It happened one summer | 27 August 2015

Five songs, only three of which were amplified. Thirty-five minutes, including interruptions. That’s how long Bob Dylan played for at Newport Folk Festival on Sunday 25 July 1965. Even on its own merits, it was a messy, halting set with an inadequate sound system. ‘Why did that matter?’ Elijah Wald rightly asks. ‘Why does what one musician played on one evening continue to resonate half a century later?’

Cameras documented only the stage, and memories are unreliable, so nobody can say how many in the 17,000-strong crowd booed Dylan’s noisy rock’n’roll rebirth, but one eyewitness’s claim that it ‘electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other’ is broadly true. Dylan himself was shaken, asking a friend, ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ The festival organisers, led by the veteran folksinger and activist Pete Seeger, saw Eden slipping away. Had Dylan lost his voice that morning and cancelled the show, rock would still have waxed and folk still waned, but Newport turned a trend into a drama.