Loose in the Temple Precints

The day before Dylan’s performance, there had been a backstage incident that foreshadowed the clash to come. Alan Lomax had given a grudging introduction to a session by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose electrified instruments he was known to disapprove of.

As he came offstage, he was confronted by an enraged Albert Grossman, who was hoping to manage the Butterfield band. The two men were soon grappling in the dirt. As a result, the festival board voted to ban Grossman from the event, but had second thoughts when it realized that kicking out Grossman might mean losing his clients, including Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.

The Lomax–Grossman undercard bout carried much of the same symbolic import as the headline clash — Dylan versus (a section of) the Newport audience. Lomax was regarded by many as the incarnation of the festival’s values and historic roots.

His work as an archivist, musical anthropologist, and proselytizer had made the folk revival possible. His field recordings and anthologies were foundation stones of Dylan’s art and sensibility. Years later, Dylan paid tribute to him as “one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music” — folk music in all its varieties.

But in 1965, it was Grossman, not Lomax, who was in Dylan’s corner. The smugly imperturbable entrepreneur was already widely resented at Newport, where many viewed him as a money changer at loose in the temple precincts. This year, his boy Dylan had grown bigger than the event itself; the singer-songwriter’s every move drew crowds and cameras and created logistical chaos. Even before Dylan stepped onstage, there was a sense that the fragile ethos of the festival was under threat.

On the bootleg recording of the Newport appearance, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) can be heard introducing Dylan to an ecstatic audience: this was “the face of folk music to the large American public,” the man who had brought to it “the point of view of a poet.” The groan of disappointment from the crowd when they are warned that Dylan has “only a limited time” to perform gives some notion of the expectations he aroused.

But on that late Sunday afternoon, Dylan confronted the 15,000-strong Newport throng as an alien. The ascetic blue jeans and work shirt had been discarded in favor of pointy leather boots, eye-popping polka dots, and dark shades. He seemed to some to be reinventing himself as a Beatlefied dandy.

Backed by members of the Butterfield band, augmented by Al Kooper on organ, he played three songs: “Maggie’s Farm” (released earlier that year on Bringing It All Back Home), “Like a Rolling Stone” (just released as a single), and an early version of what was soon to become “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (which would be included on Highway 61 Revisited).

Accounts of his performance and the audience’s reaction are numerous and conflicting. The bootleg shows Dylan on the top of his form, and while the rhythm section sometimes stutters, the performance as a whole is fresh and convincing. Mike Bloomfield’s guitar crackles and Dylan’s singing is artful and fluid, each phrase lovingly shaped.

Nonetheless, Dylan’s electric music met with the vocal disapproval of a large number of people at Newport (there’s no agreement on how large a number). What’s more, several prominent festival figures made it clear that they abhorred the noise that Dylan was making. Those sixteen minutes of raging rock inaugurated a period of public conflict between Dylan and part of his audience, a drama that was to be played out in the United States and Europe over the coming year.

Busting Borders

“You couldn’t understand a goddamn word of what they were singing,” Pete Seeger complained, years later. The poor mix and the unrehearsed ensemble have been blamed for the new sound’s rocky reception. But there’s no doubt that the sheer volume was an issue, as it was to be at the Manchester Free Trade Hall ten months later.

Dylan wanted to play loud music, and for the same reasons that many in the years (decades) to come wanted to hear it: the visceral thrill. To the sober-minded side of the folk revival, the hedonism was alien. The meaning resided, at least in part, in the words, and they wanted to hear them.

But the volume was part of Dylan’s search for a bigger sound in more ways than one: 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 a tune. This was a music of emotional extravagance that the staid Newport format could not accommodate.

Of course, in going electric, Dylan was also trying to follow the new British bands up the charts. The scope for a commercial breakthrough had been confirmed by the success of the Byrds’ folk-rock version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” one of the hits of the summer. The market for rock-tinged music played with electric guitars, bass, and drums was clearly larger than the market for solo acoustic folk.

But the accusation of sellout was and remains curious. Usually, selling out implies a compromise with popular taste, a watering-down, a sinking to a lower common denominator. But Dylan’s border-busting sound of 1965 was nothing if not challenging — to radio DJs as much as to folk conservatives.

“Like a Rolling Stone,” released four days before Newport, was twice the length of a standard single. The language and imagery were far richer, more recondite than was customary on mainstream radio. Most importantly, the temper of the new songs was deliberately provocative. Dylan didn’t sugarcoat the pill. He lacquered it with astringent.

Dylan’s daring should not be underestimated. Here was an artist who abandoned a recognized niche not for facile populism but for an adventurous and demanding style, and somehow managed to find a new mass audience for it. When the bebop innovators moved away from swing-era conventions, they found themselves in an avant-garde wilderness. Dylan helped create a new audience by challenging, even offending, his existing one.

For all the mixed motives, the intellectual confusion, it took guts and vision to pull this off. It also took the right mix of social circumstances, not least those upheavals from below that supplied both Dylan and his audience with the self-confidence to smash through established categories.

A Cautionary Tale

History vindicated Dylan, and in short order. “Like a Rolling Stone,” booed at Newport, became a huge hit, detonating an explosion of ambition and experiment in the pop genre. Dylan himself proceeded to create his most majestic and complex work, proving that he could reach a mass audience without compromising his vision. “It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox,” Allen Ginsberg observed, “and he proved it can.”

Newport ’65 is a cautionary tale for the Left. It’s a tale of a movement for social change blinded by dogmatism and orthodoxy, unable to embrace an original and challenging contribution. It’s a tale of the dangers of condescending to popular culture, of the folly of fetishizing a genre.

It’s a tale of how a would-be counterculture, in seeking to program the artist, unknowingly emulated the dominant culture it sought to challenge. The people’s champions, aiming to conserve the people’s music, ended up ossifying it — and failed to recognize the authentic popular expression they were looking for when it took an unexpected form.

To this day, Lomax, Seeger, and their allies get a rough ride from many Dylan fans, as if their offense were fresh. But their objections to the new music were not as groundless, philistine, or shortsighted as some would claim. It’s important to understand what seemed so precious to the old guard, so worth preserving, and why Dylan going electric threatened it.

The Newport Festival was a nonprofit enterprise with a social mission. It provided a then rare showcase not only for hard-hitting topical songs but also for neglected black and working-class artists. It acted as a link between the Southern civil rights movement and the folk community of the urban North.

Lomax, Seeger, and the like had suffered under McCarthyism, when the values of the Popular Front seemed to have been extirpated from American life. To them, Newport represented a cracking open of a long-closed door, a precious seed; it needed to be given appropriate nurture.

Also on the bill with Dylan that evening was Fannie Lou Hamer — the eloquently blunt Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party militant who so affronted Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. It was only possible to have someone like Hamer on the Newport platform because the festival organizers could safely assume that the audience would share a political as well as a musical ethic.

Indeed, to them, the two were one. They conceived the folk audience, and specifically the Newport crowd, not merely as an aggregate of consumers, but as a participatory community. They believed, not without reason, that this was a community whose bonds — based on shared values — would dissolve if it was invaded by market forces. And they identified these forces with teen-oriented rock ‘n’ roll.

Monstrous Invaders

In keeping with a long Romantic tradition of hostility to technology — the vehicle of impersonal social dominance — they regarded amplified and studio-crafted music as inauthentic. In this context, as Oscar Brand, a veteran of the first folk revival, explained, “the electric guitar represented capitalism.”

Lomax had been the pioneer of folk as a living tradition. He had responded positively to skiffle. As early as 1958, he had included rock ‘n’ roll in a presentation of American folk music. He had long been aware that the “folklore movement can have dangerous potentialities.” It could be used to promote nationalist and racist ideas; it could be “petrified by improper use in education.” In the “creative process of folklore . . . there may be many versions of a song, every one of which is as ‘correct’ as every other.”

Yet Lomax found Dylan’s music of 1965 decidedly incorrect. For Lomax, it was the democratic character of the folk tradition that made it live:

One might say that every folklore item has been voted on by a broad electorate, an audience free to choose, reject or alter according to his lights. The teller of tales or the singer of songs often affects community taste by his own style of performance; he may stoutly defend his own version as the only correct one; but he is always conscious, as few cultivated artists can be, of the needs and preferences of his audience. He is of his audience.

That intimate relationship, that accountability of artist to audience, would not be possible when artist and audience were mediated almost exclusively by commerce, large corporations, and the electronic media. Years later, Lomax remarked:

We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.

However wrongheaded the fear of rock ‘n’ roll, the apprehensions about the impact of the increasingly powerful mass media on anything that might be construed as a people’s culture have proved well-founded. Dylan’s innovative fusion helped to identify a new record-buying constituency, and thus proved a stepping stone in the construction of today’s global music industry. Dominated by a handful of giant corporations, it is both more economically centralized and more socially segregated than ever, as executives calibrate the music to chime with increasingly refined demographics.

Like the militants at the March on Washington, the defenders of the folk faith at Newport feared that their movement was being coopted by the blandishments of established power. Given the history of the ’60s, and its treatment in afteryears, Lomax and his allies ought to be given credit for their prescient insight into how, in a society dominated by corporate media, the cultural expressions of dissent could be transmogrified into profitable, politically malleable commodities.

As the decades have rolled by, participation and collectivity — the roots of all vital popular culture — have been steadily replaced by passive individual consumerism. There have been repeated efforts to claw back the music from the corporate institutions: punk, hip-hop, acid house, outlaw/alternative country. All have found their destinies intertwined with the industry they rose to challenge.

As Lomax feared, the demands of authenticity and political independence do, in the long run, clash with those of commerce. What he misidentified, in 1965, was the field of battle and the weapons to hand.

A Highly Visible Enterprise

From Newport, Dylan himself went straight back into the studio, undaunted, and cut the bulk of the demoniac tracks on Highway 61 Revisited. The departure from the folk revival and the embrace of electric music seemed decisive. But Dylan soon came to regret the stampede he touched off. As he made repeatedly clear in interviews, his allegiance to the old songs, to the traditions, remained undimmed, and he never ceased plundering them.

In recent years, he has often lamented the weakening of the folk tradition, the severing of the links with a pre-corporate past. As for rock ‘n’ roll, he says in the Biograph notes of 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.

Dylan returned to Newport, after an absence of more than three decades, in 2002. The festival itself was no longer what it once was. Abandoned in 1970 (because of what its official website terms “growing social unrest”), it was revived in the mid-’80s, largely stripped of political aspirations. Today it occupies a cozy niche in the music industry.

The title sponsor for the 2002 event was a company selling “natural juices” (it was also backed by Borders, the bookselling giant, and ABC television). Dylan donned a wig, false beard, and silly hat for the occasion, but played his usual set and made no reference to past events.