Book review: Dylan Goes Electric! - when folk revival died
One act of artistic rebellion signalled the dawn of rock. John Harris looks back at what really happened on July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport folk festival
What happened to the musical revolution? From the 1950s to the '90s, popular music was prone to watershed moments. The process was not neatly linear; change was usually dramatic and often retrospectively pinned to a particular moment: The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964; David Bowie announcing the belated start of the '70s when he performed Starman on Top of the Pops in July 1972; even as late as the summer of 2001, the arrival of the high-conceptual blues-rock duo The White Stripes in London, as they stylishly set about killing the grindingly awful genre known as "nu-metal".
The 21st century is very different. When anybody can log in to Spotify and put Quicksilver Messenger Service next to The Clash next to Beastie Boys next to Pharrell Williams, how can one retain any feeling of forward motion? When YouTube means we now consume music's visual aspects in isolation rather than as part of a simultaneous audience of millions, can a single musical event or occasion ever take on huge historical meaning?
On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan - then 24 - appeared at the Newport folk festival in Rhode Island, backed by the multi-instrumentalist Al Kooper, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, from Chicago. He played only three songs with the group, before returning solo on stage to play two more on a borrowed acoustic guitar. In response to the electric section, some in the audience cheered, while others booed - though they may have been protesting against Dylan's short set or the shortcomings of the sound as much as from a feeling of betrayal.
A strong conviction that Dylan was doing something unforgivable was in the air: the folklorist Alan Lomax later said that Dylan and his "very bad, very loud, electronic r-r band" had "more or less killed the festival". Whatever the reality, the accepted account of what had happened was soon established: Dylan and his band facing a wall of boos and catcalls, and carrying on regardless. Some versions had it that the veteran folk musician and activist Pete Seeger reacted to Dylan's set by trying to cut through cables with an axe.
At 50 years’ distance, you still marvel at how the briefest of shows could have been freighted with such meaning
No matter that Dylan had recently released half an album's worth of "electric" music on Bringing it all Back Home, nor that a fully powered band had backed him on a 1962 single titled Mixed-Up Confusion: Newport became the moment he "went electric", and scandalised the earnest devotees of the American folk revival so greatly that many never recovered. In not much longer than 10 minutes, as Elijah Wald puts it, Dylan triggered "the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation".
But Wald has a habit of exploring the complications and tensions that underlie received stories: witness Escaping the Delta, his fascinating exploration of the legend of Robert Johnson. Dylan Goes Electric! both explains the huge array of subplots that fed into the Newport moment and undermines any idea that the story is clear-cut. It is a great work of scholarship, brimming with insight - among the best music books I have ever read.
Its spine is the contrast between Dylan and Seeger, the Newport festival's de facto king, who had begun blazing a trail for the folk revival and its inbuilt radical politics in the early 1940s. Seeger and his followers, Wald writes, "believed they were working for the good of humanity … but they were intensely aware of the forces marshalled against them: the capitalist system and the moneyed interests that upheld it". Seeger - "a difficult man to know and sometimes a hard man to like" - endured years of anti-communist blacklisting, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was acquitted a year later, but it all heightened the quasi-religious sense that folk music was the preserve of saints.
Obviously, things were more complicated than that. From the late '50s, the folk revival regularly gave rise to tensions and splits. It was partly built on the idea of glorying in the work of rural, genuinely "folk" musicians who could be taken from their shotgun shacks and introduced to a mass audience. But it also gave prominence to acts who seemed happy to smother the music in sentimentality and kitsch - most notably, The Kingston Trio, the California band whose huge-selling version of the standard Tom Dooley (1958) made folk big business. By the early '60s, it was all going the way of The X Factor, as Wald recounts: "Mercury Records staged a nine-day spring break hootenanny at Daytona Beach in April 1963 that drew more than 36 collegiate folk-singing groups to compete for a recording contract."
In 1962, Dylan had seemed to answer the call for a more authentic sound - even if, as the son of an electrical goods salesman from Minnesota, he was arguably anything but. Again, it was complicated. Long before he plugged in a Fender Stratocaster, Dylan had already ended up on the wrong side of folk devotees' prejudices: in response to his first album, some traditionalists deemed him "forced, pretentious and inept", and again when The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan announced a shift away from traditional material and his arrival as a songwriter.
When he moved into rock, the mother of all backlashes was inevitable. Wald points out that among the songs on the US charts when Dylan began to think about going electric were Chuck Berry's Nadine and Tommy Tucker's Hi-Heel Sneakers: play these two superlative records next to, say, Dylan's From a Buick 6 (1965), and you get a real flavour of what he had in mind. Lyrically, he had already begun the shift from unadorned, often topical songs into a more impressionistic, hallucinatory style; musically, he aimed at something much more nimble than the folk revival's lumbering piety.
He had performed at Newport in 1963 and '64, and by the time of his third appearance, the sense that he was trying to escape the left-leaning milieu was overwhelming. So much of his songwriting from this time is about the need to challenge the "protesty" (his word) stereotype - from acoustic pieces such as It Ain't Me Babe and My Back Pages to electric songs such as Ballad of a Thin Man and Like a Rolling Stone, the celebration of abandonment and solitude with which he repeatedly taunted the outraged elements of his audience.
Something had to give. But at 50 years' distance, you still marvel at how the briefest of shows could have been freighted with such meaning. Whatever actually happened, Wald observes, Newport symbolically heralded the death "of a left rooted in the progressive dreams of the New Deal and vice-president Henry Wallace's Century of the Common Man".
It seems that Seeger probably did not try to cut through cables with an axe, but he did recount what had happened with the crestfallen conclusion: "I thought he had so much promise." Others, by contrast, knew what time it was. In the folk magazine Sing Out!, the critic Paul Nelson compared the two musicians and announced his decision to leave one behind. "Rose-coloured glasses or a magnifying glass?" he wrote. "A nice guy who has subjugated his art through his continued insistence on a world that never was and never can be, or an angry, passionate poet who demands his art to be all?" He said of Newport: "It was a sad parting of the ways for many, myself included." But then came the slam-dunk resolution: "I choose Dylan. I choose art."
Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald (Dey Street Books)
The Guardian