Bob Dylan Paper

Macheath requested some time ago that I post my paper after it was done, and I'm finally getting around to that. Sorry about the appearance, but I'm far too lazy to format it properly.

During the 1960s, folk music was at the height of its second wave of popularity. Festivals such at the Newport Folk Festival, a weekend long concert featuring many folk and blues musicians held annually in Newport, Rhode Island, were popular with music fans across the United States. The festivals represented unity, and devotion to a cause. The Newport Festival, specifically, was nonprofit, and had a social mission. It was a place for artists to play topical songs for or about minorities and the working class, and it was a link between the civil rights movement in the southern United States and the folk community of the urban northern United States.


Politically, the United States was going through many things during this time period. Folk artists had suffered under McCarthyism, and, to many of the artists, the Newport Folk Festival represented a return to the values they felt had been lost during that era of paranoia and fear. At the same time, however, the early idealism and unity of the civil rights movement was faltering, and division and pessimism were taking over the movement. Domestic oppression grew, and the war in Vietnam intensified. Because the causes people had been so unified for were becoming more controversial, opinions and elements of culture became less inclusive and the social cohesion of the music world began disintegrating. Countercultures were visible in the popular British rock of the time, and in the beginnings of folk-rock from bands like The Byrds, who had released a folk-rock version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was becoming clear the rebellion would sell, and it was worthy to pursue as a theme. Folk musicians were particularly weary of big business, however, and they did everything possible to keep their music scene separate from commerce.


Folk music’s separation from business became an issue at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, on July 25, when one of the youngest and most popular folk musicians of the time, Bob Dylan, played his set with electric accompaniment. The older folk musicians, as well as the festival organizers, all saw folk music as simply a man with his guitar or harmonica, and to see a respected and idolized musician take the stage with a band was heart-breaking. As one spectator noted, “It … was as if all of a sudden you saw Martin Luther King, Jr., doing a cigarette ad.” Bob Dylan going electric became one of the most written about moments of rock and roll history. Rumors say that his audience, disgusted at the noise they were hearing, began booing Dylan, forcing him off stage. Reports about what happened vary widely even amongst the people in attendance at the Newport Folk Festival that year.


Furthermore, Dylan was ostracized for his abandonment of the folk music that had fostered him and made him famous. He angered some mentors and fans, and was even blamed for single-handedly causing the decline in the popularity of folk music after the 1965 concert. While it is true that folk music dropped in popularity as rock and roll became increasingly accepted, it is wrong to say that Dylan caused this trend. Dylan was simply expanding his musical repertoire, transitioning from a musical style that no longer worked for him, and it should not have come as a shock to anyone.


Dylan had been playing music with occasional electric accompaniment since 1962, and his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, which had been available for five months before the festival, was acoustic on one side of the record and electric on the other. In fact, the single that had been released from that album, “Maggie’s Farm,” was an electric song. Still, people were amazed to see Bob Dylan take the stage holding an electric guitar, and wearing a bright orange shirt, black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, and pointy boots. Abandoning his usual comfortable work shirt and jeans look for something more cutting edge, fans and other artists believed Dylan was also abandoning his familiar style of music for something too loud, obnoxious, and youthful for their tastes.


There are various reports as to what actually took place at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Apparently, there had been tension between Bob Dylan’s manager, Alan Grossman, and one of the festival organizers, Alan Lomax, since the beginning of the festival. Lomax did not want the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, an electric blues band from Chicago, at the Newport Festival. When called upon to introduce the band at a workshop on blues music during the festival, Lomax gave an extremely disdainful introduction:
Today you’ve been hearing music by the great blues players, guys who go out and find themselves an old cigar box, put a stick on it, attach some string, sit under a tree and play great blues for themselves. Now you’re going to hear a group of young boys from Chicago with electric instruments. Let’s see if they can play this hardware at all.


Grossman confronted Lomax about the condescending introduction, and the two men began physically fighting. Lomax approached the festival’s board of directors about banning Grossman, but because the man managed Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Buffy St. Marie, the board decided they could not afford to dismiss him from the Newport Festival. The festival committee realized that Dylan was “bigger than the festival itself,” and losing him would be disastrous.


Dylan’s desire to play an electric set only furthered the feelings of tension that already existed at the folk festival. He recruited members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to back him up, as well as a few other people. His band consisted of Michael Bloomfield, Jerome Arnold, Sam Lay, Al Kooper, and Barry Goldberg. They only practiced together once, the night before their performance. Dylan played three songs backed by the band: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and an early version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” at the time titled “Phantom Engineer.”


Bootleg recordings of the concert show that Dylan was well received as he walked onstage. He performed well, although the rhythm section left much to be desired. Still, some of the audience began booing Dylan, and he ended his set after 16 minutes, after playing only three songs. There is no agreement about how much of the audience booed, or even if they were really booing, but important Newport Folk Festival figureheads made it clear that they were not at all pleased with Bob Dylan’s musical set. Pete Seeger, who devoted a copious amount of time and energy to mentoring Dylan during the musician’s early years, when he was just starting out, said, “You couldn’t understand a goddamn word of what they were singing,” and he picked up an axe, threatening to cut the wire cables.


Seeger believed that concerts should be like sing-alongs, and involve the audience. Dylan’s set simply did not allow this because the audience members would not be able to hear each other sing. In fact, Pete Seeger was so offended by Dylan playing an electric set at a folk festival, which he saw as a cataclysmic event, that he resigned from his position on the Newport Folk Festival Board of Directors, he resigned as director of the Woody Guthrie Children’s Trust Fund, and he suspended his column in Sing Out!, a music magazine. He believed the songs backed by an electric band to be “some of the most destructive music this side of hell.”


Other important people of the Newport Folk Festival were offended as well. As musician Theodore Bikel put it, “You don’t whistle in church – you don’t play rock and roll at a folk festival.” Alan Lomax was also furious. He yelled, screaming that amplified instruments don’t belong in a folk festival. He even threatened to run to the stage himself to make the music stop; however, he was not in close enough proximity to the stage for the threat to be taken seriously.


Although the festival organizers and many of the older folk musicians were concerned about the amplified noise of Dylan’s set, they were not just worried about the electric instruments. In their minds, electric instruments and rock and roll represented consumer-driven music that they wanted no part of. Alan Lomax believed that for a musician, nothing was more important than the relationship with the audience, and that, once commerce and large corporations were involved, their relationship, based on mutual trust, would be ruined. Furthermore, the festival organizers thought that the crowds’ bond with one another would be broken if the Newport Folk Festival was invaded by market forces. Oscar Brand, a musician from the first folk revival, went as far as to say, “The electric guitar represented capitalism.”


Clearly, the market for folk-rock was larger than the market for solo, acoustic folk, but Bob Dylan was not trying to capitalize on that fact. He left his comfortable niche in the world of folk music for the more money-driven world of rock, and he certainly did not sell out. He did not conform to popular taste – his new sound was far more challenging, provocative, and rebellious than most rock and roll heard on the radio at the time. His just-released single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” was over six minutes long, twice as long as a standard single. Dylan wanted to play loud music for the “visceral thrill.” He wanted his art to be “an intense experience for all concerned, a discharge of hectic energy, a musical whole that was more than a lyric set to tune.” Rock and roll was a new area to explore and create in for Dylan, not a commercial interest.


Playing with an electric band was not a sudden impulse for Bob Dylan. He had been interested in playing rock and roll since his early teenage years. Supposedly, at age fourteen, after hearing “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley, he shouted, “Hey that’s our music! That’s written for us!” and he listed “To join the band of Little Richard” as his ambition in one of his high school yearbooks. In addition, Dylan started feeling as though his topical songs were forcing him into a position as the political voice and conscience of his generation. His politicized image limited him artistically. Although his music obviously held political messages, he had not intended to be placed in the position as the lone representative of his generation, and he had no intentions of staying in that position, once it was forced upon him. By 1964, Dylan had begun experimenting with drugs and associating with New York hipsters and Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg. Experiences and associates such as these encouraged Dylan to have a more free-associative and imagistic use of language than the style used in his political and topical songs.


Dylan probably thought that the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival, where he had been so well received two years earlier, would be receptive to his change. Though an electric band now backed him, he was the same man with the same musical vision as he was before – he was just working in a different format now. Dylan was later quoted as saying, “I did this crazy thing. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed. I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.” Depending on the source of information, members of the audience were either cheering because they appreciated the new style of performance, or booing in order to express disappointment at the length of the set and the poor sound system, or to let Dylan know how much they despised the music he had just played. The stories from the Newport Folk Festival do not correlate with one another, or with recordings of the event, at all. There are no boos or other expressions of unhappiness on the bootleg tapes, but people in attendance claim that the crowd was very displeased.


Some people believe that the only reason for the audiences’ disapproval was the length of Bob Dylan’s set. He was a headliner for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and he only played three songs, for a total of sixteen minutes, before walking offstage. Most other acts had played for 45 minutes to an hour, but Dylan, the reason many people came to the festival in the first place, played only a fraction of that time. Al Kooper, a member of Dylan’s band that night, said, “Some had traveled thousands of miles and paid a lot for tickets. What did they get? Three songs […] They didn’t give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.” He added, “earlier in the festival, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had played electric, and the crowd didn’t seem too incensed.” While it may be true that the audience welcomed other electric acts warmly, Dylan was a little different. He was popular and respected, and the audience thought they knew what to expect of him. When he came onstage looking completely different than they had expected, carrying a different instrument than they had expected, it is possible that they would not have been as warm to him as they had been to previous electric acts during the festival.


According to other people, the bad reception was expressing displeasure at the inadequacy of the sound system. The system buried the voice of Bob Dylan, and some protesters were simply yelling, trying to get the technician to fix that issue. Others around them began booing also, though, and the scene “mushroomed into what was generally taken as antielectric purism.” Certainly poor sound mix can be blamed partially, but the sheer volume of the set was also an issue. As one critic wrote, “For the kids who were ready for it these songs were great blues-based rock and roll with the added dimension of Dylan’s lyrics and powerful vocal presence; for the uninitiated, it was not just electric instruments on a ‘folk’ stage but probably the loudest, most piercing, most cacophonous noise they ever endured in the name of entertainment.”


Of course there are also reports from those who appreciated Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival that year. Joe Boyd, the festival’s production manager, called the performance “powerfully, ballsy-mixed, expertly done rock ‘n’ roll, and when that first note of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ hit it was the loudest thing anyone had ever heard.” Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, was amazed when he heard the crowd expressing unhappiness with Bob Dylan’s performance:
Suddenly we heard booing, like pockets of wartime flak. The audience had split into two separate and opposing camps. It grew into an awesome barrage of catcalls and hisses. It was very strange, because I couldn’t believe that those people weren’t hearing the wonderful stuff I was hearing.


Paul Rothchild, a producer for Elektra Records, was doing the sound mixing. He said, “From my perspective, it seemed like everybody on my left wanted Dylan to get off the stage, everybody on my right wanted him to turn it up.” Joe Boyd agreed, saying, “I think it was evenly divided between approbation and condemnation from the crowd.”


Bob Dylan heard jeers from the crowd, however, and left the stage. There are various claims of how he reacted to the crowd booing him. Most agree that he left the stage hurt and angry, and visibly shaken, but reports of what took place backstage differ. Al Kooper claimed to be standing right next to Dylan, and said that Dylan felt good about having played electric. On the other hand, Jonathan Taplin, one of Dylan’s roadies, claims that he saw Dylan crying. In any case, he was consoled and persuaded to return to the stage. He was handed an acoustic guitar, and he walked onto stage, cheered on by the crowd, and played two more songs solo, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Dylan’s total time onstage, acoustic and electric, totaled just over 23 minutes.


Bob Dylan returned to the recording studio immediately after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. He recorded most of Highway 61 Revisited, which embraced electric music. He also wrote and recorded “Positively 4th Street,” which is seen as Dylan’s ‘good riddance’ to the folk scene, with the lyrics “You got a lot of nerve / To say you are my friend / When I was down / You just stood there grinning / You got a lot of nerve / To say you got a helping hand to lend / You just want to be on / The side that’s winning.” Though the song never mentions 4th Street, except for the reference in the title, 4th Street in the Village was full of folk and protest-era associates of Dylan’s. He released a total of three electric albums between March 1965 and May 1966.


As soon as rumors that Dylan was booed for going electric got out into the public, music historians, journalists, and fans who felt threatened by his new style of music latched onto the information. Many people truly believed that rock and roll equaled commercialism and sellout to the establishment. Bob Dylan’s next concert was Forest Hills on August 28, 1965. The audience booed and criticized Dylan for playing an electric set, but he continued touring. In the spring of 1966, Dylan went on a tour of Europe. The tour was structured similarly to his performance at the Newport Folk Festival the previous summer, but instead of playing electric first, and acoustic second, the order was reversed. He “created a concert structure in which these two very different approaches to music could be experienced side by side for him, this is a wholeness, not an either / or. It was his way of telling the truth about music, about his experience of music.”


The 1966 tour of Europe was brutal, and Dylan did not play publicly for two years after it. At one concert, at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, the audience began slowly clapping their hands in unison, in an attempt to disrupt Dylan’s harmonica introduction to a song. Dylan, obviously trying not to be distracted, begins mumbling softly, and the audience quiets down just in time to hear him say, “if you only just wouldn’t clap so hard.” The banter between Dylan and the audience continues until, right before the final song of the evening, an audience member screams “Judas!” at Dylan. This moment, though often mistakenly thought to have taken place at Royal Albert Hall, is monumental. The crowd applauds, and Dylan replies “I don’t belieeeeeve you,” plays the first chord of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and yells, “You’re a liar!” Then, turning to his band, he tells them to “play fuckin’ loud.” Interactions like that were not uncommon, and roadies and band members recall the audiences booing and throwing things as soon as they walked onstage. He was booed everywhere, at every show, for two years.


Although many musicians and fans were not happy about Bob Dylan playing electric, the effects of it were almost immediate in the music scene. Even at the time, the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 was recognized as an important event. It was the point when “Dylan went his way, and folk purists went theirs.” The festival marked the end of the second folk revival, a reason why many accuse Dylan of putting folk music “on a life-support machine.” Many folk artists followed Dylan’s lead, playing with an electric band backing them up. Joan Baez’s next album had a bass and an electric guitar; Tom Rush released an album that was one side acoustic and one side electric; and even Pete Seeger, who had so adamantly and violently opposed Dylan’s electric set at Newport released an electric album in 1968. Folk music was truly never the same again – the folk festival was an unprecedented end of one era and beginning of another. By the late 1960s, the folk music movement had ended and rock and roll had triumphed.


Bob Dylan has expressed some remorse over the situation, however. He came to regret the movement he started, and said of rock, in 1985:
It’s now a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing. You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so… in the beginning it wasn’t anything like that. You were eligible to get busted for playing it… It’s all been neutralized, nothing threatening, nothing magical… Everything is just too commercial.
Twenty years after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan acknowledged that the consumerism Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger were scared of actually came true. They thought that if big business were introduced into the music scene, the relationship between musician and audience would deteriorate, and Dylan admitted that that had happened. So while the older folk musicians at the 1965 Newport Festival were right to be weary of big business, they did not have to be scared about the new style of music Dylan played.


Bob Dylan released over thirty albums after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and all of them have some folk influence. The folk music that was so popular through the first half of the twentieth century is still evident in popular music of today. Anyone who has been influenced by Dylan has been influenced by folk music. Although the folk artists of the older generation, in 1965, were worried that folk music would completely disappear from the music scene and rock and roll would take its place, quite the opposite is true. Elements of folk music have become so mainstream, that they have completely integrated into popular music.


The significance of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is that it was a social change blinded by orthodoxy. Bob Dylan hoped to introduce an original and challenging idea to the festival, but was stopped by the closed-mindedness of fans and festival organizers. Had they been more willing to experience something new, they would have realized, as many did, that they were listening to something great. Folk music was all about change and making a difference, but the folk fans were not willing to accept that there were ways to make differences beyond what they knew, and were familiar with. When Bob Dylan sang topical songs with an electric guitar and a back up band, rather than a harmonica, few people could look past the instruments to see that the man playing the music, and the message of his music, and had not changed.




References
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. 2000. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. 1991. New York: William Morrow.
Marqusee, Mark. Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art. 2003. New York: The
New Press.
“Newport ’65: Dylan Goes Electric.” Black, Johnny. Q. Collector’s Edition, Nov.1 2002.
Riley, Tim. Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. 1992. New York: Da Capo Press.
Williams, Paul. Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan, Volume One, 1960 – 1973. 1990. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Underwood-Miller.