CHAPTER EIGHT
Three Stages
That event was taken to the country at large—the factual country, as it was in that noisy, murderous, idyllic summer of 1965, and the imagined country, as Dylan would map it on Highway 61 Revisited, which was released on August 30, just in time for everyone to go back to real life.
The first step was Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival, where over the previous two years, surrounded by contemporary hit-makers like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary, legendary names from the founding blues and country records of the 1920s and ’30s, among them Son House, Mother Maybelle Carter, Skip James, Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dock Boggs, and such guardians of the tradition as the songster and ban-joist Pete Seeger and the folklorist Alan Lomax, he had emerged as the biggest draw and the most mystical presence. Dylan’s friend Paul Nelson was at the time a critic for his own Little Sandy Review in Minneapolis and for Sing Out! the house organ of the folk movement; as he put it in 1975, posing as a private eye for the Watchtower Detective Agency and running down Dylan’s biography for prospective clients “looking for a hero” to promote, “In the mid-Sixties Dylan’s talent evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action. Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it.”
Also at Newport in 1965 was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose appearance as a white-led electric blues band led to a fight between Albert Grossman, who was managing them as well as Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary, and Alan Lomax, who had introduced Butterfield’s group on its own stage as a fraud and a joke. “I was cheering,” Michael Bloomfield wrote in 1977. “I said, ‘Kick that ass, Albert.’” Dylan asked Bloomfield to find him a band, and along with Al Kooper Bloomfield recruited drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold from the Butterfield band, and pianist Barry Goldberg. They rehearsed overnight; the next evening, on July 25, they took the stage. “I was wearing Levi’s, a button-down shirt and a sports coat,” Bloomfield said. “The black guys from the Butterfield Band were wearing gold shoes and had processes. Dylan wore rock and roll clothes: black leather jacket, yellow pin shirt without the tie. And he had a Fender Stratocaster. He looked like someone from West Side Story.”
“The audience [was] booing and yelling ‘get rid of the electric guitar,’” Nelson reported at the time. There were cat-calls and screams and shouts and cheers. The band played a fierce “Maggie’s Farm,” with Bloomfield leading the way, and a clattering “Phantom Engineer,” a song that would turn up under another title and in an entirely different mode on Highway 61 Revisited; in between was “Like a Rolling Stone,” already all over the radio, which escaped from its creators. They couldn’t find the song; it lumbered and groaned, until finally it fell back into its beginnings as a waltz and Dylan gave up singing the song and began declaiming it, as if it were a speech. As music it was a non-event; after Elvis Presley’s third, above-the-waist appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, in 1957, and the Beatles’ debut there in 1964, as a performance it has grown into perhaps the most storied event in the history of modern popular music.
It has since become weirdly fashionable to claim that there was no booing—or, if one admits that there was less-than-pleasant noise coming from the audience during and between the songs, at least no condemnation of Dylan’s new music in that form. The sound was too loud, some say, and people, especially the elite of the folk movement, seated up front, who, the argument goes, were inexplicably familiar with the technical side of amplified music, were simply calling for a better mix. Or the sound was not loud enough. Or people in the back, misunderstanding the constructive criticism offered by the people in the front, and not wanting to appear uninformed, imitated what they mistakenly took to be boos and thus drowned out the helpful suggestions. Or people were booing because Dylan only played three songs, which is imaginable, though that doesn’t account for people booing before the band finished and left. Or, as Geoff Muldaur has recently argued, people in the folk movement were booing because Bob Dylan was playing bad rock ’n’ roll, and they knew good rock ’n’ roll from bad and appreciated the former. Or, as David Hajdu implied in 2001 in his hagiography of the sixties novelist, Don Juan, and Dylan imitator Richard Fariña, the whole thing was a fraud cooked up after the fact by Dylan and his sycophants as a publicity stunt.
There was no controversy at the time as to whether or not the crowd booed Bob Dylan. The only controversy was over the music itself, and the controversy was not about whether it was good rock ’n’ roll or bad rock ’n’ roll. The music was the cigarette butt, and people made up their minds about its significance on the spot.
It was the first time the singer known for his vagabond’s guitar and hobo harmonica had performed with a rock ’n’ roll band since high school. One of his first original songs, written in Hibbing in 1958, was “Little Richard,” which can be heard in James Marsh’s 1993 television documentary Tales of Rock ’N’ Roll: Highway 61 Revisited, with a scratchy home tape of the tune running under an outside shot of what in 1958 was Dylan’s second-floor room in the Zimmerman house, so that the song appears to be coming right out of the window. “Little Richard, oooooo, Little Richard,” Dylan shouts, hammering a piano. “Little Richard gonna find it out—Little Richard.” But Little Richard was not Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan’s first folk music hero, troubadour of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, ghost of the American highway, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust. Little Richard, though he was for a time someone millions of people actually wanted to hear, was not Of the People; Little Richard was a freak, a foot of pomade, a pound of makeup, and purple clothes. Little Richard was rock ’n’ roll, and in 1961, when Bob Dylan would offer the scenemakers in Village folk clubs sneering parodies of doo-wop and teenage laments (“I’m gonna kill my parents,” he burbled in “Acne,” as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott supplied backing doo-wahs, “because they don’t understand”)—or in 1964, when at his Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall Dylan pretended he didn’t know “Leader of the Pack” was by the Shangri-Las and not the Marvelettes, since obviously anything in the Top 40 was interchangeable with anything else—or in 1965, to some of the people in the crowd at Newport, rock ’n’ roll was pandering to the crowd, cheapening everything that was good in yourself by selling yourself to the highest bidder, putting advertising slogans on your back if that’s what it took. “To the folk community,” said Bloomfield, who had been part of it, “rock ’n’ roll was greasers, heads, dancers, people who got drunk and boogied. Lightnin’ Hopkins had made electric records for twelve years, but he didn’t bring his electric band from Texas. No, sir, he came out at Newport like they had just taken him out of the fields, like the tar baby.”
Five days later, on July 29, Dylan returned to the studio; with Russ Savakus and Al Kooper’s friend Harvey Goldstein (later Harvey Brooks) replacing Joe Macho, Jr., on bass, and Bob Johnston producing, over the next few days Dylan recorded the rest of Highway 61 Revisited, including the eleven-minute “Desolation Row”—which Johnston took as Dylan’s reply to his enemies at Newport—and his next single, “Positively 4th Street,” which nearly everybody took to be his response to his enemies at Newport, especially Greenwich Village flatterers and hypocrites who, the singer said pityingly, “just want to be on the side that’s winning,” though people in Minnesota have always believed it was about 4th Street in Minneapolis.
Newport forced people to take sides—or allowed them the thrill of taking sides. What you hear from the crowd at Dylan’s next show, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium on Long Island—his first full-scale debut of his new music—are people who have come together to fight a cultural war.
Dylan had put together a new band; in addition to Goldstein on bass and Kooper on electric piano, there was Robbie Robertson on guitar and Levon Helm on drums, the latter two from Levon and the Hawks, the barnstorming bar band from Toronto. The ensemble would accompany Dylan for one more show, at the Hollywood Bowl on September 3. After that the rest of the Hawks—pianist Richard Manuel, organist Garth Hudson, and bassist Rick Danko—joined Robertson and Helm, and with them around him Dylan set out across the country. In the fall Helm left in despair over the rancor the band encountered, over audiences enraged by the turn of a folk singer whose words you could understand toward a sound so big it demanded you surrender one kind of meaning for another; other drummers, lastly and most notably Mickey Jones, took his place until the group disbanded when their long tour, which took them back and forth across the United States, to Australia, to Scandinavia, to Ireland, and up and down England and Scotland, ended in London in the late spring of 1966. After that Dylan had his famous motorcycle accident and quit the road. In Woodstock, he played possum, and began to look for new music. He appeared occasionally over the next years with the Hawks, by 1968 renamed as the Band, with Helm again part of the group. He did not tour again for eight years.
At Forest Hills Dylan’s show was presented in the form it would keep for the next eight months: a solo acoustic performance, a break, and then a return with the band. New fans of Dylan’s Top 40 hits were there, and Top 40 disc jockeys introduced both sets; Dylan could not have been more provocative if he had appeared for the second part of the show riding in a solid-gold Eldorado, or for that matter on a golden calf, and people were ready to be provoked. The crowd was with Dylan all the way for the acoustic half of the show, instantly catching the rhythm and the refrain of the still-unreleased, never-before-played “Desolation Row,” laughing at the tricksters in the song as Cinderella turned into Bette Davis and Einstein traded clothes with Robin Hood. There were no formal protest songs, nothing from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or
The Times They Are A-Changin’, no “With God on Our Side” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” but the troubadour was present and true, and the crowd cheered.
16 When Dylan came back with the band, for “Maggie’s Farm,” an electric “It Ain’t Me Babe,” from the 1964 acoustic album
Another Side of Bob Dylan, and more songs that would appear on
Highway 61 Revisited, again and again fury coursed through the crowd like a snake; the wails of hate are beyond belief. Listening now, you can feel a mass of people bucking and weaving, many of them as united in their screaming as twelve-year-old female Beatle fans were with theirs—“Okay, when he goes ‘
hand,’ we all go PAUL!” except that at Forest Hills it could be “Okay, right now, all together, SCUMBAG!” The performance is a screech; the musicians flay at the songs. “Like a Rolling Stone” came last. While here the cheers now outnumbered the boos—this was, for many, the reason they were there—you can hear both Dylan and the band pull back from the song, from its difficulty, its elusive shape, from the challenge, it turned out, that the song embodied not only for whoever heard it, but anyone who thought he or she could play it. By the end, with only Kooper, with his electric piano, seemingly willing to take responsibility for the monster, the song seemed reduced to one repeating plinking note.
Six days later in Hollywood, there was far less booing—though the only person I have ever met who has admitted to booing Bob Dylan in 1965, and perhaps the only person alive willing to admit it, did it at the Hollywood Bowl—but the sound of the ensemble had devolved toward whatever the radio was sounding like, and “Like a Rolling Stone” was still a fish story. Shirley Poston, writing in The Beat, the radio station newsletter that for all of its embarrassments (even in 1965, most Top 40 listeners probably knew that Eric Burdon of the Animals was not “the greatest blues singer in the world”) was at the time as good as any other pop music publication available, tells the story best.
This was the moment the majority of the audience had been waiting for. Dylan, in the flesh, singing the number one song that has made him the idol of millions instead of just thousands.
It was probably the moment he’d been waiting for, too.
He knew the song by heart. So did his audience. Unfortunately, the band did not. And the famous “Like a Rolling Stone” was minus the powerful Dylan composed background that helped catapult the song and the singer to international fame.
But Dylan made the best of it. There hadn’t been time for the band to learn the intricate arrangement, so the band just more or less played on.
Soon enough, in Texas, Dylan would chase the song with the Hawks. Over the next months, their music grew in power and ambition. It seemed that nothing was beyond their grasp—but “Like a Rolling Stone” remained out of reach. The country they were traversing was, somehow, giving back less than the country Dylan had already explored on Highway 61 Revisited.