The whole Chicago crew followed the Butterfield Band to Newport. And why not? The cream of America’s folk talent would be there, and with a performer’s pass or any type of backstage pass, you could hang out with them, shoot the breeze, pick up licks, and generally make the scene. It was shaping up to be a big moment for the band, and Paul was a little nervous about appearing there. His Chicago friends, including Nick Gravenites and Barry Goldberg, would act as a support group. As Nick Gravenites said later, “We all got in our cars and drove back east to Newport.”
With the help of Bloomfield and his other hired guns, Dylan had turned “Like a Rolling Stone” into a pop record that you wanted to listen to over and over. Columbia had released the single on July 20, two days before the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was set to begin. At Newport with Dylan and the Butterfield Band, Bloomfield would apply his virtuoso guitar to some of Dylan’s latest and most compelling songs, and the result was music that was both populist and musically advanced, a combination of qualities that folkie ideologues and purists had previously thought incompatible.
Bloomfield wasn’t exactly a musical purist—he liked everything from George Jones and Jerry Lee Lewis to Cecil Taylor and Big Joe Williams. An intellectual who analyzed what he heard from a musicological standpoint, Bloomfield found country, soul, blues, and the Beatles completely compatible. He respected what the Newport board of directors was trying to do, but he had reservations about their intentions, and he thought there were better places to hear folk and blues music.
“For years, the Newport Folk Festival was a really good musical service,” he told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “It brought a lot of real good music to the ears of a lot of people that may not have heard it, though it wasn’t, in my opinion, the best folk festival that you could see. I think the University of Chicago probably had the best folk festivals that were going on in America at that time, but Newport was no slouch.” Newport’s board was composed of folk musicians and scholars—Alan Lomax, Theodore Bikel, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Ralph Rinzler, and Peter Yarrow.
Lomax was a musicologist and writer who had been championing the working-class aspects of blues and folk since the 1930s. He would present blues in a scholarly context at the 1965 Newport festival, while Peter Yarrow, of the bestselling commercial folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, would champion the work of such folk-pop songwriters as Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Dylan himself. In fact, it was Yarrow who suggested to his fellow Newport board members that they extend an invitation to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Lomax’s displeasure. The Butterfield Band hadn’t yet recorded their first album, and they were still almost completely unknown outside of Chicago. Lomax hadn’t heard their music, but he was suspicious of them from the start, since they had been put on the program by Yarrow and Grossman, with the help of Elektra.
With Gravenites sitting in, the Butterfield Band made their Newport debut on Friday afternoon at Lomax’s workshop on blues history, where they began their set with Little Walter’s “Juke.” They continued with “Look over Yonders Wall,” a version of a 1945 song by Memphis pianist James Clark. Titled “Look on Yonder Wall,” the song had been cut in 1961 by Elmore James. Lomax probably knew “Look over Yonders Wall” as well as the Butterfield Band did, but he gave them an offhand introduction that led to a now-legendary fight between him and Albert Grossman.
“He introduced us in this very scathing way—something to the effect that Newport has finally stooped so low as to bring this sort of act on the stage,” Bloomfield told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. Bloomfield observed how strenuously Albert Grossman came to the band’s defense: “He said, ‘Listen, man. How can you give these guys this kind of introduction? This is really out of line. You’re a real prick to do this.’ And they got into a fistfight, these two sort of elderly guys. I was screaming, ‘Kick his ass, Albert! Just stomp him!’”
In fact, Lomax prefaced his introduction with a continuation of his lecture about the history of the blues, and he made it clear that he thought white people had no business playing it: “Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up,” he said. Finally, he introduced the band. “I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the test,” Lomax said. “That’s what I hear—I’m anxious to find out whether it’s true or not. We have here tonight, highly recommended, already the king of Chicago, which is a big, uh, tribute: Paul Butterfield.” He finished by saying, “Anyway, this is the new blues from Chicago,” and then the band lit into “Juke.”
The subsequent fight between Lomax and Grossman has become part of the lore of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Paul Rothchild, who was there on behalf of Elektra and was helping Joe Boyd and Yarrow run sound, had a similar recollection to Bloomfield’s: Grossman asked Lomax, “What the fuck kind of a way is that to introduce a bunch of musicians? You should be ashamed of yourself.” Lomax retorted, “Do you want a punch in the mouth?” and Grossman shot back, “I don’t have to take that from a faggot like you!”
Both men were rotund, and they began feebly punching at each other and rolling on the ground. It was quite a spectacle. Blues songwriter Willie Dixon, a former Golden Gloves boxer, looked on with amusement. Documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner was at Newport that year with his crew, and they caught the scene for the 1967 film Festival. Contrary to the legend, it appears that the two men began fighting after the set was over, not during it—Festival clearly shows Grossman beaming away during the performance, without a scratch on him.
Although the Butterfield Band played their collective asses off, Gravenites thought they received “a mixed reception. It was just ingrained in the people in that audience, the years and years of controversy over whites playing blues. Not folk-style blues—serious blues.” Geoff Muldaur thought they were superb, “the most important thing to happen at Newport in 1965,” he later said. The reporter for the Quincy Patriot Ledger described the Butterfield Band as a “group half way between the Righteous Brothers and the Rolling Stones,” and took note of the crowd’s excited “writhing and shouting.”
Years later, Michael was still angry about what had happened there. “When we came to Newport, we brought an electric band, and we played what to us was the music that was entirely indigenous to the neighborhood—to the city—that we grew up in,” he told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “There was no doubt in my mind that this was folk music, absolutely. This was what I heard in the streets of my city, out of the windows. It was what the people listened to, and that’s what folk art is to me, what people listen to.”
In fact, neither the Newport board nor the folk fans who came to the festival were categorically opposed to the idea of electric instruments. John Lee Hooker had played an electric guitar at Newport in 1963, while Johnny Cash had appeared with guitarist Luther Perkins in 1964. At the 1965 festival, Lightnin’ Hopkins would perform with an electric guitar. What some fans found confusing was the relationship between what was called folk and what was termed commercial pop music. Cash was a Nashville country star, but he was as much a folkie and song collector as Bloomfield or Pete Seeger, and such country songwriters as John D. Loudermilk, Billy Edd Wheeler, Dallas Frazier, Marijohn Wilkin, and Roger Miller were busy writing what amounted to modern folk tunes. Judy Henske’s 1963 version of Wheeler’s “High Flyin’ Bird” had been a minor hit for Elektra, and Richie Havens would introduce Wheeler’s tune to a new generation of folk-rock fans on his 1967 debut album for Verve Records.
Havens appeared at the 1965 festival as well, performing Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” at a songwriting workshop that also featured Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, and Dylan. The folk scene was changing quickly, as Yarrow, who had put together the Contemporary Songs workshop, couldn’t help but notice. New songwriters such as Ian Tyson, Dylan, Donovan, and Lightfoot were taking folk conventions and turning them to their own purposes, just as the Nashville tunesmiths were doing.
On Friday morning, Bloomfield hosted a blues workshop that included Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis. Geoff Muldaur, who had known Joe Boyd since they were teenagers together in Princeton, was aware of Bloomfield. Not many others were, though. Eric Von Schmidt noticed Bloomfield’s name on the list of performers who would be participating in the workshop. “You ever heard of Mike Bloomfield?” Von Schmidt remembered asking Muldaur. “He said, ‘Oh, he’s a great guitar player.’ That was all I knew.”
The Butterfield Band played another set on Saturday afternoon at the Blues and Harmonica workshop, and it offered a taste of what was to come on Sunday night when members of the band would back Dylan on three of his new electric songs. Their amped-up performance drowned out the autoharps of Maybelle Carter and Mike Seeger, who were leading a folk workshop near them. The set started off with a shuffle titled “Elvin’s Blues,” which gave Bishop a chance to show off his chops. Bishop didn’t take the kind of chances Bloomfield did during the band’s three Newport performances, but he proved himself a perfectly credible soloist with a fine feel for blues classicism.
Bloomfield had looked on with pleasure at the fight between Lomax and Grossman, and he later zeroed in on the element of hypocrisy in the way folkies recast American music in their own image. Talking to Tom Yates and Kate Hayes, he remembered Lightnin’ Hopkins’s 1965 Newport appearance. “It was real weird, because it was such a scam: they had Lightnin’ Hopkins there, who had played electric guitar for years and years, and who was sitting there with his processed hair and his pimp shades, and he had this slick mohair suit on, and I think he came out, man, in bare feet, with overalls,” Bloomfield said. “I mean, he just acted like a farm boy.” (At the Friday morning blues-guitar workshop, Bloomfield introduced Hopkins as “my favorite blues singer, the king of the blues.”)
Lerner’s film Festival also included some amazing performances by Son House, and juxtaposed interviews with him and with Bloomfield, who offered explanations of the blues aesthetic that were only superficially dissimilar. Drumming out a loose beat with his fingers, House improvised a talking blues: “You wants to see ’em, wonder where they at,” he intoned. “You don’t know whether to cut their throat or to cry again. That’s the blues.” Meanwhile, Bloomfield laid out his background as a child of affluence. “It’s very strange, ’cause I’m not born to blues, you know,” he said. “It’s not in my blood; it’s not in my roots, in my family. Man, I’m Jewish, you know. I’ve been Jewish for years.”
House seemed to understand what was happening at Newport and in the folk music scene of 1965, as aficionados such as Bloomfield cut through class barriers to appreciate blues and the men and women who had created it. “But this old-time stuff, that was out before he come here,” House said about Bloomfield. “And so, then when he see it, then that’s new to him.” As for Bloomfield, he appreciated what his associate Paul Butterfield was doing with the blues tradition. “You can quote me on this, man,” Bloomfield said. “Butterfield’s somethin’ else. He feels it—he’s in there, all the way. . . . There’s no white bullshit with Butterfield. . . . If he was green, it wouldn’t make any difference. If he was a planaria, a tuna fish sandwich, Butterfield would still be into the blues.”
One of the landmarks of the Newport festival grounds has always been Nethercliffe, the large white common house where performers can go to tune, rest before or after a performance, and generally socialize and hang out. After the Butterfield Band left the stage of the Blues and Harmonica workshop on Saturday afternoon, Grossman called them all to Nethercliffe. “What they were doing was bringing various people that could play electric into the house,” Gravenites recalled. “And Bloomfield was there, Dylan was over in the corner, and Michael knew all the chords and would audition these people. If they didn’t know what to do, bam! he got somebody else. It was amazing. Bloomfield sitting there, auditioning each guy, showing everybody the arrangements, and Dylan would come over and clarify some chord or something. It was an historic moment, and Michael was its concertmaster.”
Dylan had arrived at Newport Friday night, so he hadn’t seen the Butterfield Band’s performance that afternoon. He had played a workshop set on Saturday afternoon that had drawn over five thousand people. Talking to a Time magazine reporter on Saturday, Dylan had named his favorite bands of the moment: “For me right now, there are three groups: Butterfield, the Byrds, and the Sir Douglas Quintet.” Barry Tashian, a rock ’n’ roll guitarist and singer who was playing in a Boston band called the Remains, and who had recently played electric guitar with Richard and Mimi Fariña at a Cambridge radio station, recalled meeting Dylan as the pop star made a stop at a concession stand. “I said to him, ‘Who’s gonna be in your band tomorrow, Bob?’” Tashian said. “And he didn’t know me, so he started puttin’ me on. And he said, ‘Oh, let’s see—I’ve got Clark Terry on trumpet, Jack Teagarden on trombone.’ I was just crushed at the time. I went, ‘Uh huh,’ and I kinda backed away, because I wasn’t ready to laugh and say, ‘Right.’”
Dylan probably got the idea to use the Butterfield Band musicians from Grossman, who told Dylan about the stir they’d caused at their Friday performance. Lomax and the rest of the Newport board, minus Yarrow, had called an emergency meeting to discuss banning Grossman from the grounds, but George Wein refused. Grossman was managing Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia, Odetta, the Fariñas, and Peter, Paul and Mary, not to mention Dylan, and Wein didn’t want to alienate him. Meanwhile, Grossman had run into Al Kooper, who came to Newport every year, and he told Kooper that Dylan was looking for him. Kooper joined the Butterfield Band and Dylan’s entourage on Saturday night at Nethercliffe to rehearse Dylan’s material.
With Kooper on keyboards and Bloomfield serving as guitarist and bandleader, the group began working out the three Dylan songs they would perform the next night. Sam Lay had heard “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio, but Jerome Arnold, who didn’t know who Dylan was, found the song’s changes hard to grasp. Goldberg was there, and he was eager to play, since he’d come to Newport hoping to sit in with the Butterfield Band but had been turned down by Rothchild, who wanted to keep the group a quintet. Meanwhile, Gravenites made himself comfortable in the big house. Writing in Blues Revue thirty years later, he remembered putting his feet up on one of the mansion’s coffee tables, only to have them kicked off by Bob Neuwirth, one of Dylan’s entourage.
The Butterfield Band had been scheduled to perform on Sunday afternoon at the New Folks showcase, but a rainstorm soaked the stage, and Peter Yarrow told the crowd that they would play a set that night, before Dylan was scheduled to go on.
There has been plenty written about that Sunday evening set at Newport. Some say there erupted a cacophony of booing that nearly deafened those not already deafened by the band. Others maintain that despite the disapproval writ large on the face of the Newport establishment, the majority of the crowd loved it. Dylan arrived for his sound check early that evening, and he wore a pop star’s outfit: a pistachio-colored shirt with white polka dots.
One legend that has arisen out of Dylan’s 1965 Newport set has to do with with how the music sounded to the audience. In the standard accounts of that night’s performance, the Newport technicians were defeated by the demands of loud, electric music. However, Joe Boyd and Paul Rothchild had arrived at Newport a day early to check microphone levels and equalization. They knew how loudly Bloomfield and the Butterfield Band liked to play, and they were determined to make everything sound as clear as possible.
What made Dylan’s electric set sonically problematic wasn’t the ineptitude of the technicians. The Newport stage was raked—that is, it sloped toward the audience. There were no stage monitors in those days, and the PA speakers were set at the sides of the stage. Dylan’s vocals came through the PA speakers, but there was no way to feed the electric instruments into the PA. Anyone sitting directly in front of the stage heard the amplified sound coming right at them, while Dylan’s voice came only through the PA speakers. For many in the audience, it made for a bizarre listening experience.
The Butterfield Band hit the stage at eight o’clock Sunday night. They played a brilliant set that ended with “Born in Chicago,” the song Gravenites had brought to the band. Sam Lay drove the performance with a display of tactful but powerful drum work that subtly pushed the beat with artfully placed sixteenth-note patterns. Bloomfield paced Butterfield during ”Born in Chicago” with slurs and bent notes that often landed hard on the first beat of every measure without ever impeding the flow of the music. It was a summation of everything they had learned during their apprenticeships in Chicago.
“I thought Paul Rothchild did a good job with the sound,” Joe Boyd remembers. Rothchild and Boyd marked each channel’s levels on the soundboard with a fluorescent pen and checked the equalization dials above the faders. Boyd went back to the stage to look one last time at the microphone and amplifier positions, and signaled with his flashlight that everything was ready to go, and Peter Yarrow got ready to introduce Dylan and his band.
Bloomfield plugged his 1964 Telecaster into an Epiphone Futura amp and checked his tuning, and Yarrow began his introduction, which was interrupted by the cheers and howls of the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s gonna come up now has a limited amount of time,” he said. “His name is Bob Dylan!”
What Bloomfield played in the next five minutes would mark a turning point in the history of electric guitar. His performance on “Maggie’s Farm” was a radical move, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, though he played louder than just about any electric guitarist before him. With Lay, Arnold, Kooper, and Goldberg providing a rough groove, Bloomfield played variations on a simple riff that harked back to Elmore James’s 1961 song “Stranger Blues,” itself a reworking of the Mississippi Delta blues standard, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.”
During “Maggie’s Farm,” Bloomfield becomes Dylan’s second voice. He sits so hard on top of the beat that it screams, and what he plays amounts to a sardonic running commentary on Dylan’s song. Bloomfield approaches atonality in a couple of places, but his playing on “Maggie’s Farm” sits squarely within the blues tradition. It’s not hard to understand why some people in the audience were confused, because what Bloomfield gave them on the evening of July 25, 1965, was the future of rock guitar.
Eric Von Schmidt remembered Bloomfield’s performance as a deliberate act of provocation. “It was obvious that Bloomfield was out to kill,” he said later. “He had his guitar turned up as loud as he could possibly turn it up, and he was playing as many notes as he could possibly play. I thought it was terrible. . . . I admire his music, but at the moment he was just a note machine.” Von Schmidt almost got the point: Bloomfield did play a lot of notes, but they were the right ones.
“We backed up Bob Dylan, who had a hit single with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ at that time,” Bloomfield told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “I thought he’d be well received. The guy’s got a hit, there’s all these people there who obviously love him, they probably came more to see Bob Dylan more than anybody else in the whole festival. I mean, they booed him.”
When you study Lerner’s Festival, you hear booing combined with a loud, collective murmur—the sound of an audience who has heard something they can’t quite describe. As Peter Yarrow recalls, the Newport audience was composed of genteel people. The legend of Newport says that everyone hated what Dylan and his electric band played that night, but that’s not true, either. “It was Godawful loud,” Maria Muldaur remembered. “To me it was exciting . . . but lots of people just freaked out.”
Dylan and the band got through “Like a Rolling Stone” and a new song called “Phantom Engineer,” which would show up on Highway 61 Revisited as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Al Kooper, who thought some of the crowd booed Dylan because of the brevity of the set and not because of its content, remembered that Arnold and Lay got the beat turned around during “Phantom Engineer.” As he said later, “I thought it was a dreadful performance, myself. I didn’t think it was historic.”
Talking about the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fifty years later, Peter Yarrow remembers Dylan’s set as an experiment that had gone wrong. “The only song that worked at all was ‘Maggie’s Farm,’” he says. “I was mixing it at the time, so I know what it sounded like. It sounded horrible. There was so much leakage that it was ridiculous.”
In Yarrow’s estimation, the controversy over Dylan going electric had everything to do with Dylan’s intentions, not his use of amplified guitars. “Looked at in retrospect, why would it be OK for the blues singers to have amplification?” he asks. “Well, it was OK because that was part of the way they performed anyhow. So where do you draw the line? The point was, it wasn’t a line. It was the spirit with which something was shared.”
Backstage after it was over, Pete Seeger was livid. Dylan went out and played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, but the deed was done. The final part of the Dylan-at-Newport legend is that Seeger threatened to cut the cables to the PA with an ax. This may be true. Boyd thinks that the story of Seeger and the avenging ax started because Seeger had used an ax in a performance with the Texas Work Song Group, an ensemble who played at Newport that year. They performed one song while swinging axes at a tree stump. Other observers have pointed to the fact that Yarrow referred to Dylan’s guitar as “his ax” before Dylan came back out to perform his two acoustic numbers. Paul Rothchild claimed to have seen Seeger carrying an ax, while Theodore Bikel remembered Seeger saying, “I feel like going out there and smashing that fucking guitar” as the band rocked out. Seeger finally retreated to a car parked on the grounds, where it was quiet. As George Wein recalled it, Seeger said, “That noise is terrible! Make it stop.” Wein replied, “Pete, it’s too late. There’s nothing we can do.”