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.
Received wisdom casts it as a violent generational schism, but Wald, a seasoned historian of folk music and the 1960s, prefers to see it as a still relevant clash between
the twin ideals of the modern era: the democratic, communitarian ideal of a society of equals working together for the common good and the romantic, libertarian ideal of the free individual, unburdened by constraints or rules or custom.
Unfortunately, the road to Newport is too long and much of the backstory is overfamiliar. This is ground that hasn’t just been well-trodden; it’s been steamrollered flat. More illuminating is Wald’s analysis of the folk revival. Far from being a tight clique of earnest fuddy-duddies, it was a vibrantly unstable alliance of different factions, from college-age Peter, Paul and Mary fans to seasoned song collectors, and from old Popular Front leftists to blues purists.
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