I forgot. That biopic about Dylan is out and it undoubtedly has the story about how Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and all hell broke loose because Dylan had violated some sacred trust. Something like that. Tyler Cowen has an interview with Joe Boyd, who was production manager that night. He says, “not so.” Tyler quotes Boyd as saying:
It was Top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all-acoustic music and very pure, traditional, or idealistic. Everybody — Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience — sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big-time something moving into this delicate little world.
I was totally on Dylan’s side. Paul Rothchild and I were like, “Yes.” But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger’s point, absolutely. I would contest — of course, I would, wouldn’t I — contest that the sound was awful. It was just very loud. Nobody had ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothchild pushed up the faders, but it had to be because it was the first moment of rock.
Nobody ever used the word “rock” before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn’t rock. This was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard. Mike Bloomfield — this was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. You didn’t have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. So, with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield’s guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar.
That escalation of volume is what shaped or defined the future of rock. It became really loud music. That was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. There was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren’t used to it, but it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But that night it wasn’t, and I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan.
That’s consistent with what one of my graduate school teachers, Bruce Jackson, said. He was there. He was one of the directors of the festival and was in the wings that night. He says (from the trusty WayBack Machine):
The July 25, 1965, audience, the story goes, was driven to rage because their acoustic guitar troubadour had betrayed them by going electric and plugging in. The booing was so loud that, after the first three electric songs, Dylan dismissed the band and finished the set with his acoustic guitar.
There’s a host of other associated narratives about goings-on in the wings: Pete Seeger and other Newport board directors were so repulsed and enraged they struggled to kill the electric power; Pete was frenetically looking for an axe to chop the major power line; people were yelling, screaming, crying, beating breasts, rending garments. Griel Marcus tells some of those stories really well at the beginning of his 1998 Dylan book, Invisible Republic.
Great stories. But not one of them is true.
Bruce then goes on to transcribe a bit of what was on the tape of that performance starting with the point where Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, introduces Dylan. After that Bruce observes:
First, you can hear a lot of individual things yelled by the audience and the general responses of the audience.
Second, all the booing you can hear from the stage is in response to things Peter Yarrow said, not to things Bob Dylan did.
Third, it was Peter Yarrow who first started drawing attention to what guitar Dylan was using. He twice said that he was coming back with an acoustic guitar, and he stressed it each time. I remember wondering at the time why Peter was making such a big deal of what instrument Dylan was going to use.
I’ve heard people say that Dylan himself gave proof of how upset he was at the boos when he came back to do those encores with that acoustic guitar rather than two more electric songs with the Butterfield group. Nonsense: Dylan and the blues band did three songs together because that was all the songs they’d prepared to perform together. They hadn’t prepared more because they’d been told beforehand by us Newport board members that three songs was all they’d be allowed to do.
I know that at some subsequent performances Dylan’s electric guitar was indeed booed by people in the audience. But I’ve never known if those boos were from people who were really outraged and affronted at the electric power or people who read some of the first renderings of the Legend of Newport ‘65 and thought that was the way they were supposed to behave to be cool. After all, by the end of that summer everybody knew Dylan had gone electric, so why go to a concert if you knew beforehand that you were going to be unhappy and your ears were going to hurt? Maybe to have a good time, screaming and yelling, the way kids do.
After listening to the original recording, I can’t help but wonder if that whole short period of public rage at Bob Dylan’s electric guitar wasn’t just one more passing fad manufactured out of some warped stories that came out of a performance that just who was really there—at the time, if not in the reconstructions of memory—thought was pretty damned fine.
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