Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965. Photo: Folklife Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
On July 25, 1965 when Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival it was like nothing his audience had ever heard. And many of his most ardent fans hated it.
Musicologist Elijah Wald says that Dylan’s loud set of rock music shocked many of the fans that had embraced the singer as a voice of their progressive values.
Wald tells Steve Fast that the electric set seemed to close the door on the folk songs Dylan had made his name with at Newport previously.
“To a lot of people that just felt like rejection,” Wald says. He notes that Billboard magazine’s coverage of Newport in ’65 asserted that storyline, asserting that the folkies “were being left behind by I suppose rock and roll, commercial culture and the pop scene.”
Wald says that Dylan’s choice to gravitate from folk to rock was a sign of the times.
“Everything that we normally think of when we say the words ‘The Sixties,’–rock and roll, the Vietnam war, the hippies, the long hair, the drugs– all of that is starting in 1965.”
Wald is the author of the book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.”
Listen to the interview: Elijah Wald on The Steve Fast Show
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