How Timothée Chalamet Learned to Channel Bob Dylan on Guitar

Larry Saltzman isn’t a guitar teacher by trade — he’s a high-end session pro who’s toured with Simon and Garfunkel, played in Saturday Night Live‘s house band, and backed up artists from Jewel to Darlene Love to Celine Dion. But for the past decade or so, he’s been moonlighting as a tutor to A-list actors, most recently bringing Timothée Chalamet from near-zero guitar proficiency to the point where he was able to play for real as Bob Dylan in his Oscar-nominated A Complete Unknown performance — and serve double duty as SNL‘s host and musical guest.  “Timothée never wanted to take the easy way out,” Saltzman says. “If there was a shortcut, he didn’t want to know about it.”

How did you start teaching guitar to actors?
My friend, [violinist] Sandy Park, had recommended me to be the guitar teacher for Meryl Streep for the [2015] film Ricki and the Flash. The phone call was like, “Hey, we heard you’re a teacher. Are you interested in teaching an actor?” I was like, “Well, I’m not a full-time teacher. I could probably turn you on to somebody good.” They said the actor might be more interested in hanging out with me than somebody who just has students coming and going all day. I was not desperate for the gig. I’m laying down all kinds of rules for them. Like, “I can’t probably do it at a given time every week. The actor would have to be flexible in terms of the schedule.” And they’re listening to this and they’re indulging me somehow. Then the fifth phone call was, “We’re going to tell you who it is now. Don’t tell anybody, because you tell the wrong person, they’ll tell somebody who has a camera. People will be waiting, paparazzi will find out. The actor wants to show up at your place every Monday morning at 11 for the indefinite future for the next few months.”

How did the Timothée Chalamet project come about?
It was the same kind of thing. They didn’t tell me who it was. With these non-disclosure agreements, they don’t want people blabbing about it. I’m not on Facebook, you know what I mean? I have none of that kind of stuff. After three or four or five phone calls, they finally said it’s Timothée Chalamet. I really didn’t know who Timothée was. They said it’s Bob Dylan music. For me, it was incredible because I have a sister who’s five years older than me, so literally when I was 10 years old and my sister was 15, those albums were coming into our house, like literally from the first Dylan album. I played guitar from when I was 11. So I was very much in tune with what they were.

What was your initial approach?
I had a script. I looked at the script, and I was a good citizen. I made a list of the 20-some-odd songs in the script. I spoke with [director] Jim Mangold, and I arranged them in a hierarchy of difficulty, starting with easy ones like “Masters of War,” which was just like two or three chords. His response was brilliant. He said, “Great, do that, but if Timothée wants to learn a song that’s not in the script, you should teach him that song too.” I was like, “Well, why would I want to teach something that doesn’t ever get played in the movie?” He said, “Because that might indicate he’s excited about that song and interested in that song, and that’s valuable too, even if it’s not in the movie.”

What were your first sessions like?
When he got to my place and we had our guitars in our hands, I asked if he’d played, and he said just a little. He kind of knew one or two chords and formed a couple of chords, and that’s what he did. I could tell he was just very musical right away. He went to LaGuardia [High School]. I don’t know what goes on there — I imagine they’re teaching them acting, they’re teaching them singing, and he was rapping, which is so rhythmic and so musical. I wouldn’t be surprised if he could read music. He certainly knows intuitively music theory. We did a lot of talk about music theory. It probably sounds deadly and boring, but I always did it in the context of, “How would Bob relate to this?” Even when we were talking in musical terms about the four chord, the five chord, I would say to him, which I believe to be true, when Bob talked to musicians, this is the lingo that he would say.

How did you document and organize the material?
My Dropbox file on this is ridiculous. My Timothée/Dylan Dropbox folder is intense. For each song, I would obviously have an MP3, and then I had this program called Transcribe where you could play it and you could slow it down. That was really helpful. You could zero in on whatever you needed to focus on. For each song, I had a Read Me document with different YouTube videos that I wanted to watch, and then I would have lyrics with chords, like a folk way to do it. I wrote things out with probably a few little words of encouragement here and there. Each song had its own thing.

How did you approach teaching Dylan’s guitar style?
The process is cumulative, meaning that Bob tends to have a lot of the same vocabulary. Once you’ve learned that bass-note walk down, Bob’s going to do that a million times. In terms of groove, that took him a minute, but in terms of the all-important groove of the right hand — that was very natural to him. I always say you can’t teach somebody that if they don’t have that. Unlike Paul Simon or James Taylor, who are very elegant guitar players with a lot of technique, Bob’s a lot more rough and ready. Bob’s arrangements were so freaking perfect for what he was doing. They’re creative and not generic. They’re never just E minor to D—there’s always a little bit of a hammer-on or interesting voicing. Dylan almost always played the F with his thumb. He never did barre chords [early on]. He always used his thumb a lot. When he played a D with an F sharp in the bass, he played like that.

“Masters of War” was the first song we worked on. I basically gave him all the chord shapes, and then I gave him the lyrics with the chord changes over the lyrics, which is such a folk way to do it. We talked a lot about history and about how these things were taught to people in the fifties and sixties.

You had to tackle “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which is a notoriously tricky finger-picking part.  
It blew my mind to revisit it. And it’s a really fast tempo. I was intimidated by teaching it to him. I was intimidated from playing it myself. He wasn’t intimidated by it. He just did it. It has a little funny hammer in it that comes around every once in a while. Sometimes Bob would maybe vary the pattern. But in the middle of me explaining it to him, he’s already playing. I mean, it wasn’t playing like at tempo and perfectly, but he’s already like going. For the fingerpicking ones — there weren’t many fingerpicking ones. “Girl from the North Country” was a fingerpicking one. But I showed him the different patterns that have names like “outside in” and “inside out.” People have named them. I showed him that stuff, and wow, he took to it right away. We did songs like “I Was Young When I Left Home” that weren’t in the script, and he got into them. 

How about the electric stuff?
When we looked at songs like “Maggie’s Farm,” I had it all worked out. I was not messing around. I’d note things like, “Bringing It All Back Home version, capo 3, key of E, Newport version, key of D, no capo.” For “Maggie’s Farm” and the other Newport songs, Bob kind of had his little vocabulary about the electric, which wasn’t adapted much from his acoustic playing.

You thought you only had a few months to work on this with Timothée, but instead you had five years, in part because of the pandemic. 
We started really around Thanksgiving 2019, and filming was going to be like April. He’s coming over fairly frequently — a couple of times a week, or maybe I wouldn’t see him for two weeks and then he’d come over. The news is coming around of this pandemic. Oh, now there’s one case. Oh, now there’s ten cases. By the time the shutdown happened around March 13th, we got news that filming is postponed. We were going to reschedule it for four months later. Should be fine. We get to the next couple of months and it’s like, “Oops, pandemic’s not getting any better.” 

Then when it would get better, “Oh well, Tim’s got to do Dune.” Then it almost became a thing of like, will it ever get made? But Tim always said, “I have faith this is gonna get made.” We switched to Zoom largely. When he was up in Woodstock during the pandemic with his friend, they really wanted me to come up to Woodstock. It was like, “Larry, come up to Woodstock, we’ll hang and play guitar for like four days.” But it was the height of the pandemic when you didn’t even want to get in a taxi.

Did you do any work with the harmonica?
He started by himself, and then they hired a colleague of mine, Rob Paparozzi, who’s one of New York’s great harmonica players. Towards the end, me and Rob spent some great time with Tim. We did like one incredible five-hour session with me and Rob Paparozzi and Tim, and we had so much fun. Tim was so enthusiastic about showing us stuff. Me and Rob, we’re pretty experienced guys, we’ve been around a little bit, and I would say to Rob after, “Isn’t that extraordinary that he owned it on that level?”

How involved were you with the actual filming?
In my humble opinion, the reason why I wasn’t on the set is that Timothée is the kind of person who, when he showed up on the set, he had it together. He didn’t need like, “Oh my God, can you bring in Larry? I forget which is the D minor.” He’s not operating on that level.

It feels like you and Timothée and everyone involved felt a certain weight of responsibility with these tasks.
A friend of mine said to me, “For people who are younger, who don’t know so much about Dylan, they’re gonna go see this movie, and this is gonna be their Dylan.” People don’t have time and effort to really listen to everything that Dylan ever recorded. That’s why I took it very seriously. I understood the responsibility. People like you and me who are music fans, we understand the responsibility. I didn’t take a single shortcut. I really didn’t.

From Rolling Stone US.