Bob Dylan Goes Electric

A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan's rockstar origins as an act of profound betrayal. Is any of it true?

The story of Bob Dylan “plugging in” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—the key to understanding Dylan, according to A Complete Unknown, the new Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet—has seared its way into the American cultural imagination: It’s the Bob Dylan story known by those who don’t know anything about Bob Dylan. Clinton Heylin, one of Dylan’s many biographers, describes it as “the most written about performance in the history of rock.” Elijah Wald, who wrote the book upon which the new film was based, argues that the performance “split” the 1960s. Mike Marqusee calls it the “fulcrum” of the decade, when “the early unity and idealism of the civil rights movement gave way to division and pessimism.”

While fans and critics still debate the meaning of Newport, most agree on the basic facts: Dylan appeared on the Sunday evening stage at about 9:15pm with a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. He had cast off what musician Dave Van Ronk called his “romantic hobo” look, wearing a black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. He was joined by Al Kooper, Barry Goldberg, and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They played three songs: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and an early version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Pete Yarrow beckoned Dylan back on stage, and he played two more numbers using an acoustic guitar borrowed from Johnny Cash: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (then titled “Phantom Engineer”) and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (A Complete Unknown takes some understandable dramatic liberties with these events.)

What remains the subject of debate is the extent to which Dylan’s electric numbers offended, horrified, or satisfied the audience. According to the story handed down from the folk establishment, Dylan’s electric performance was nothing less than an act of aesthetic vandalism. In The Mansion on the Hill, Fred Goodman describes the audience as being “struck dumb” and “pummeled” by the opening chords of “Maggie’s Farm.”

“People were just horrified,” according to Pete Yarrow. “It was as if it was a capitulation to the enemy—as if all of a sudden you saw Martin Luther King Jr. doing a cigarette ad.” “I ran to hide my eyes and ears,” Pete Seeger wrote days after the performance, “because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd or some of the most destructive music this side of Hell.”

Decades later, Seeger remembered telling people backstage that he would have cut the cables if he’d had an axe; in some more fanciful memories, an axe-wielding Peter Seeger was literally trying to hack the cables. Some people remember that Dylan was “booed off the stage”—at times, Dylan himself even seems to remember it that way. According to Paul Nelson’s famous review in Sing Out!, the folk publication, that evening’s performance “split apart forever the two biggest names in folk,” and forced the audience to choose between Seeger’s sugary middlebrow Norman Rockwell vision of America and the more avant-garde, Beat-inspired vision offered by Dylan. The folk audience had to choose, Nelson argued—and it chose Seeger. But if Dylan’s folk audience rejected what Nelson called a “difficult stab of art,” they did so partly because they suspected that commerce, rather than art, motivated the thrust.

The folk establishment’s allergic reaction to this new incarnation of Dylan had less to do with the electrified music than a sense that the movement itself was at stake. From the beginning, the folk revival ethos, with its roots in the Popular Front left, was animated by a powerful vision of equality and fraternity: as Goodman records, every performer at the festival “played for scale: fifty dollars a day. Bob Dylan did it for the same money as prisoners from a Texas chain gang.” Far from the utopian, folk-sanctioned vision of communal fraternity, Dylan’s new rock songs proclaimed a radical sense of individualism, alienation, and withdrawal—a literal and metaphorical rejection of the symbolic pieties of an earlier time: “your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe.” Worse, from the perspective of folk’s old guard, was that the heretical message appeared to be blatantly commercial: going electric was an aesthetic decision that allowed Dylan to plug into a larger audience.

The familiar story of Dylan’s treasonous performance at Newport, shimmering with allegorical richness, has long struck critics as incredulous. As David Hajdu and others have observed, Bringing it All Back Home, Dylan’s first (partial) foray into rock, had been out since March, while “Like a Rolling Stone” was on heavy radio rotation and would hit #2 on the Billboard charts within weeks. Dylan was not the only, or even the first, electric act to play at Newport that weekend—Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (two of whom stuck around to back Dylan) had already played well-received electric sets. Even the most obvious questions—such as whether Dylan was booed off the stage—are difficult to answer with certainty. Some suggest that people were booing because of poor sound quality. Documentary evidence is of limited use in setting the record straight: as Elijah Wald points out in Dylan Goes Electric, most film clips of the performance splice “the anguished shouts after Dylan left the stage into other parts of the performance to create the illusion that the mythic confrontation was captured on tape.”

Regardless of the extent or reason for the booing, the suggestion that these songs would have incited such spontaneous public outrage seems far-fetched. “My own view, and I was sitting there,” says John Cooke, “was that most people in the audience had heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and they probably bought tickets purposely to see Bob Dylan and hear it, not in some weird hope that Dylan would go back in time to do the stuff he hadn’t done on his last two albums.”

If the broad contours of the Dylan “sellout at Newport” myth were defined by the folk establishment, revisionist accounts have emphasized the naivety required to presume that Dylan had ever been an authentic folkie. In his memoir Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk describes how the adoption and adaptation of personas was de rigueur in a 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene in which “personal reinvention was the order of the day.” Dylan’s carefully cultivated Dust Bowl ragamuffin image—and the Chaplinesque stage humour that frequently attended it—were crucial to his early act, but impediments to the more expansive, sophisticated version of himself he was developing.

“Myself, I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take,” Van Ronk recalls. “I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. And I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true ‘folk’ artist.” Given his early musical touchstones (Jimmy Reed and Little Richard among them) and his later career arc, Dylan’s brief dalliance with folk has struck some critics as a mere accident of history. Benjamin Hedin speculates that had Dylan arrived in New York a few years later, during the British invasion, he would have skipped his “folkie debut” and plugged in from the start.

Dylan’s embrace of folk songs may have been tactical, temporary, and careerist, and he would of course famously disavow any assertation that he was the “voice of a generation,” but the music itself was received by many in a spirit approaching total sincerity and earnestness. It may be true, as Van Ronk suggests, that Dylan never thought of himself as a true folk artist, but the anti-racist and anti-war sentiments behind “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol” and “Masters of War” rang true with his audience, and it’s hard to imagine why anyone listening to Dylan in 1962 would have heard these songs as anything other than sincere expressions of social consciousness. Was “Blowing in the Wind” just a formal exercise in songcraft? Was Dylan’s performance of “When the Ship Comes In” in front of 200,000 people at the March on Washington in 1963 simply a good P.R. move—a way to build his profile until something better came along? Festival organizers at Newport, some of whom had been persecuted under McCarthyism, certainly didn’t think so—nor did they conceive of folk listeners as a market subject to manipulation. They understood their audience “not merely as an aggregate of consumers, but as a participatory community,” Marqusee writes, and “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.”

Dylan’s participation in this community cannot be dismissed as merely incidental, an historical accident that he might have “skipped” on his journey to rock, because it is precisely the rejection (or betrayal) of this community and its ideals that provided his form of rock with its newly anarchic edge. The sense of reckless abandon coursing through these frayed, chaotic performances was made credible by the fact that Dylan really was abandoning something. Whether he was crying when he returned for his acoustic encore is yet another subject of debate, but the songs must have felt, to some, like a good-bye kiss: “Strike another match, go start anew / And it’s all over now, baby blue.”

With the passage of years and albums, Dylan seemed increasingly central to rock culture even as rock music grew increasingly peripheral to Dylan. His initial rock phase—consisting of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—was over only 14-months after it had begun. His most exhilarating rock performances took place in a 1966 world tour that re-staged the drama of “plugging in” each night: after serenading audiences with a poignant acoustic set (including “She Belongs to Me” and “Visions of Johanna”), Dylan returned with The Band to excoriate them with “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”) It was the loudest, most confrontational phase of Dylan’s career—and then it was over. After a period of bucolic self-recreation, he returned with the countrified sounds of John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969), sang melodic duets with Johnny Cash, and explored a universe of American musical influence with The Band in what would become the Basement Tapes. The 1970s albums that followed might all be considered rock in some loose sense—Blood on the Tracks routinely appears on lists of the best rock albums of the decade—but the “rock” elements on Dylan’s 1970s albums feel increasingly marginal to their success as albums.

Dylan’s fans will have their personal favorite rock performances of recent decades: his punk-like execution of “Jokerman” with The Plugz on Letterman in 1984; an MTV “unplugged” session in 1995; a gritty rendition of “Love Sick” at the 1998 Grammys (interrupted by an interpretive dancer with “soy bomb” written on his chest). For decades, Dylan’s music has been given the hard rock treatment—most famously by Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,” but also by The Ramones (“My Back Pages”) Rage Against the Machine (“Maggie’s Farm”) and The White Stripes (“One More Cup of Coffee”).

Yet the general musical tendency in Dylan’s music since his late-1990s “comeback” has been toward diversity, tradition, and eclecticism. In the 1960s, Dylan famously ridiculed the idea of generic fidelity: “[W]hat does it mean, rock ‘n’ roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John Lee Hooker, Bobby Vinton, Jerry Lewis’s kid?” Dylan asked in a 1966 Playboy interview. “What about Lawrence Welk? He must play a few rock ‘n’ roll songs.”

Despite his mockery of the generic terms themselves (“folk music is a bunch of fat people,” he said in the same interview), Dylan’s artistic decisions in 1965-1966 told the opposite tale: plugging in was a symbolic act of material consequence. Over the past 30 years, as Dylan’s music has forked into the blues, Irish outlaw ballads, Tejano music, country and western, and pop standards, his sound achieved the generic promiscuity he hinted at in 1966: a “traditional music” that “comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and revolves around vegetables and death.” If there is an advantage to using rock as a generic label for Dylan, it is that rock itself is now capacious and “generic” enough to allow us to forget about such labels.

In his 1988 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, Bruce Springsteen defended Dylan as a pioneer. “Without Bob,” he said, “the Beatles wouldn’t have done Sgt. Pepper, the Beach Boys wouldn’t have made Pet Sounds, the Sex Pistols wouldn’t have made ‘God Save the Queen,’ U2 wouldn’t have done ‘Pride in the name of Love,’ Marvin Gaye wouldn’t have done ‘What’s Going On?’”—and Springsteen goes on. In explaining Dylan’s importance to rock history, critics frequently employ a similar formula: without Dylan, famous band x would never have made classic album y. The problem with such pronouncements is not only their counterfactual logic—we’ll never know the world in which Bob Dylan did not exist, and presumably the cultural influences operating on him were also operating on everyone else—but also that they locate the essence of his achievements outside of his own songs. While reinforcing the “complete unknown / I’m not there” reading of Dylan’s artistic identity, such an approach risks missing what is there. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why the folkies felt so betrayed by Dylan’s electric turn: had it been up to them, there would have been no “eras” in Bob Dylan’s career—just one long, finger-pointin’ era. But if we have lost some of that folkie fervour, we’ve gained some perspective: an ability to hear in Dylan’s live performances the interpenetration of style and influence and genre that now exists, thrillingly, in the moment of our musical present.

Adapted from “Dylan and Rock,” my chapter from The World of Bob Dylan (ed. Sean Latham, Cambridge University Press, 2021).