11
Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained. I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing … It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you, if you yourself don’t dig you.
—Bob Dylan, 1965
The decision to quit singing was no frivolous whim. Dylan’s final days in London had been troubled ones. A week in bed from food poisoning after a holiday in Portugal with Sara had given him a lot of time to think. He became convinced that he could go no further with his music. He would later talk to journalists about this fleeting decision on his 1965–66 tour with the Hawks.
For most acts in pop music the imposition of fame happens so rapidly that there is little opportunity to step back and isolate oneself from the phenomenon. The process in Dylan’s case, however, had been percolating for three years, ever since ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ had been a huge hit for Peter, Paul and Mary; his ambivalence a good deal longer—until no more good times would he crave. At the end of May he presented himself with a choice. He could commit himself to his boyhood dream and embrace rock & roll stardom, or he could walk away from it all. It would be unwise to underestimate how seriously he considered the latter option. He would tell Nat Hentoff in 1966, ‘People have one great blessing—obscurity.’ It’s fair to say that, by then, he knew what he was giving up.
On one level his dilemma was simply artistic restlessness. In the fall of 1963 he had come to realize the shallowness of the topical-song stream. In the spring of 1965 he was hard at work on his first book. Such diversions were part of a thirst for something more than the acoustic music he was making. If Bringing It All Back Home found him back on terra firma, it also seemed to represent, initially at least, the outer limits of where he could see himself going musically. His attempt to record with an authentic rhythm & blues band in England had been a disaster, and the five months since BIABH had resulted in no new chains of flashing images.
‘Like a Rolling Stone’ opened up that unseen levee, out of which poured many of his greatest songs. Though he had been impressed by the sound that the Beatles, the Animals, and the Byrds had succeeded in getting, he wanted something that truly brought it back home—a rhythm & blues sound with a folk sensibility. When ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ introduced it to the world, it would be called folk-rock, though Dylan always justifiably hated that expression.
Bob Dylan: What I’m doing now, it’s a whole other thing. We’re not playing rock music. It’s not a hard sound. These people call it folk-rock—if they want to call it that, something that simple, it’s good for selling the records. As far as it being what it is, I don’t know what it is. I can’t call it folk-rock. It’s a whole way of doing things. [1965]
Dylan required a sound that lent meaning to the words, enabled them to cohabit without conflict. He had evidently decided to consolidate his success on the pop charts, and to signpost his chosen course, by recording ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ as a single. The first computation in his new mathematical sound was to come, as always, from the guitarist. The problem solver on Bringing It All Back Home had been Bruce Langhorne. This time it was to be Michael Bloomfield, the young white blues guitarist Dylan had jammed with in Chicago back in April 1963. Why Langhorne was not recalled is unclear. Perhaps he was simply unavailable, or Dylan wanted something imbued with the blues, but not the blues. Curiously, Bloomfield later informed Langhorne that he was constantly being told to play like him throughout the ensuing sessions.
Dylan had run into Bloomfield on a couple of occasions since the Bear, at an after-gig party when he played Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in December 1963 and at the So Many Roads session, if he was truly in attendance. But what presumably prompted his renewed interest in the young colt were tapes Paul Rothchild had been making for Elektra of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, for whom Bloomfield was now whipping up a storm. Rothchild probably played these to Dylan just after his return from Albion. The Butterfield Blues Band was as close to England’s Bluesbreakers as America could provide in 1965. This time, though, Dylan sought to enjoin only the guitarist. He invited Bloomfield to Woodstock the weekend before the session now booked at Columbia.
Michael Bloomfield: I didn’t even have a guitar case. I just had my Telecaster. And Bob picked me up at the bus station and took me to this house where he lived … Sara was there … and she made very strange food, tuna-fish salad with peanuts in it, toasted, and he taught me these songs, ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and all those songs from that album, and he said, ‘I don’t want you to play any of that B. B. King shit, none of that fucking blues, I want you to play something else.’ So we fooled around and [I] finally played something he liked. It was very weird, he was playing in weird keys which he always does, all on the black keys of the piano.
Like Clapton, Bloomfield was essentially a blues guitarist. Dylan alone knows what sound he did hear Bloomfield playing, if it wasn’t ‘any of that B. B. King shit.’ Whatever it was, the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ Bloomfield heard that weekend had been composed at the piano, and it was in waltz time (3/4), rather than the conventional 4/4 to which it would revert in the studio.
The session at Columbia Studios in New York on June 15, 1965 is one which has now passed into pop lore. The main source of the lore is Al Kooper’s version of events in his autobiography, Backstage Passes. Kooper had secured an invitation to the session from Tom Wilson, the producer, harboring hopes of persuading Dylan to let him play guitar. When Dylan arrived, though, he was already accompanied by Bloomfield, whom Kooper soon realized was way out of his own league as a guitar player. When Dylan started recording his new song, though, he decided he needed both piano and organ, and Kooper volunteered his services at the organ. As Kooper tells it, he felt his ‘way through the changes like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch. After six minutes they’d gotten the first complete take of the day down, and all adjourned to the booth to hear it played back.’ Dylan apparently liked the sound Kooper was making, and halfway through the playback asked Wilson to turn the organ up. Thus was born that organ-guitar mix that so identified Dylan’s 1965–66 sound.
According to the Kooper gospel, that ‘fumbling for the light switch’ take was all they needed to create the immortal ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ proving only that there are lies, damn lies and Al Kooper’s recollections. Though Dylan may indeed have racked up more classic first takes than any jazz great, the June 15 session was his most labored to date, and Kooper may have been included on the final take of the day simply as a last resort. He is certainly not audible on the four false starts that preface the only complete ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ of the day, nor is he evident on the eight takes of a fast blues jam (what became ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh’ in the fullness of tape) or the six takes of a medium-cool vamp (‘Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence’) that occupied the remainder of the afternoon’s slog. According to Bloomfield, a large part of the problem was producer Tom Wilson.
Michael Bloomfield: They had a great bass player named Russ Savakus, a terrific guy. It was his first date playing electric bass. He was scared about that. And they had the best studio drummer [Bobby Gregg]. But no one understood nothing. The producer was a non-producer … I think it was a black guy named Tom Wilson. He didn’t know what was happening, man! … We did twenty alternate takes of every song, and it got ridiculous because they were long songs … It was never like: ‘Here’s one of the tunes, we’re gonna learn it, work out the arrangement,’ that just wasn’t done. The thing just sort of fell together in this haphazard, half-assed way … It was just like a jam session, it really was.
Work on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ resumed the following afternoon with Al Kooper on organ. Immediately Tom Wilson suggested a runthrough: ‘Okay, Bob, let’s do one, and then I’ll play it back to you and you can take it apart.’ This run-through now had the right piano sound, fitful organ vamps, and Bloomfield’s cascading fills, even though it broke down as they reached for the chorus, just as Dylan is blurting out, ‘Nah, we gotta work that part out.’ A couple more breakdowns and then suddenly, remake/retake four, everyone began playing on radar for perhaps the most important six minutes in modern rock.
And yet, as if reaching for something that he was not sure existed, Dylan continued to drive the musicians through another eleven attempts at a fully realized ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ including some three complete takes. But by now everyone was trying too hard, playing too much. Finally they returned to the booth to hear the playbacks. Only then does Dylan seem to have realized that, back on take four, he had achieved what he had renounced on the back sleeve of his previous album—perfection. Returning to Grossman’s apartment with music publisher Artie Mogull and a couple of friends, he put on the acetate to remind himself how it felt.
Bob Dylan: We took an acetate of it down to my manager’s house on Gramercy Park and different people kept coming and going and we played it on the record player all night. My music publisher just kept listening to it, shaking his head saying, ‘Wow, man, I just don’t believe this.’ [1987]
Not surprisingly, one of the ‘different people’ invited down to Grossman’s to hear the new Dylan A side was the man who had been producing Bloomfield’s other current session work. Elektra producer Paul Rothchild realized that the single was some way beyond the conventional pop-blues forms he had been dabbling in, not merely original but radical:
Paul Rothchild: I knew the song was a smash, and yet I was consumed with envy because it was the best thing I’d heard any of our crowd do and knew it was going to turn the tables on our nice, comfortable lives.
Others shared Rothchild’s suspicion that something had changed. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the impact ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ had on many second-generation rockers would never be replicated. Not that it was just rockers who recognized its import. Paul Nelson was in another New York studio with Dylan’s old buddies John Koerner, Dave Ray, and Tony Glover, making their second folk-blues album for Elektra, when someone appeared with a copy of the song.
Paul Nelson: I thought, ‘Oh boy, this just makes what we did obsolete … this is where it’s gonna go! And these guys know it too.’ [But] they were all for it. They knew a big change had come.
Across the ocean, Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon’s house in Weybridge and hearing this six-minute single: ‘It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further.’ Bruce Springsteen, a callow Asbury juvenile with big dreams, later said that when he heard the song for the first time, driving in the car with his mom, listening to WMCA, ‘that snare shot that [kicked it off] sounded like somebody’s kicked open the door to your mind.’ Even the outer echelons of pop culture felt the shock waves, though some were less than convinced that the song’s intended audience really knew what was happening here.
Frank Zappa: When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: ‘If this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else.’ … But it didn’t do anything. It sold, but nobody responded to it the way that they should have.
Though the other two and a half songs cut at the June sessions were presumably an attempt at a B side that reinforced Dylan’s new direction in song, he was unhappy with the results, and perhaps with his producer. In a hurry to get his new single on the airwaves and into the shops, Dylan picked the surreal ‘Gates of Eden’ as the single’s other side. Columbia would manage to get the 45 out in under a month.
Dylan knew that before he could start in earnest on his next album, he had some songs to write, even if his course was now charted. Thus began a month of intense writing upstate, near to Woodstock, where he had just bought a house of his own in Byrdcliffe. His relationship with Sara had been intensifying in the last couple of months, and this probably pushed him to purchase his own place.
Before resuming work on his third album in a year, though, he had another major commitment. Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Festival may well be the most written-about performance in the history of rock & roll. Even at the time it was recognized as an important demarcation—the point where Dylan went his way and folk purists went theirs. There are as many opinions about the events that weekend as there are witnesses. Most of the major protagonists have axes to grind, looking through hindsight’s rearview mirror—particularly those who feel a need to defend their initial resistance to change.
Dylan himself, talking about those events twenty years on, made a telling remark: ‘I had a hit record out so I don’t know how people expected me to do anything different.’ Not only had he already released Bringing It All Back Home with an electric side, but he had had a hit single with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ More importantly, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was issued as a single the week before Newport, entering the charts within four days of its release, and seemingly blaring from every radio carried by the fifteen thousand fans who made it to Freebody Park that July weekend.
Joe Boyd: There was a tremendous anticipation at Newport about Dylan—‘Is he here yet? Has he arrived?’—and instead of this blue-jeaned, work-shirted guy who’d arrived in 1964 to be the Pied Piper, he arrived rather secretively; he was staying in a luxurious hotel just on the outside of town and he arrived with Bob Neuwirth and Al Kooper; that was the entourage, Neuwirth, Kooper, and Dylan. And they were all wearing puff-sleeved dueling shirts—one of them was polka dot—and they were not wearing blue jeans … They wore sunglasses. The whole image was very, very different.
One question never adequately resolved is whether Dylan arrived at Newport with any specific intention of playing with a band. According to Kooper, they did not meet up until he arrived at the Festival and he was informed by Grossman that Dylan had been looking for him. This contradicts the usually reliable Boyd, who says that Kooper arrived with Dylan. If Dylan was trying to get hold of Kooper, it clearly suggests an intent to play with him at Newport. Joe Boyd also recalls already knowing ‘that Dylan was going to do something with more than just himself’.
According to Eric Von Schmidt, Dylan ‘heard [the Paul] Butterfield [Blues Band] in the blues workshop a couple of days earlier and realized they were a great blues band, and … said, ‘Wanna do “Maggie’s Farm”?’ But, even if Bloomfield’s membership in that combo was not what prompted Dylan’s call in early June, he cannot have been unaware of the band given his friendship with their producer. Rothchild had already asked Grossman if he would be interested in managing the band. Grossman, a Chicago native, came and saw them play at the Café A Go-Go and apparently told Rothchild, ‘I’ll see them at Newport.’
It may simply be an instance of Dylan’s unswerving belief in the powers of serendipity, that he would arrive at Newport minus a band and yet expect to play electric. Or perhaps he planned to play ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and/or ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ solo! Crazy as it sounds, he did perform an acoustic ‘Tombstone Blues’ at Newport that year. On Saturday afternoon he appeared at a songwriters’ workshop (akin to the topical-song workshop the previous year) at which he also played a cursory version of ‘All I Really Wanna Do.’ Making friends, though, was not on that year’s curriculum. The workshop, which was on one of the side stages set up for such events, quickly grew to resemble Bedlam, and Dylan’s set had to be cut short because of the chaos his presence created. The tension was mounting, and inevitably the resultant fury was directed not at Dylan but at his high-and-mighty manager, Albert Grossman. It now dawned on the festival committee that Grossman’s boy was bigger than the festival itself.
Joe Boyd: The crowd around the songwriters’ workshop was so immense that it was swamping the other workshops. People were complaining: ‘Turn up the Dylan one, because we’re getting bleed from the banjo one on the other side!’ This was very much against the spirit of what the festival was supposed to be about … Grossman became a focus of hostility for a lot of [the officials]. He’d never been popular among these people. He’d always been seen as one of the moneychangers at the gate of the temple. And Grossman was arrogant, particularly with Dylan now being so big. Grossman was being very cool, but Grossman’s way of being cool got up people’s noses.
The tide of resentment spilled over later that afternoon, during another workshop. Newport was always billed as the Newport Folk and Blues Festival, and with the likes of Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Muddy Waters on the bill, there was no shortage of noteworthy bluesmen that year. The fact that Muddy Waters was known primarily for electric R&B recordings was evidently a trade secret, as he arrived with acoustic guitar in hand. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, hardly exponents of acoustic blues, were also scheduled to play at the blues workshop, amps and all. The band’s appearance on the bill had already been a source of some contention even before respected musicologist Alan Lomax stepped up to introduce them.
Joe Boyd: There had been a lot of pressure from Peter Yarrow on adding the Paul Butterfield Band to the lineup of the festival—he really put a lot of pressure on the other members of the board to get the invitation, and Lomax was really against it. Against Butterfield. Against white boys doing the blues, really … Lomax was forced to introduce the Butterfield Band at the blues workshop, and he gave them an introduction which was very condescending.
Paul Rothchild: After the traditionalists, and ahead of the Butterfield set, [Lomax] got up and said something like, ‘Today you’ve been hearing music by the great blues players, guys who go out and find themselves an old cigar box, put a stick on it, attach some strings, sit under a tree, and play great blues for themselves. Now you’re going to hear a group of young boys from Chicago with electric instruments. Let’s see if they can play this hardware at all.’
Joe Boyd: As the group started to take the stage Lomax came offstage to be confronted by Grossman … Next thing you know, these two men, both rather oversized, were rolling around in the dirt throwing punches. They had to be pulled apart. Lomax then called an emergency meeting of the board of the festival that night … The board actually voted in favor of banning Grossman from the grounds of the festival. George Wein, who was a nonvoting advisor to the board, had to step in and say, ‘Look, I don’t have a vote, it’s up to you, but I can tell you right now that if you do bar Grossman you have to prepare yourselves for the walk-out of Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Buffy St. Marie!’ … So the board reconsidered, and dropped the action against Grossman, but there was obviously a tremendous simmering of feeling.
It needs to be recalled that the Newport Festival was run by a nonprofit organization, and that the performers were paid only nominal fees, certainly not the sort of fees someone like Dylan now commanded. Grossman, apparently, told the Butterfield Band after their set that he wanted to manage them; and Bloomfield, presumably as a result of that decision, told Dylan that he could not go on the road with him. However, Grossman may also have convinced Dylan that the Butterfield Blues Band provided a frame around which he could erect an impromptu electric backing for the coming Sunday’s revivalist meeting.
Having already enlisted keyboard components, Kooper on organ and Barry Goldberg on piano, and with Bloomfield as a given, Dylan just needed a rhythm section—and Butterfield’s seemed as good as any. Unfortunately, as with Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, what Butterfield’s all-black rhythm section, comprising Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums, knew how to play was the blues, pure and simple.
Jonathan Taplin: The problem [with] the rhythm section [was that] they were great blues players, but Dylan didn’t play twelve-bar music. He played very bizarre music in terms of its structure [and] they didn’t really understand what was going on at all.
Michael Bloomfield: We were all at Newport, Kooper, me, Barry [Goldberg], and this schwartze Jerome [Arnold] from the Butterfield Band playing bass, and he’s fucking up everything. We’re practicing there in a room, and Odetta’s staring at us, and Mary Travers is there, and we’re playing and it’s sounding horrible. Finally it’s time for the gig, and Barry and me are throwing up in these outhouses.
They worked up only three songs, two of which were hardly radical departures from the Butterfield band’s regular stock-in-trade—‘Maggie’s Farm’ and the equally sweet-home ‘Phantom Engineer’ (yet to evolve into ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’)—and by dawn Dylan was happy enough to proceed with the unveiling. Shelton and Spitz have both claimed that there was no sound check for Dylan and the band, evidently unaware of the footage in Murray Lerner’s fine documentary of those Newport weekends, Festival, in which Peter Yarrow can be heard coaxing the musicians to ‘get your instruments into your heads,’ a difficult procedure at the best of times. Joe Boyd, perhaps the most reliable eyewitness to events both backstage and onstage that weekend, well recalls the sound check.
Joe Boyd: By the time the concert had finished that [Sunday] afternoon, and before the start of the Butterfield set that evening, we had two hours … so the whole area was cleared and we got to do our sound checks. Now we had known that Dylan was going to do something, with more than just himself, and that he was going to need a sound check … Anyway, 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. They started playing. We all knew that this was significant.
The organizers had been given their first intimation of what Dylan had in mind for Sunday evening.
Pete Seeger: It wasn’t a real sound check. They were tinkering around with it and all they knew was, ‘Turn the sound up! Turn the sound up!’ They wanted to get volume.
The basic sound was also previewed for the fans at the beginning of the Sunday evening concert, when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band found themselves on the main stage, opening the proceedings, because of a downpour that had washed out their scheduled afternoon set. The organizers rightly recognized the dangers that came with electricity. Throughout the early evening, Dylan stayed backstage. When he came onstage as the penultimate act in the first half he was dressed all in black.
Murray Lerner: I think I was more struck by the oddity of his clothing … the way Dylan was dressed, in the leather, it signified motorcycle, a tinge of Hell’s Angel … I don’t remember booing, but I remember consternation.
Liam Clancy: I was up a twelve-foot platform, filming with a telephoto lens, so I could zoom in close. And [when] Dylan came out … it was obvious that he was stoned, bobbing around the stage, very Chaplinesque actually.
There have been numerous accounts of the twenty-five minutes that Dylan occupied the stage that evening. Those who prefer their history infused with myth have Pete Seeger attempting to wrest the mixing board from Paul Rothchild throughout Dylan’s set. One suggestion made is that the sound was so bad that fans began shouting because Dylan was inaudible. The punchy soundboard tape does not lend credence to this theory, though Tony Glover, who was watching from Chip Monck’s lighting trailer out front, insists ‘the PA sound basically sucked … vocal and guitar volumes surged and/or disappeared and the keyboards were virtually inaudible.’ When he was not being distracted by an enraged Seeger, Paul Rothchild was having a hard time hearing what was going on ‘because of the furor.’
Joe Boyd: So out comes Dylan and I’m out there onstage before he comes out, setting up all the amps to exactly the right levels, and Rothchild’s got everything cranked up, 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 wasn’t just the fact that he came out and played with an electric band … 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 & roll. It wasn’t. It was powerfully, ballsy-mixed, expertly done rock & roll … 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.’ 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. It’s just unbearably loud.’ 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 center thing, show your badge, and just come down the center 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 okay. 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, and there was Grossman and Neuwirth and Yarrow and Rothchild all sitting at the sound desk, grinning, very very pleased with themselves … 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, ‘C’mon, 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 was the back of Pete Seeger disappearing down the road past the car park … 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.
Seeger was furious with Dylan but only, he insists, because the sound was so distorted that nobody could understand the words. He insists he saw nothing fundamentally heretical about playing with electric instruments: ‘It’s all how you use it.’ And yet, as he readily admits, ‘I was ready to chop the microphone cord.’ In truth, Seeger saw the carefully orchestrated theme he had announced at evening’s outset—‘songs babies would like to grow up with’—disappearing down the same whirlpool of irrelevance as the union songs he used to sing with the Weavers. If the organizers were incensed, they weren’t alone. As Dylan wound to the end of ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ paying fans began to boo. Consternation Dylan undoubtedly expected, but it had been a while since he’d been booed.
Paul Nelson: I was right in the photographers’ pit so it was hard to hear what the crowd was doing. I could hear some boos. I don’t know how loud the boos were, but they were there … Dylan was just caught in the circumstances of wanting to debut some rock & roll on the night we were all supposed to be babbling.
Jac Holzman: Paul Nelson … was standing alongside, and we just turned to each other and shit-grinned. This was electricity married to content. We were hearing music with lyrics that had meaning, with a rock beat … All the parallel strains of music over the years coalesced for me in that moment …Then suddenly we heard booing … It grew into an awesome barrage of catcalls and hisses. It was very strange.
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. [1965]
Initially oblivious to the boos, the musicians still knew they had their problems. Sam Lay had turned the beat around on ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ so that he was playing on the upbeats (one and three), not the downbeats (two and four). Dylan quickly led them into ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, but the rhythm section was floundering—not that anyone out front was concentrating on the actual music. The idea of ‘Rolling Stone’ was enough for some. Finally, Dylan called out ‘Phantom Engineer’ and, having found solid ground, the blues boys took off. Before the initial shock could wear off, they riproared through the still jet-fueled ‘Phantom Engineer’, and then Dylan said, ‘That’s it,’ and it was all over. Time onstage, just under sixteen minutes.
Kooper’s version of events, which by now we might have learned was suspect, is that ‘they were booing …’cause he only played three songs … but at the festival there definitely was a dispute about electric people playing, so I think they got meshed together in the booing legend.’ He remains alone in this interpretation from stage right. Dylan knew better, and according to eyewitnesses galore, he was ‘real shook up.’
Paul Nelson: I think he was pretty stunned by it. It looked to me like he was quite moved and upset by it, and I was only about ten feet away. I thought it was tremendous.
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 … It was unbelievably dramatic.
Dylan seems to have had no plan beyond playing his three songs with the guys, and going down the road feeling bad. Taplin says it was Johnny Cash’s idea to coax him into returning alone, but Peter Yarrow was on hand, and as the crowd roared its (dis)approval, he came back out and announced that Bob was getting an acoustic guitar—a renewed roar. Again, the mythologizers have Dylan playing ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ as a grand gesture, and leaving the stage. In fact, he climaxed his set with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ returning the controversy full circle to his previous year’s performance and the fuss that song had caused then. It now sat atop the charts, courtesy of the Byrds. Point made.
After the intermission Seeger and Lomax got their wish, a set composed of all the things they held dear, but the drama of what had happened cast a shadow not only over remaining proceedings, but over the whole folk revival.
Joe Boyd: After the interval for some reason the scheduling misfired and every washed-up, boring, old, folkie, 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 that 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 … You knew, as it was happening, that paths were parting.
Surprisingly, Dylan had not taken off after his set, entourage in tow, but stuck around for the traditional post-Newport party for performers, at which the Chambers Brothers played their brand of electric blues. Dylan, though, remained largely by himself. John Cohen, from the New Lost City Ramblers, engaged him in earnest conversation, and the other performers were mostly supportive of him, but he clearly felt isolated from it all.
Maria Muldaur: Dylan was off in a corner buried, and [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.’
Bloomfield, on the other hand, suggests that the after-effects of Newport wore off quickly enough. Twenty-four hours later, at another party, the old Bobby was back and, hopefully, his hands were no longer on fire:
Michael Bloomfield: When I saw him afterwards, he looked real shook up and I didn’t know the nature of what made him all shook up. But 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.
Dylan had made an essentially selfish statement intended to create artistic elbow room, and cannot be held accountable for its more unfortunate consequences (i.e., self-absorbed singer-songwriters). And yet the fact is that Newport 1965 marked not only the death of the second folk revival and the assimilation of folk conceits (albeit Dylanized) into the new rock sounds, but the return of folk music—‘the only true valid death you can feel today’—to the outer ring roads of popular song, barely in the peripheral vision of the mainstream Dylan now embraced.
He is quite correct when he reiterates that folk music can never die. Nevertheless his actions, and his alone, put it on a life-support machine. It was a renunciation for which he soon felt a need to atone.
Karl Dallas: When Northumbrian traditionalist Louis Killen did a small concert at Woodstock at the height of Dylan’s withdrawal from the music business, Dylan turned up disguised in dark glasses and revealed afterwards to Killen that one of the reasons he had hidden himself away had been not so much the trauma of folkdom’s refusal to accept his electric experiments, as their later overenthusiastic move from acoustic to electric music … He had been pursuing a personal vision, not charting a recommended course of action for his peers.
Bob Dylan: I was telling somebody … about when you go to see a folksinger now, you hear somebody singing his own songs. And the person says, ‘Yeah, well, you started that.’ And in a sense, it’s true. But … there’s no dedication to folk music now, no appreciation of the art form. [1984]
Bob Dylan: Folk music … got swept away by fashionable things … British invasions and pop art and medium-is-the-message type of things. But it didn’t die. All modern music is based on those forms and structural verses. [1989]
There were enough old fans who came following him, and enough new fans, period, for him not to care about those he left behind. He had managed a trick rarely achieved in popular culture. He had replaced one popular audience with another, almost overnight, and actually increased his fan base in the process. His previous audience would largely accept the path he carved out in the fullness of time, but it would be a laborious process for some. Joan Baez would record her next album with bass and electric guitar, but not drums; Tom Rush would record an album with one side acoustic and one side that made So Many Roads sound halfhearted; even Pete Seeger would record an all-electric album by 1968—by which time, of course, Dylan had gone acoustic. Some responded more immediately. Phil Ochs wrote to the Village Voice championing Dylan’s cause:
Dylan is being violently criticized for using amplified rock & roll as his medium on the Newport folk stage … I understand that even most of the festival directors were quite upset at his performance … I think the best way to judge for yourself who was making the most valid musical point is to listen to a couple of Newport records of previous years and then listen to Dylan’s new single, ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’
Paul Nelson, who had played an unwitting role in Dylan’s previous renunciation of the topical-song genre, had only recently assumed the editorship of Sing Out. In a strong defense of Dylan, Nelson described Newport ’65 as ‘a sad parting of the ways for many, myself included. I choose Dylan, I choose art.’ It was a powerful statement, even if Irwin Silber sought to counteract it with his own view of Dylan’s set—‘not very good “rock” … [and not] very good Dylan’—published at the front of the same November issue.
Paul Nelson: I quit Sing Out over Newport, I resigned, I wrote a piece in defense of Dylan and resigned. I didn’t trust Irwin [Silber] to print the piece I wrote and I went in to Moe [Asch], [and said,] ‘Will you make sure this gets printed right?’ I got free tickets for [Dylan] concerts for years.
Nelson’s resignation did not end the war, it just drew battle lines. The Sing Out letters pages would wring the debate to death over the coming year. By then, the scale of Dylan’s achievement with his electric fusion, and the inability of the folk world to replace him, would render all contrary views moot. Dylan himself would continue to address his ‘old fans’ in song—one of the first songs he recorded after Newport had the provocative title ‘Positively Fourth Street’—even as he ridiculed them in print.
Bob Dylan: There were a lot of people there who were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterwards. I do resent somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because they were old fans. [1965]
When he returned to the familiar Studio A four days after Newport, Dylan had dispensed with the producer of his last three and a half albums, Tom Wilson. Why Wilson was replaced has never been explained. Despite the assessments of Mike Bloomfield—‘a non-producer’—and Paul Rothchild—who claims that Wilson was inclined to move sessions along at the expense of good takes—the fact is that Dylan and Wilson both liked to record quickly, with a minimum of fuss, relying on a percentage of simple twists of fate. Though Wilson had a reputation for telling his artists, ‘Just go ahead and do it, don’t mind me,’ Dylan at this stage hardly needed the producer’s creative input, and Wilson deserves a chunk of credit for pushing Dylan toward a full-fledged electric sound (though not as full-fledged as Wilson’s greatest noisefest, the Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat).
Dylan and Wilson had also seemed the best of buddies, departing arm in arm from that London session in May. When asked by Jann Wenner in 1969 why Wilson was replaced, Dylan ducked the question. Wilson, now dead, also played dumb about the reasons for his removal, though he did make it clear to Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker in 1975 that he and Dylan had had a major disagreement, and Dylan had said to him, ‘Maybe we should try Phil Spector.’ What Phil Spector would have made of Highway 61 Revisited, I fear to speculate. As it is, Dylan once again found himself with another in-house producer, Bob Johnston. If he was looking for someone with greater imagination and technical expertise, he had fallen short. If he was looking for someone happy to roll tape, Johnston was his man.
Al Kooper: I think Tom Wilson was more something than Bob Johnston … more soulful. Plus he was a real experimenter … Bob Johnston I would say is the kinda guy that just pats you on the back and says you’re fantastic, and just keeps you going.
While Dylan’s instinctual genius continued to work overtime, Johnston’s lack of creative input was not a major issue. Dylan retained the input of other musicians, his manager, and his key sidekick.
Tony Glover: As far as I could tell, producer Bob Johnston was from the John Hammond school of production: call out take numbers, keep the logs, make phone calls, and stay out of the way. The only people I heard making comments about the takes were Albert and Neuwirth. The sessions seemed loose but businesslike. The session men would gather around Bob as he ran down a tune for them, singing a few verses as they noted down the changes, then sit down with their instruments and try out lines and rhythms.
Dylan was increasingly confident about his ability to harness his musical ideas. As Bloomfield later observed, it was Dylan who was responsible for okaying the mix on Highway 61 Revisited and ‘it was astutely mixed … He knew he had a sound in mind.’ He also knew he did not want to record sixteen takes of each song. He needed musicians who could respond to his energy and ideas. In Dylan’s book, technical expertise was no substitute for a willingness to wing it. Russ Savakus, bass player on ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ was finding the whole thing a bit fraught and apparently ‘freaked out a bit’ during one of the twelve takes of ‘Tombstone Blues.’
Harvey Brooks: I got to know Russ … He was a very straight shooter and a real good bass player, but I think he did also have some difficulty with the style of music, because as I was [about] to learn, this was a case of just go for it—you were only going to get one or two shots, maybe, at each song.
At some point, probably on July 30, Savakus bailed out. Kooper assured Dylan that he knew a suitable replacement, and secured the gig for his friend Harvey Brooks. Dylan clearly loved Brooks’s bass playing—he would ask him to play in his next live band—and though Kooper and Brooks were relative rookies, Dylan still had Bobby Gregg holding the sticks and Paul Griffin on piano, both of whom had contributed so much on Bringing It All Back Home. Bloomfield also remained at the peak of his playing powers through the three days it took to wrap up Highway 61 Revisited, during which Dylan’s focus was something to behold.
Harvey Brooks: Bob comes into the studio and … it goes quiet, and [everyone] starts listening to him, to what he’s gonna say and what he wants to do. He ran the whole session. Bob Johnston was there just to keep it going. He was supposed to say if somebody was in tune or out of tune, but that was a useless concept, to try and get anything in tune … I was amazed that Bob could write his songs and perform them at the same time. He’d be writing the next song, changing his lyrics around … constantly … I really had no idea what was going on.
It wasn’t just the lyrics that were getting changed around. On day one, they had warmed up with a couple of takes of his Newport sign-off, ‘Phantom Engineer,’ but something wasn’t right and after a morning of working on ‘Tombstone Blues,’ Dylan spent the lunch break sitting at the piano, while Tony Glover watched and listened, ‘and [he] worked over “Phantom Engineer” [into “It Takes a Lot to Laugh”] for an hour or more. When the crew was back in place, Bob ran down how he wanted it done differently—and in three takes they got the lovely version on the album.’ The final song cut that day was ‘Positively Fourth Street,’ which made ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ sound like ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ Surely a response to the neophobes of Newport, it was issued as a single the first week in September, whence it followed ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ into the Top 10.
If the first July session produced ‘Tombstone Blues,’ ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh,’ and ‘Positively Fourth Street’, the second session, on Friday, July 30, proved that Dylan’s reliance on serendipity had its downside. Though the slight ‘From a Buick Six,’ a written-by-numbers paean to fast living and speed, was taped quickly enough, Dylan and the band got bogged down with his latest rewrite of ‘Baby Blue’ with added bile, ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ Seventeen takes and a lot of breakdowns later, they finally got a take that was in time, but it still sounded like little more than, in Glover’s choice phrase, ‘a paler version of “Positively Fourth Street,” with less interesting lyrics.’
Michael Bloomfield: There were chord charts for these songs but no one had any idea what the music was supposed to sound like … it all sort of went around Dylan. I mean he didn’t direct the music, he just sang the songs and played piano and guitar and it just sort of went on around him … But the sound was a matter of pure chance … the producer did not tell people what to play or have a sound in mind … I was there, man, I’m telling you it was a result of chucklefucking, of people stepping on each other’s dicks until it came out right.
After an afternoon and early evening of chucklefucking, they attempted to record a take of Dylan’s most ambitious song to date, an eleven-minute voyage through a Kafkaesque world of gypsies, hoboes, thieves of fire, and historical characters beyond their rightful time. Though the quasi-electronic combo got through the whole song, ‘Desolation Row’ did not suit its electric children.
Tony Glover: The last song attempted was … ‘Desolation Row.’ By the first verse into it, it was obvious that Bob’s guitar was rather painfully out of tune. Both Neuwirth and I pointed it out, but Albert didn’t want to stop the take. ‘Let him go,’ he said inscrutably. Some twelve minutes later, Bob called for a playback and as it began he scowled, ‘It’s way outta tune—why didn’t you stop me? It’s a long song.’ Albert replied, ‘You’ll get it next time.’
After the Friday session, there was a two-day break, sessions resuming Monday evening. Dylan, Al Kooper, Tony Glover, and a lady friend drove up to Woodstock, where Dylan spent most of Saturday writing out chord charts with Kooper and polishing the half dozen songs he had yet to record.
August 2, 1965, was one of those extraordinary sessions where Dylan’s focus was unfailing and the other musicians were servants of the sound. Preferring the tricks of the night, he began the session at eight in the evening. With Sam Lay guesting on drums, ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ complete with a ‘cigar-sized toy siren-whistle that Bob ended up sticking in his harp-holder,’ was the first cut of the day, followed by a positively rippling ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ and the insouciance of ‘Queen Jane Approximately.’ As the session stretched into the early hours, Dylan and the band managed to cut ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ in a couple of takes. Mystifyingly Dylan wound up mixing Kooper’s ghost-train organ way down, perhaps feeling that it was a distraction from the song’s words, which said more than any song to date about his current worldview. If ‘Desolation Row’ was Dylan’s The Trial, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ was his Freaks. He would suggest in 1978 that he had written the song from the viewpoint of a ‘geek,’ a man who made his living biting the heads off chickens, for whom the only freak in the song was Mr. Jones, but a rap he gave in concert in 1986 probably came nearer the truth:
This is a song I wrote in response to people who ask questions all the time … I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So every once in a while you gotta do this kinda thing—put somebody in their place … This is my response to something that happened over in England, I think it was ’63 or ’64 …
By the time he recorded ‘Thin Man’ at two in the morning, Dylan was looking forward to wrapping up his second album of 1965. But he still wasn’t sure that he had the right take on the album’s true epic, ‘Desolation Row’, and decided to tackle it as an acoustic solo companion-piece to the second side of Bringing It All Back Home. Replacing a single line from the semi-electric take cut a couple of days earlier (now released on No Direction Home: The Bootleg Series vol. 7), so that they spoonfed Casanova ‘to get him to feel more assured’, not ‘the boiled guts of birds’, the song still did not come easily, the released take being an edit of one of four unfinished takes and the one complete take.
It would appear that Dylan was given a test pressing (presumably on the third) of all the songs recorded over the three days (plus ‘Like a Rolling Stone’), with a view to honing the material down to a single album from these fifty-nine minutes. The test-pressing still included the semi-electric ‘Desolation Row’. It took the overdubbing of a second guitarist on the acoustic take to convince Dylan he should go ‘acoustic’. Johnston hurriedly scheduled a session for the fourth, at which he was joined by Charlie McCoy, a respected Nashville guitarist, who had been flown to New York at Johnston’s instigation. Unsure what was expected of him, McCoy bluffed it.
Charlie McCoy: They just told me to go out and pick up a guitar and play what I felt like playing. I finished and I went in and asked Dylan if it suited him … He said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’
More like sublime. Thus was Highway 61 Revisited completed, an album that consolidated everything ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (and Bringing It All Back Home) proffered. In a world before Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul, and a world away from Bound for Glory, Dylan conjured up an amalgamation of every strand in American popular music from ‘Gypsy Davey’ to the Philly Sound. The rich, textured sound was folk-rock realized. The competition were still tuning their Rickenbackers and wondering how to hide their love away. Dylan, though, was not about to stand still. That wild mercury sound beckoned.