Gibson has revealed a stunning collection of acoustic guitars themed after A Complete Unknown, the forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet.
In the process, the company detailed its partnership with the film's production team, particularly its Executive Music Producer, Nick Baxter.
Having built a number of guitars specifically for the film, and the recording sessions for its soundtrack, Gibson worked with Baxter and Chalamet on getting the iconic singer/songwriter's distinct guitar tone – which shifted around even in the few years the movie covers – exactly right.
In a newly-published interview with Gibson, Baxter recounted the exhaustive process of mirroring Dylan's early/mid-'60s sound.
“I was listening to a lot of music with Jim [Mangold, the film's director] and Timmy to try to pick apart some of the magic in these recordings,” Baxter said.
“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.”
As is the case with just about every aspect of his musical approach over the last 60 years, Dylan's early guitar playing was always subject to sudden and unexpected changes. As Baxter tells it, that fluidity actually made capturing his guitar sound a bit easier.
“I think you realize pretty quickly that he never plays the song the same way twice and we wanted to draw from it,” he explained. “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.”
As for the guitars themselves, the collection features nine instruments, each of which were used in the making of the film.
They include: a small-body L-00 Original, a trio of SJ-200s – a standard, a Custom Shop '57, and an ornate Johnny Cash signature – a pair of J-45s (a '50s Faded model and a '60s Original example); a J-35 '30s Faded guitar, a Hummingbird Original, and a Southern Jumbo Original.
Ironically, one of Baxter's tougher tasks was getting these pristine instruments to sound... worse.
“A lot of the time it was about how we get the guitar to sound almost worse, in a way,” he told Gibson. “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.”
Last month, Chalamet opened up about the process of learning Dylan's guitar style, telling Zane Lowe, “It’s a lot of downstrokes, and his strumming pattern in the early ’60s was very different [from his later career].”
The Gibson guitars used in A Complete Unknown will be put on display at the Gibson Garage Nashville starting next week, December 19, through January.
For more about the collection, visit Gibson.
