a shot from the movie, most likely of one of the concerts Dylan gave with Joan Baez.

It show the familiar Dylan "halo" - his hair in silhouette, as in the Greatest Hits album.

22a)

It's very reminiscent of this Daniel Kramer shot of Dylan and Joan Baez playing in New Haven in 1965.

23)

The end of the trailer has Dylan writing "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" at Pete Seeger's house upstate in Beacon. Dylan wrote the song in the summer of 1962.

24)

This seems to show Pete Seeger's wife Toshi and his three kids.

26)

Dylan listens as one of the Seegers signifies her approval of the song so far.

26)

I've never seen photos of Dylan at Pete Seeger's house. But Dylan used to stay with a family called the Alpers in Schenectady, New York, and there are pictures of Dylan taken at their house that are reminiscent of the ones with the Seegers. Here's one of Dylan with Suze Rotolo. (photo by Joe Alper)

25a)

Dylan with one of the Alper children. (photo by Joe Alper)