#ThrowbackThursday: Bob Dylan went electric at Newport Folk Fest 50 years ago
One of the greatest live music moments in American history is five decades old this weekend.
Bob Dylan plays a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar for the first time on stage as he performs at the Newport Folk Festival with guitarist Mike Bloomfield on July 25, 1965.
We know Bob Dylan played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
We know he played three songs, plugged in and accompanied by a backing band with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: “Maggie’s Farm,’’ “Like a Rolling Stone,’’ which had only been released eight days before, and “Phantom Engineer,’’ an early version of what would be released as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry’’ later that summer.
We know he left the stage after that, only to reappear and play two concluding solo numbers on his acoustic guitar.
As for the rest, it all really depends who you ask. Many recount Dylan’s electric set being met with boos, but the source of those jeers is still up for debate.
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“The Dylan experience at Newport 37 years ago is now a study in the vagaries of memory,’’ Sam Allis wrote for The Boston Globe in 2002, just before Dylan’s return to the festival. “There exists no official version of what happened. There can’t be. Everyone who was there, and a bunch who weren’t, is convinced with moral certainty that his or her version is the authoritative one.’’
Much like Woodstock a few years later, many more would say they were there than actually were, and various stories have twisted the whole experience into a glorious confusion of tall tales and truths.
“Some 15,000 people saw Dylan’s set,’’ David Hajdu wrote in Positively 4th Street, a book about Dylan, “and everyone who touched a different part of that elephant came away with his or her own mental picture of the beast.’’
The most common story is that the traditional folk purists of the ’65 Newport crowd were so disgusted by Dylan’s decision to go electric that many booed to show their displeasure.
“Music of the folk variety being conveyed in an acoustic fashion, in a very personal fashion, without the use of electronic instruments was very important, so the response to him was a feeling, I think, of betrayal or abandonment of that point of view by Bob,’’ Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, said in a radio report from WRNI’s Av Harris. Yarrow had introduced Dylan’s set in 1965 and was backstage during his performance.
A distant view of Dylan on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
It is a widespread belief that one of the people who was furious about this change in direction was Pete Seeger, a good friend of Dylan’s and a fellow folk singer. But Seeger himself denies this, saying that his ire was fueled by the poor work of the soundboard operators.
“When Bob Dylan switched to an electric guitar at Newport in 1965, I was not upset with him — I was furious at the sound system,’’ Seeger wrote in Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, his 1993 memoir. “I wanted to cut the cable. Bob was singing ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ one of his best songs, but you couldn’t understand a word, because of the distortion.’’
And many say that the unfavorable response from some in the crowd was simply due to the brevity of the set itself. Dylan’s organist Al Kooper says that the band was only able to squeeze in one full rehearsal the night before, which yielded a three-song set.
“Most people performed 45 minutes to an hour,’’ Kooper told the Globe in 2002. “We played about 15 minutes and we were the headliners. The bulk of the audience was not horrified by it. They loved Bob Dylan and were also capable of going to a Rolling Stones concert. But three songs — you’d be [angry], too.’’
Fearing for a riot, festival organizer George Wein and others had to cajole Dylan out for two more songs to help ease the crowd’s frustration.
Hajdu believes that the choice to go electric was something that should not have taken the audience by surprise. His thoughts point to an even greater change in Dylan’s songwriting that threw a curveball at the excited crowd.
“Something happened a year earlier than this when Bob changed the content of his music,’’ Hajdu tells WRNI. “Before he picked up an electric guitar, he was no longer writing protest music, he was writing personal music and poetic music.’’
Funny enough, the show is now viewed as one of the most influential in the history of modern music. Dylan has remained tight-lipped about the performance, with many accounts saying the the show visibly flustered him.
Bob Dylan plays a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar for the first time on stage as he performs at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965
“What I gather to be true is that, like everything, it depends on whose perspective,’’ said Jay Sweet, who has produced the Newport Folk Festival since 2010. “All history is going to have its own interpretation. I think if you take small kernels of truth from every story you hear, you’ll get closest to the actual truth.’’
It was a turning point for live music. He was no longer the political Woody Guthrie protege that the folk community shielded as their own. He opened up the genre, his career, and the festival into a whole new realm of interpretation.
“I think no matter which angle you take, the one thing that everyone can agree upon is that that moment, and I mean the pun intentionally, was electrifying,’’ said Sweet. “It’s so rare that there’s one direct moment in time, where you knew music was going to be different going forward.’’
It’s no surprise, then, that 50 years after this performance, Newport will honor it at this year’s festival. Sunday night will close with a revue billed as “‘65 Revisited.’’
“You have to be willing to take chances to move forward,’’ said Sweet. “I think we’re going to celebrate by doing just that — allowing a bunch of newer artists to reinterpret that legend in their own way.’’
While the lineup and details for this performance will remain a secret until it takes the stage, it will undoubtedly include Dylan’s music, and will tip its cap to the man who transformed the stage forevermore.
2015 Boston Calling fall lineup:
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