On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in black jeans, black boots, and a black leather jacket, carrying a Fender Stratocaster in place of his familiar acoustic guitar.The crowd shifted restlessly as he tested his tuning and was joined by a quintet of backing musicians. Then the band crashed into a raw Chicago boogie and, straining to be heard over the loudest music ever to hit Newport, he snarled his opening line: "I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!"
What happened next is obscured by a maelstrom of conflicting impressions: The New York Times reported that Dylan "was roundly booed by folk-song purists, who considered this innovation the worst sort of heresy." In some stories Pete Seeger, the gentle giant of the folk scene, tried to cut the sound cables with an axe. Some people were dancing, some were crying, many were dismayed and angry, many were cheering, many were overwhelmed by the ferocious shock of the music or astounded by the negative reactions.
As if challenging the doubters, Dylan roared into "Like a Rolling Stone", his new radio hit, each chorus confronting them with the question: "How does it feel?" The audience roared back its mixed feelings, and after only three songs he left the stage. The crowd was screaming louder than ever—some with anger at Dylan’s betrayal, thousands more because they had come to see their idol and he had barely performed. Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, tried to quiet them, but it was impossible. Finally, Dylan reappeared with a borrowed acoustic guitar and bid Newport a stark farewell: "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue".
That is the legend of Dylan at Newport, and much of it is true. Seeger did not have an axe, but that story became so widespread that eventually even he found a way to fit it into his remembrances, saying he shouted, "If I had an axe, I’d chop the mike cable." Some people certainly booed, many applauded, and later fans have pored over film clips of the concert trying to sort out the crowd’s reactions—a fruitless exercise, since most clips have been doctored to fit the legend, splicing the anguished shouts after Dylan left the stage into other parts of his performance to create the illusion that the mythic confrontation was captured on tape.
Why did that matter? Why does what one musician played on one evening continue to resonate half a century later? One answer is that Dylan was the iconic voice of a decade famed for rebellion and Newport was the epochal break of the young rocker with the old society that would not accept him. He was already recognized as a mercurial genius, the ultimate outsider, compared to Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, Jack Kerouac in On the Road, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, the alienated Meursault in Albert Camus’s Stranger—and most frequently of all to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He was the decade’s existential hero, ramblin’ out of the west, wandering the midnight streets of Greenwich Village, jotting angular words at scarred tables in crowded cafés, roaring down the road on his motorcycle, sauntering onto the stage, or striding off, ready or not.
Dylan at Newport is remembered as a pioneering artist defying the rules and damn the consequences. Supporters of new musical trends ever since—punk, rap, hip-hop, electronica—have compared their critics to the dull folkies who didn’t understand the times were a-changing, and a complex choice by a complex artist in a complex time became a parable: the prophet of the new era going his own way despite the jeering rejection of his old fans. He challenged the establishment: "Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" He defined his own transformation: "I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now." He drew a line between himself and those who tried to claim him: "I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants me to be just like them." And he warned those wary of following new paths: "He not busy being born is busy dying."
In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past. But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power, abandoning idealism and hope and selling out to the star machine. In this version the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture, rehearsals for Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it.
Pat though it may be to divide history into neat decimal segments, the 1960s were a period of dramatic upheaval, and 1965 marked a significant divide. The optimism of the early decade had been shaken by the murders of William Moore; of Medgar Evers; of four young girls in Birmingham; of John F. Kennedy; of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney; of Viola Liuzzo and dozens more; and again in February with the killing of Malcolm X. Three weeks after the Newport festival, Watts exploded in rioting, and the communal swell of "We Shall Overcome" was broken by shouts of "Black power!" It was still three years before the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and many people continued to believe in the dream of integration, equality, and universal brotherhood. But the weekend Dylan walked onstage with his Stratocaster, President Johnson announced he was doubling the military draft and committing the United States to victory in Vietnam….
In 1965 Dylan was only 24 years old, but he had already gone through a lot of changes and been criticized and attacked for each of them. His first performances as a teenage rock'n'roller were met with laughter and jeers. When he turned to folk music, the high school girlfriend who had shared his early passions was troubled, asking why he’d given up "the hard blues stuff." When he turned from singing traditional folk songs to writing his own material, old supporters accused him of becoming "melodramatic and maudlin"—one, stumbling across a typescript
of "The Times They Are a-Changin", demanded, "What is this shit?" When he turned from sharp topical lyrics to introspective poetic explorations, followers who had hailed him as the voice of a generation lamented that he was abandoning his true path and "wasting our precious time." When he added an electric band, he was booed around the world by anguished devotees, one famously shouting "Judas!"
With every change and attack Dylan’s audience grew, and his new fans always felt superior to the old fans who hadn’t really understood him, and each new wave hailed him as a defiant outsider. His electric apostasy at Newport was the most dramatic declaration of independence, a symbol for a rebellious decade and a generation that did not want to succeed on their parents’ and teachers’ terms or succumb to the establishment, the system, the machine. If the booing at Newport has often been exaggerated, that is because it was essential to the legend, proof that no matter how high Dylan’s records climbed on the pop charts, he was neither selling out nor buying in, but bravely going his own way.
This is an excerpt from Elijah Wald's new book, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, which is available now. Reprint courtesy of Harper Collins. Elijah Wald's "Jelly Rolls & Candy Lickers: A Brief History of Cunnilingus in Black Pop Music" appears in the latest issue of The Pitchfork Review, which is on newstands now.