Fact #88835

EYE WITNESS REPORTS OF BOB DYLAN AT THE 1965 NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL
researched and compiled by Johnny Black

Joe Boyd (production manager, Newport Festival) : We had known that Dylan was going to do something with more than just himself. There'd been rumours of secret rehearsals in this hotel he was staying at, and that he was going to need a soundcheck.

I went to Grossman and I said, 'You guys, we want you to have a soundcheck. Do you want a soundcheck?' And he said, 'You bet we want a soundcheck.'

By the time the (Sunday afternoon) concert had finished, and before the start of the Butterfield Blues Band set that evening, we had two hours. So the whole area was cleared, and we got to do our soundchecks… We had taken the precaution of doing soundchecks on almost all the other performers for Sunday nightearlier that morning … We hadn't heard Dylan, but we had kept this time clear…

Jonathan Taplin (roadie, Bob Dylan] : We kicked everybody out of the stadium and did a short sound check, which Peter Yarrow was mixing.

Donovan : Donovan: This seemed like a shock at the time as everyone thought he was folk, but Bob is really an R'n'B artist who is influenced by American R'n'B, so when he played electric he was emulating his heroes.

I loved it when he played electric guitar and I was there when it happened!

The audience at Newport Folk were still naïve - the girls in Bobby Sox and pony tails and the boys in plaid shorts and crew-cuts - what did they or the press know about folk and R'n'B?

Mike Bloomefield (guitarist) : The Pete Seeger folkies considered themselves purists. They embraced Dylan. He was their new guide to carry the Woody Guthrie torch, but he showed up at Newport with his mod clothes and his electric guitar and a rock band and, well, it just wasn't the same od Bob Dylan.

Joe Boyd : So on came Dylan with the Butterfield Band and Al Kooper on keyboards. We set up the stage the way they wanted it set up. It was set up anyway for Butterfield in the first set.

Mike Bloomefield : Dylan wore rock'n'roll clothes: black leather jacket, yellow shirt without the tie. And he had a Fender Stratocaster. He looked like someone from West Side Story.

Joe Boyd : They started playing. Obviously, this was great. We all knew that this was significant. I said, 'How many songs are you going to do? And they - Butterfield, Bloomfield and Dylan - looked at each other and said, 'Well, we only know three, so that's what we're going to do.'

Al Kooper : We had stayed up all night the night before rehearsing and only got three songs together. I'm not so sure Dylan wanted to play more than that. I think the whole thing was semi-spontaneous about him doing an electric set at the show. He could've gone out and played acoustic, which I think was probably his original plan when he got in the car to drive up there.

Jonathan Taplin : The problem was the rhythm section. They were great blues players, but Dylan didn't play twelve-bar music. He played very bizarre music in terms of its structure. So they didn't really understand what was going on at all. And Bob refused to do much of a rehearsal…

Pete Seeger (folk singer) : It wasn't a real soundcheck. They were tinkering around with it and all they knew was, 'Turn the sound up. Turn the sound up!' They wanted to get volume.

Dave Gahr (music biz photographer) : I knew what was coming, because in the afternoon I was the only photographer allowed in to shoot Dylan with Butterfield's band.

Joe Boyd : Dylan wasn't on at the end of the concert. He was on in the middle. He was on one act before the interval, at around 9.15.

Liam Clancy (folk performer) : I was actually filming at the Newport Festival that year. I was up a twelve-foot platform, filming with a telephoto lens, so I could zoom in close. And Dylan came out, and it was obvious that he was stoned, bobbing around the stage, very Chaplinesque actually.

Joe Boyd : I'm out there on the stage, setting up all the amps to exactly the right levels, and Rothschild's got everything cranked up…

Paul Rothchild : I was at the console, mixing the set, the only one there who had ever recorded electric music. I could barely hear Dylan because of the furor.

Joe Boyd : Care was taken to get Paul Rothschild to mix the sound. Because you had Paul Rothschild on the sound, you didn't have some square sound guy fumbling with the dials and having the thing creep up to where it should have been. You would have had just badly mixed rock'n'roll. It wasn't. It was powerfully, ballsy-mixed, expertly done rock And roll…

…and when that first note of Maggie's Farm hit - I mean, by today's standards it wasn't very loud, but by those standards of the day - it was the loudest thing anybody had ever heard. The volume. That was the thing - the volume. It wasn't just the music, it was just the fact that hecame out and played with an electric band.

Jac Holzman : I was standing next to Dave Gahr in the photographer's pit, below and in front of the stage. Peter Yarrow introduced Dylan for the very special artist that he was, and from the moment he launched into Maggie's Farm, now fleshed out with an incredible electric intensity, it was clarity and catharsis.

I could feel the tickler go up on the back of my neck, the hairs rising in happy resonance. My friend Paul Nelson of the Little Sandy Review was standing alongside, and we just turned to each other and shit-grinned.

Al Kooper : In Maggie's Farm, the beat got turned around so, instead of playing on two and four, (drummer) Sam Lay was playing on one and three. That's an accident that can happen, and it happened, so it was sort of a disaster. I got lost myself.

Joe Boyd : As soon as I had gotten the stage set, I ran around to the press enclosure which was the front section, press and friends and people, and stood sort of at the door of the gates, and watched at the side of the stage and I thought, 'This is great!' I was lapping it all up. Somebody pulled at my elbow and said, 'You'd better go backstage. They want to talk to you.'

Jac Holzman : Backstage, an un-civil war had broken out. Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you didn't have amplified instruments…

Mike Bloomefield : To the folk community, rock'n'roll was greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied.

Paul Rothchild : … the old guard, George Wein, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger. Pete, pacifist Pete, with an ax! 'I'm going to cut the cables!'

Pete Seeger : I was ready to chop the microphone cord.

Joe Boyd : So I went backstage and there I was confronted by Seeger and Lomax and, I think, Theodore Bikel or somebody, saying, 'It's too loud. You've got to turn it down. It's far too loud. We can't have it like this.'

Joe Boyd : And they were really upset. Very, very upset. I said, 'Well, I don't control the sound. The sound is out there in the middle of the audience.'

And so Lomax said, 'How do you get there? Tell me how to get there. I'll go out there.' I said, 'Well, Alan, you walk right to the back - it's only about half a mile - and then you walk around to the centre thing, show your badge, and just come down the centre aisle.' And he said, 'There must be a quicker way.' So I said, 'Well, you can climb over the fence.' I was looking at his girth,you know? And he said, 'Now, look, you go out there. You can get there. I know you know how to get there. Go out there and tell them that the board orders them to turn the sound down.' I said, 'OK.'

So I went out. There was a place where anyone could climb on top of a box and get over the fence from backstage. By this time, I think it was the beginning of the second number…

Al Kooper : Tombstone Blues was fine, and we did Like A Rolling Stone real good…

Jac Holzman : This was electricity married to content. We were hearing music with lyrics that had meaning, with a rock beat, drums and electric guitars, Mike Bloomefield keening as if squeezing out his final note on this planet. Absolutely stunning. All the parallel strains of music over the years coalesced for me in that moment. It was like a sunrise after a storm, when all is clean . . . all is known.

Mike Bloomefield : Like A Rolling Stone was on the radio and the audience knew the words, but they had to be purists, so a lot of them sang along and loved it, and then they booed at the end.

Jac Holzman : Then suddenly we heard booing, like pockets of wartime flak. The audience had split into two separate and opposing camps. It grew into an awesome barrage of catcalls and hisses. It was very strange, because I couldn't believe that those people weren't hearing the wonderful stuff I was hearing.

Ric von Schmidt (folk singer) : Whoever was controlling the mikes messed it up. You couldn't hear Dylan. It looked like he was singing with the volume off. We were sitting in the press section, maybe thirty yards back, and yelling, 'Can't hear ya!' and 'Cut the band down.' Then they went into the next song and no-one had changed any dials. It was the same thing, no voice coming through at all.

Joe Boyd : There was Grossman and Neuwirth and Yarrow and Rothschild all sitting at the sound desk, grinning, very pleased with themselves and, meanwhile, the audience was going nuts. There were arguments between people sitting next to each other. Some people were booing, some people were cheering. I relayed Lomax's message and Peter Yarrow said, 'Tell Alan Lomax …' and extended his middle finger. And I said, 'Come on, Peter, gimme a break. 'He said, 'Well, just tell Alan that the board of the festival are adequately represented on the sound console and that we have things fully under control and we think that the sound is at the correct level.'

So I went back, climbed over the fence and by this time all I could see of Pete Seeger was the back of Pete Seeger disappearing down the road past the car park.

Jac Holzman : Pete Seeger was beside himself, jumped into a car and rolled up the windows, his hands over his ears.

Joe Boyd : I was confronted by Lomax and Bikel again, frothing at the mouth,and I relayed Yarrow's message and they just cursed and gnashed their teeth. By this time, the thing was almost over.

Bob Dylan : I did this very crazy thing. I didn't know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed. I'll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.

Al Kooper : They booed. There's no doubt about the fact that they booed. But the reason they booed is because he only played for fifteen minutes and everybody else played for forty five minutes to an hour, and he was the headliner of the festival. They were feeling ripped off. Wouldn't you? The fact that he was playing electric... I don't know. Earlier in the festival, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band had played electric, and the crowd didn't seem too incensed. The Chambers Brothers played electric, and the crowd didn't seem too incensed. What was I thinking at the time? I was thinking we weren't playing too good. That's what I was thinking.

Jac Holzman : I looked directly into Dylan's face as he squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out what was happening.

Paul Rothchild : From my perspective, it seemed like everybody on my left wanted Dylan to get off the stage, everybody on my right wanted him to turn it up. And I did. I turned it up.

Jonathan Taplin : Out front it was turning into a disaster.

Jac Holzman : Crazier and crazier.

Joe Boyd : Dylan had been scheduled for forty minutes … certainly half an hour. People had not come all that way to see twenty minutes of Bob Dylan, or fifteen … So Yarrow was all poised to go up on stage and … suddenly … they'd finished.

Jonathan Taplin : Bob was getting booed and he walked off.

Jac Holzman : Dylan left the stage hurt, angry and shaken.

Al Kooper : A large part of that crowd had come especially to see Dylan. Some had travelled thousands of miles and paid a lot of money for tickets and what did they get? Three songs, and one of those was a mess. They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.

Joe Boyd : There was a huge roar from the crowd. You know, 'more' and 'boo' sound very similar if you have a whole crowd going 'more' and 'boo' - you couldn't really tell what was happening. I think it was evenly divided between approbabtion and condemnation from the crowd. Well this roar went on for quite some time…

Jac Holzman : Peter Yarrow took the stage again, very rattled. Like a wounded cheerleader, he attempted to rally support, urging the audience on until there was enough positive emotion that Dylan could return with dignity.

Joe Boyd : Dylan was hiding in a tent. Grossman didn't want to get involved. He wasn't going to bully Dylan about it.

Michael Bloomfield : He looked real shook up.

Al Kooper : I was standing right next to Bob backstage, and not only was he not crying, he was feeling good about having played electric. He was happy. That's when Peter Yarrow came up and handed him an acoustic guitar, because the set was so short he just felt there should be more.

Jonathan Taplin : I saw Dylan backstage from a little bit of a distance, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny Cash came up and gave him a big Gibson guitar, a jumbo, much too big for Bob, and told him to go back out there.

Bob Dylan : I wasn't surprised by the reaction I got in 1965 at Newport. Going electric was a natural progression. I had been hanging around with different people, playing different material in small gatherings and at other festivals. Newport got more media attention because it was larger that the other festivals. The way people reacted was nothing I could have prepared for, but by that time I knew pretty much what I was doing onstage.

Joe Boyd : Anyway, finally, Dylan stumbled back out on stage with an acoustic guitar…

Mike Bloomefield : In penance! Dylan put on his old Martin and played. Dylan should have just given them the finger.

Jonathan Taplin : He says, "Does anybody have a D harmonica?" And all these harmonicas were being thrown from the audience.

Liam Clancy (folk singer) : He broke into that Tambourine Man and I found myself standing there with tears streaming down my face, because - I saw the butterfly emerging from the caterpillar. I also saw, for the first time, the immense value of what the man was about. When he sang 'my ancient empty street's too dead from dreaming' I knew it was Sullivan Street, on a Sunday. So it was not only a street, it was our street. I suddenly realised that this kid who had bugged us so often, had emerged into a very major artist.

Jonathan Taplin : The audience thought they'd won. Here was Dylan, no band, back into acoustic folk stuff. And then he sang 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' and walked off.

Jac Holzman : And Dylan and folk music and Elektra were never the same again.

Joe Boyd : Right after him were this amazing group of black gospel singers from the sea islands off South Carolina, the Moving Star Singers, who were really magnificent, and then there was the interval.

After the interval, for some reason, the scheduling misfired and every washed-up, boring, old, folky, left-wing fart you could imagine in a row, leading up to Peter, Paul And Mary in the final thing - Ronnie Gilbert, Oscar Brand, Josh White. , - who was very much beyond his powers at this point - Theodore Bikel - they all went on, one after another. It was like an object lesson in what was going on here. Like, you guys are all washed-up. This is all finished. There's something else now that we're dealing with.

Jonathan Taplin : It was unbelievably dramatic. At the party afterwards he was pretty much by himself. I mean, all the other singers and everything were very supportive of him, but it was clear that he didn't like what had happened.

Maria Muldaur (singer) : Dylan was off in a corner, buried, and (singer, Richard) Farina told me to go over and ask Dylan to dance. So I went over to him and said, 'Do you want to dance?' and he looked up at me and said, 'I would, but my hands are on fire.'

Michael Bloomfield : The next night, he was at this party, and he's sitting next to this girl and her husband and he's got his hand right up her pussy, right next to her husband, and she's letting him do this, and her husband's going crazy, so Dylan seemed quite untouched by it the next day.

Izzy Young (proprietor, Folklore Center, New York and friend of Dylan) : Most books on folk music today state that folk music in the USA began with The Kingston Trio in 1958 and ended with Bob Dylan playing electric at the Newport Festival in 1965. But I was there and didn't think that it was important enough to write about in Sing Out!, which everyone read at the time. All I remember now is what journalists, together with scholars, have cooked up for a general public. Who cares if, behind the stage, Alan Lomax and Al Grossman fought over being the biggest macho around, or if a few kids booed because they had to wait for an encore?

Paul Rothchild : To me, that night at Newport was as clear as crystal. It's the end of one era and the beginning of another. There's no historical precedent. This is a folk festival, the folk festival, and you couldn't even say it's blues and the blues has moved to an electric format. This is a young Jewish songwriter with an electric band that sounds like rock and roll. 

Joe Boyd : The thing I cherish about that evening was … there are a lot of occasions when you can look back and say, 'Well, after that night, things were never the same.' But it's very rare that you're in a moment where you know it at the time, where you know it as it's happening, and this was such an event. You knew, as it was happening, that paths were parting.

Paul Rothchild : There were two very big passions happening here. And it was an election. You had to choose which team you were going to support. I expected Peter Yarrow to join with the future, because of his peer group and his dedication to Dylan, whose songs had made Peter, Paul And Mary's success so resounding. At the same time it changed Peter's professional life. Peter, Paul And Mary were acoustic folk singers, and Peter had to know that their moment had passed; but personally, Peter's commitment was to the future. Albert Grossman, that was an obvious one. And Jac. Jac could just as easily - more easily - have joined with the Newport board of directors, the Weins, the Lomaxes, the Seegers, and said, "No electric music." But he didn't. I was very proud of Jac at that moment, watching him choose the unknown rather than the comfort of the known.

Jonathan Taplin : I ended up working with Dylan, touring, all over the country and then all over the world, for two years, and he was booed everywhere. Every time. He would play the first half folk, with just harmonica and guitar, and the second half rock and roll, and get booed.

Bob Dylan : I wasn't surprised by the reaction I got in 1965 at Newport. Going electric was a natural progression. I had been hanging around with different people, playing different material in small gatherings and at other festivals. Newport got more media attention because it was larger that the other festivals. The way people reacted was nothing I could have prepared for, but by that time I knew pretty much what I was doing onstage.

Country Joe McDonald : In 65, of course, Dylan went electric and we - the acoustic Country Joe And The Fish - decided to go electric. We played at these little venues, The Fillmore, The Avalon, and one thing led to another and we got this contract with Vanguard, and it just took off.

[Source : interview with Johnny Black for Shindig magazine, September 2013]

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1965 NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL - DAY 2 - VERSION 2
Jonathan Taplin : We kicked everybody out of the stadium and did a short soundcheck.

Joe Boyd : I said, 'How many songs are you going to do? And they - Butterfield, Bloomfield and Dylan - looked at each other and said, 'Well, we only know three, so that's what we're going to do.'

Pete Seeger (folk singer) : It wasn't a real soundcheck. They were tinkering around with it and all they knew was, 'Turn the sound up. Turn the sound up!' They wanted to get volume.

Joe Boyd : Dylan wasn't on at the end of the concert. He was on in the middle. He was on one act before the interval, at around 9.15.

Liam Clancy (folk performer) : Dylan came out, and it was obvious that he was stoned, bobbing around the stage, very Chaplinesque actually.

Joe Boyd : ...and when that first note of Maggie's Farm hit - I mean, by today's standards it wasn't very loud, but by those standards of the day - it was the loudest thing anybody had ever heard. The volume. That was the thing - the volume. It wasn't just the music, it was just the fact that he came out and played with an electric band.

Al Kooper : In Maggie's Farm, the beat got turned around so, instead of playing on two and four, (drummer) Sam Lay was playing on one and three. That's an accident that can happen, and it happened, so it was sort of a disaster. I got lost myself.

Joe Boyd : I was lapping it all up. Somebody pulled at my elbow and said, 'You'd better go backstage. They want to talk to you.'

Jac Holzman : Backstage, an un-civil war had broken out. Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you didn't have amplified instruments...

Paul Rothchild : ... the old guard, George Wein, Alan Lomax,
Pete Seeger. Pete, pacifist Pete, with an axe! 'I'm going to cut the cables!'

Joe Boyd : So I went backstage and there I was confronted by Seeger and Lomax and, I think, Theodore Bikel or somebody, saying, 'It's too loud. You've got to turn it down. It's far too loud.'

I said, 'Well, I don't control the sound. The sound is out there in the middle of the audience.'

And so Lomax said, 'How do you get there? I'll go out there.' I said, 'Well, Alan, you walk right to the back - it's only about half a mile - and then you walk around to the centre, show your badge, and just come down the centre aisle.' And he said, 'There must be a quicker way.' So I said, 'Well, you can climb over the fence.' I was looking at his girth, you know? And he said, 'Now, look, you go out there ... and tell them that the board orders them to turn the sound down.' I said, 'OK.'

Ric von Schmidt (folk singer) : Whoever was controlling the mikes messed it up. You couldn't hear Dylan. It looked like he was singing with the volume off. We were sitting in the press section, maybe thirty yards back, and yelling, 'Can't hear ya' and 'Cut the band down.' Then they went into the next song and no-one had changed any dials. It was the same thing, no voice coming through at all.

Al Kooper : They booed. There's no doubt about the fact that they booed... What was I thinking at the time? I was thinking we weren't playing too good.

Joe Boyd : There was Grossman and Neuwirth and Yarrow and Rothchild all sitting at the sound desk, grinning, very pleased with themselves and, meanwhile, the audience was going nuts. There were arguments between people sitting next to each other...

I relayed Lomax's message and Peter Yarrow said, 'Tell Alan Lomax ...' and extended his middle finger. And I said, 'Come on, Peter, gimme a break. 'He said, 'Well, just tell Alan that the board of the festival are adequately represented on the sound console and that we have things fully under control and we think that the sound is at the correct level.'

So I went back ... and was confronted by Lomax and Bikel again, frothing at the mouth, and I relayed Yarrow's message and they just cursed and gnashed their teeth. By this time, the thing was almost over.

Jonathan Taplin : Bob was getting booed and he walked off.

Bob Dylan : I did this very crazy thing. I didn't know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed. I'll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.

Al Kooper : A large part of that crowd had come especially to see Dylan. Some had travelled thousands of miles and paid a lot of money for tickets and what did they get? Three songs, and one of those was a mess. They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.

Joe Boyd : Dylan was hiding in a tent. Grossman didn't want to get involved. He wasn't going to bully Dylan about it.

Michael Bloomfield : He looked real shook up.

Jonathan Taplin : I saw Dylan backstage from a little bit of a distance, and he seemed to be crying.

Al Kooper : I was standing right next to Bob backstage, and not only was he not crying, he was feeling good about having played electric. He was happy. That's when Peter Yarrow came up and handed him an acoustic guitar, because the set was so short he just felt there should be more.

Joe Boyd : Anyway, finally, Dylan stumbled back out on stage with an acoustic guitar...

Jonathan Taplin : He says, "Does anybody have a D harmonica?" And all these harmonicas were being thrown from the audience.

Liam Clancy : He broke into that Tambourine Man and I found myself standing there with tears streaming down my face, because - I saw the butterfly emerging from the caterpillar ... I suddenly realised that this kid who had bugged us so often, had emerged into a very major artist.

Jonathan Taplin : The audience thought they'd won. Here was Dylan, no band, back into acoustic folk stuff. And then he sang 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' and walked off.

Michael Bloomfield : The next night, he was at this party, and he's sitting next to this girl and her husband and he's got his hand right up her pussy, right next to her husband,and she's letting him do this, and her husband's going crazy, so Dylan seemed quite untouched by it the next day.

Thanks : John Bauldie, Gavan Daws, Jac Holzman.