Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article "Dylan's Electric Kiss-Off" by Damien Cave et al. (©2004 by Rolling Stone LLC). Passage B is adapted from American Popular Music: The Rock Years by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman (©2006 by Oxford University Press).

Passage A by Damien Cave et al.

The most notorious live performance in rock & roll lasted about fifteen minutes: three songs played at assaultive volume by a plugged-in blues band fronted by the young poet-king of American folk music, at the sacred annual congress of acoustic purists, the Newport Folk Festival. In that quarter-hour, on the warm Sunday evening of July 25th, 1965, at Freebody Park in Newport, Rhode Island, Bob Dylan, 24—backed by the electric-Chicago charge of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—declared his independence from the orthodoxy of the folk scene and publicly unveiled his rock & roll heart.

Dylan paid for his daring. Some witnesses claimed that he left the stage in tears—shocked by the shouting and heckling from several members of the Newport audience—before going back out to do penance: two acoustic numbers. Butterfield guitarist Mike Bloomfield said Dylan "looked real shook up." But Al Kooper, who joined the Butterfield Band that fateful night as guest organist, insists that the catcalls are a myth: "It wasn't 'Boo, boo, boo.' It was 'More, more, more.'"

When Dylan walked onstage at Newport, dressed in black pants and a green shirt, it was the first time he had appeared in public with an electric guitar since his days with his Minnesota high school combo. A month before Newport, Dylan cut his first Top Five hit, "Like a Rolling Stone," in New York with a group that included Kooper and Bloomfield. Yet Dylan’s first performance that weekend, at a Newport workshop on Saturday, was a pair of older folk songs.

There is no apparent booing on the surviving soundboard tape of the show. There is yelling. It has been suggested that the audience was complaining about the sound mix. Folk icon Pete Seeger admitted he was so enraged by Dylan's set he wanted to "chop the microphone cord," but only because Dylan's voice was so distorted. (On the tape, Dylan is front, center and bitingly clear.) The crowd was mostly upset because Dylan, the top attraction at Newport, was on- and offstage in less time than it took some folkies to sing a ballad. He was so rattled when he returned alone to sing "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," that he had the wrong harmonica for the latter song. "Does anybody have an E harmonica—an E harmonica, anybody?" Dylan asked the crowd. "Just throw' em all up." He got one.

The folk scene never recovered, rock & roll was never the same, and Dylan knew he was responsible.

Passage B by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

Why was there such a shock wave produced by the concept of Bob Dylan as a rock 'n' roll star?

It probably had to do with the differing cultural roles assigned by most people to urban folk music on the one hand and to rock 'n' roll on the other. Urban folk in the early 1960s was an increasingly topical, political, socially conscious music. Even the singing of traditional folk songs often carried with it a subtext of political identification—with labor, with the poor, with minority groups and other peoples seen as oppressed, with a movement for international peace and understanding—depending on the nature and origins of the particular songs chosen. Thus the words were of paramount importance in urban folk music, and the acoustic guitar accompaniments enabled the words to be heard clearly. Besides, acoustic guitars were easily portable, readily accessible, and presented no elaborate barrier between performers and audiences. It was a relatively simple matter to bring an acoustic guitar along to a political meeting or demonstration, and to set it up and play it there when and if the occasion presented itself, which surely cannot be said of rock 'n' roll band equipment. And of course rock 'n' roll was identified as a "fun" music, a music to accompany dancing and other socializing, whose lyric content was by definition light, amusing, sometimes clever, often generic, but virtually never serious.

By the mid-1960s changes within rock 'n' roll were already in the wind, but Bob Dylan's electric style and other manifestations of folk rock had the effect of an enormous injection of growth hormones into the pop music scene. Suddenly, it was all right—expected, even—for rock 'n' roll to be as "adult" as its baby boomer audience was now becoming itself, and rock 'n' roll abruptly grew up into rock. Pop records on serious subjects, with political and poetical lyrics, sprang up everywhere; before long, this impulse carried over into the making of ambitious concept albums. The later 1960s flowered into a period of intense and remarkable innovation and creativity in pop music.