Far from Kentucky, far from a tiny cabin in the woods near an obscure monastery, folk-music-and-protest icon Bob Dylan was, like Thomas Merton, busy bringing it all back home. Though for him, home was rock ’n’ roll.
According to the accepted narrative, he “went electric” on the evening of July 25, 1965, when he and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band blasted out the opening riff of “Maggie’s Farm” on the main stage of the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. The performance had a buzz-saw intensity. It was a take-no-prisoners moment that separated the once-hip folkies from the newly hip folk-rockers. While press reports claimed that Dylan had been booed from the stage, those who were there said that while a few complained that the amps had overpowered Dylan’s vocals, the rest were complaining about the complainers.1
Boos can be heard on the official recording, though they are mostly evident at the end of the performance because the set was so short—only three songs.2 To pacify the crowd, Dylan returned to the stage to cheers and applause—without the band and having traded his solid-body Fender Stratocaster for a folk guitar. He performed two more songs, both acoustic, the final one being, significantly, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” It was a farewell in more ways than one.
The set was so short—five songs total—not because Dylan was capricious, but because all the day’s performances had run late, and there were still four to come. The festival, by local ordinance, had a time limit.
A host of related tales emerged. Pete Seeger was rumored to have tried to cut Dylan’s amplifier cables with an ax. It didn’t happen. It was also said that Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, one of the festival’s founders back in 1959, got in a fistfight with famed folklorist and festival board member Alan Lomax over Dylan’s performance. This is partly true. The men did fight, but it happened two days earlier, immediately after Lomax introduced Paul Butterfield’s blues-rock band by essentially disparaging them.3 Grossman, who was planning to sign the band as clients, resented the comments and charged over to confront Lomax as he exited the stage. Push led to literal shove, which led to the two men wrestling on the ground like schoolyard toughs.4
Another myth is that Lomax, one of the world’s great collectors of acoustic folk music, had railed against electrified music in general. But Lomax wasn’t upset by Butterfield’s amplifiers. He had long endorsed urban blues artists like Muddy Waters who performed with electrified bands. Instead, Lomax felt that Butterfield and his band were simply white boys pretending to be black.
But the fact remains that Butterfield rocked Newport with full-tilt electric blues two days before Dylan did. Even so, nothing quite approached the all-out mayhem Dylan unleashed in 1965. The performance is justifiably one of pop music’s great folktales, in which Dylan is portrayed as the lone prophet wailing in the wilderness, misunderstood by the suburban Philistines. It has been retold and rehashed, but the truth is more complex.
While it’s true that in 1965 Dylan publicly came home to the rock music he had loved as a teenager, in another sense, he had never left home; he had never not been electric. As Dylan himself has said, “We’ve been playing this music since we were ten years old. Folk music was just an interruption, which was very useful.”5
The teenage Robert Zimmerman, as Dylan was known in 1956, was as zealous a rock ’n’ roll fan as any kid his age. “Hearing [Elvis] for the first time,” he said later, “was like busting out of jail.”6 At fifteen and living in Hibbing, Minnesota, he was pounding three-chord piano accompaniments to such songs as “Let the Good Times Roll” and “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy.” In the spring of 1958, on the earliest known tape of him playing music, a sixteen-year-old Zimmerman runs through a fragment of an original song called “Hey, Little Richard” before barking out Richard’s own “Jenny Jenny.” The next spring, he wrote in his senior yearbook that his ambition was “to play with Little Richard”7—and he played in a series of high school bands, including his own Golden Chords.
On January 31, 1959, Zimmerman attended a Buddy Holly concert in Duluth. Four days later, Holly died in a plane crash, along with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, in what musician Don McLean later dubbed “the day the music died.”8 The concert had a long-term effect on him. Decades later, in 1998, as part of his Grammy-award acceptance speech for his album Time Out of Mind, he said, “When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory, and I was three feet away from him . . . and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was—I don’t know how or why—but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”9
In December 1959, Zimmerman nearly got his big break in show business. Ever a self-promoter, the eighteen-year-old talked his way into pop star Bobby Vee’s backup band, the Shadows—although Vee himself, in an interview decades later, used the word wormed.10 Under the name Elston Gunnn (yes, he spelled it with three n’s), Zimmerman pitched himself to Vee’s brother as the perfect pianist for the band. The Shadows were searching for a keyboardist, and Zimmerman claimed he had just ended a national tour playing piano for country star Conway Twitty. Needless to say, Twitty’s band never had a pianist.
Vee’s brother, needing to audition Gunnn quickly and get back on the road, found a radio studio with a piano. Liking what he heard, he hired the teenager on the spot. But after playing one performance in Fargo, North Dakota, Gunnn was fired when the Shadows realized he played passably well, but only in the key of C—only on the white keys of the piano.11
Still, Zimmerman’s transition from star-struck teenage rock fan to folk prodigy took place with dizzying intensity and speed. In January of 1961, a little over a year after his micro-stint with the Shadows, the newly self-christened “Bob Dylan” (most likely in honor of poet Dylan Thomas) told his friends he was going east to meet Woody Guthrie, then in the hospital with Huntington’s disease. Having dropped out of the University of Minnesota the previous semester, Dylan was betting it all on becoming a folkie. Woody Guthrie, for the time being, had replaced Little Richard.
Dylan was a quick study. He absorbed his folk sources well, listening to everything from regional radio to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. As Dylan once said, “Open your eyes and your ears and you’re influenced”12—a phrase that sums up his creative process then as now.
Intensity and speed also epitomized his first year in New York. Between January and December of 1961, he not only met Woody Guthrie, performed at most of the hip coffeehouses, and met or played with many of the major folk acts, but also signed a recording contract with famed jazz producer and talent scout John Hammond at Columbia Records and recorded his first album, a collection of eleven traditional songs and two originals. When Dylan returned to Duluth in December, his old friends were dumbfounded.
Even as Dylan plied the folk trade, rock ’n’ roll was on his mind. In recording the traditional songs for his first album, his intention, as he told an interviewer years later, was to do them in “a rock way.” Worried that he was not as technically proficient as other folkies in the village, Dylan felt that his strength might be in bringing a rock sensibility to the songs. He said, “On the first album, I did ‘Highway 51’ [an old blues song] like an Everly Brothers tune because that was the only way I could relate to that stuff.”13
In New York, Dylan found work as a studio musician, playing blues harmonica with plugged-in bands. In September 1961, he joined a guitar-and-bass combo to accompany folk singer Carolyn Hester on her third album. In February 1962, he played a chugging blues harmonica on Harry Belafonte’s twenty studio takes of Leadbelly’s “Midnight Special.” A month later, Dylan was in the studio with Big Joe Williams and blues diva Victoria Spivey. Williams, who christened Dylan “Little Junior,” was a Mississippi blues artist whose chosen instrument was a driving, down-and-dirty nine-string electric guitar. For an acoustic folkie, Dylan rubbed shoulders with a lot of electrified musicians.
Somewhere inside Dylan was a pent-up Elvis waiting to “bust out of jail.” Sensing this, producer John Hammond arranged for him to record several rockabilly numbers—with a full backup band—for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Among the songs attempted was Arthur Crudup’s classic “That’s Alright, Mama.” The song had been Elvis Presley’s first single back in 1954, and some critics have called that 45 rpm disc from the legendary Sun Records studio the first true rock ’n’ roll record ever made.14
In October and November 1962, accompanied by Hammond’s session crew, Dylan attempted to nail “That’s Alright, Mama” and some other songs, including his own composition “Mixed Up Confusion.” They laid down more than twenty-five takes of the latter, each sounding as mixed up and confused as the one before.15 Finally, after Hammond decided that he and Dylan were unlikely to achieve the “Sun Records sound” they had hoped for, they sent the musicians home. It was a lucky move because, shortly after the band shuffled out of the studio that day, Dylan recorded one of his most beautiful solo acoustic hits, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” in a single take.
As The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan climbed the charts on its way to Platinum status, with its powerful, memorable songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” and “Don’t Think Twice,” other musicians began to record Dylan’s songs. Peter, Paul and Mary’s mellow take on “Blowin’ in the Wind” landed at number two on the pop charts, and Dylan nudged closer to household-name status.
Dylan recorded two more acoustic albums in the next year and a half (The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Another Side of Bob Dylan), and his reputation as the leading songwriter on the folk scene was firmly established. He all but originated the term singer-songwriter. As songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “With God on Our Side,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” entered the American consciousness, Dylan became one of the highest royalty earners in the music business.
He recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan, his fourth and final all-acoustic album,16 in June 1964. The session took place four months after the Beatles took America by storm on The Ed Sullivan Show, when the country was reeling from Beatlemania. Dylan too took notice. A new, more hip attitude is evident on Another Side of Bob Dylan. Gone is the hobo minstrel, the work-shirted folkie troubadour, replaced by someone more swaggering, more flinty-edged. On the album cover, he looks more like a Beatle than like Woody Guthrie. The “other side” of Bob Dylan, the image implied, was rock ’n’ roll.
One song on that album, “My Back Pages,” is Dylan’s unambiguous valediction to his folk-protest persona. No longer is he the Bob Dylan who sang civil rights anthems in front of the Lincoln Memorial the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.” “My Back Pages” was Dylan’s declaration that time had moved on and he had moved with it.
Dylan opened the recording sessions for Another Side not by strumming a guitar, but by pounding a hard-driving piano on an original blues number called “Denise.” Later in the session, another song signaled Dylan’s shift from folk-blues to blues-rock. After he had recorded two fairly pedestrian guitar versions of “Black Crow Blues”—the first sounding folkie, the second somewhat more bluesy—some intuition inspired him to move the song to the piano. Suddenly the song found its rock ’n’ roll pulse. The old high school barrelhouse piano was back, including some Jerry Lee Lewis–style glissandos. It clicked. That take of “Black Crow Blues” ended up as the second track on the album. The closing track on Another Side, conventionally interpreted as a lover’s farewell, can also be read as Dylan’s own cryptic memo to his folk fans in general—“It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
As if to underscore folk’s transition to rock, the Turtles’ pop version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” with no less than three electric guitars and two percussionists, reached number eight on the pop charts the following year. In addition, the Byrds’ electric version of Dylan’s Another Side song “All I Really Want to Do” went head-to-head in a pop-chart skirmish with Cher’s recording of the same number.
Although Another Side was his final solo acoustic album of the 1960s, it wasn’t a folk album by a long stretch. One critic called it “a rock album without electric guitars.”17 Dylan was dead; long live Dylan.
•••
For his next foray into rock, Dylan wasn’t even present.
Tom Wilson, Dylan’s current producer, had an idea. What if he were to take one of Dylan’s old folkie vocal tracks and overdub it in the studio with electric instruments?
Wilson had followed with interest the rise of a gritty British-invasion band called the Animals, whose electrified version of the traditional American song “House of the Rising Sun” had been released that summer. The song hit number one in the UK in July 1964 and was number one in the US by September.
So, on December 8, 1964, Tom Wilson took a tape of Dylan’s own vocals for “House of the Rising Sun” from his first album, along with a couple of others, and overdubbed them with a rock accompaniment provided by session musicians. Having scheduled studio time the following month to record a batch of new Dylan songs with a band, Wilson thought he would make a trial run. The December session, without Dylan, would give him some insight into how to manage a session with rock musicians compared to the jazz musicians he was used to producing, people like Sun Ra and Donald Byrd. While the overdubbed “House of the Rising Sun,” released as an archival recording thirty years later, has a muddied sound and comes nowhere near the intensity of the Animals’ take, it was enough to give Wilson confidence when entering the studio in January.18
The concept for the new album, which would be called Bringing It All Back Home, was to record Dylan’s new songs in acoustic versions, or with only a single guitar or bass accompaniment, then to rerecord some of them with full rock-band backup. It worked. In fact, the January sessions were brilliant. Side A of the record gathered the best of the band versions, while Side B carried the acoustic songs. The album introduced such Dylan classics as “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Bringing It All Back Home would be Bob Dylan’s best-selling album to date.
Within weeks of the album’s release, the Byrds issued their own jangly electric-guitar version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the concept of folk-rock was born,19 melding Dylan’s lyrical bravura with the Beatles’ pop sensibility. The Byrds’ single shot to the top of the charts, and any radio listener who may have missed Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” two years earlier certainly knew who Bob Dylan was now.
•••
In late April and May 1965, two months after the release of Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan made a nine-concert tour of England, ending with a televised performance for the BBC on June 1. They would be the last solo acoustic concerts he would ever give. The sold-out shows were a critical and popular success, garnering high praise from such audience members as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Fans mobbed Dylan as he went to and from the concert halls—a sort of Dylan mini-mania, documented in D. A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back and mirroring in a much smaller way the Beatles’ first triumphant visit to the United States. In one scene, Dylan is seen briefly jamming in a Newcastle hotel room with Alan Price, the Animals’ keyboardist, and in another scene, Dylan is quizzing Price about his views on playing in a rock band.
On May 12, just after his final concert appearance, Dylan stopped off at Levy’s Recording Studio in London. Dylan had heard a single called “Crawling Up a Hill” by an up-and-coming British rock-and-blues group, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and he wanted to meet them. With Dylan’s single of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” climbing the charts in England and the US, his management thought a joint session might also be a good chance for him to identify himself publicly as a full-fledged rock musician.
The ostensible occasion was to record a musical greeting for Columbia’s next sales conference, but some people were hoping the session would blossom into a full-blown meeting of the musical minds. Tom Wilson was at the controls. Mayall’s band included a relatively unknown twenty-year-old guitar phenom named Eric Clapton.20
The bootleg recording tells the tale.21 After taping a short, hysterically deadpan message for the Columbia sales team, thanking them for selling so many albums and ending with “God bless you all,” Dylan is at the piano, ready for action, with the Bluesbreakers standing by.
Dylan hastily counts off, “One, two, three . . . ,” which is followed by a puzzled silence. The band is thrown off by the odd count-in. Amid the hilarity that follows, one band member cajoles, “Do it in time.” Another scoffs, “Haven’t worked much with bands, have ya?”—a particularly galling jab.
But Dylan, largely immune to being disconcerted, responds, “Naw, I won’t do any count-in. You just start—you come in.” After those two bits of contradictory instruction (how does a band both “start” and then “come in”?), Dylan begins banging the chords to “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” a straight-ahead rock number he’d recorded for Bringing It All Back Home but had not released. Again, it’s the old hammer-and-tongs piano style he used when he was fifteen. Mayall’s drummer, Hugh Flint, makes a few tentative tapping noises, but despite Dylan’s directive, the band neither starts nor comes in. Did they even know what key he was playing in?
After one valiantly miserable verse, Dylan yells to Tom Wilson in the control booth, “Okay. We’ll fade it out here . . . Tom? . . . Fade out . . . Fade it out! . . . Did you fade it out?”
A weary Tom Wilson, who had himself learned how not to be disconcerted, drawls back, “Yeah, it’s faded out, man.”
•••
One month later, Dylan and Wilson are back in New York. After the tour of England, Dylan is exhausted, recovering from the flu, and sick of being a “folk icon.” He’s ready to quit. He’s fed up with the fans, the same old demands, the grind. Still, he’s written one new song since his return—a song Dylan perversely says began as “a long piece of vomit about twenty pages long”22—and he wants to try it out in the studio.
On June 15, he and Wilson assemble six crack musicians in Columbia’s Studio A, four of whom had played on Bringing It All Back Home. Also included is Mike Bloomfield, a guitar phenom in his own right, whose regular gig is with the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band. (A month and a half later, he will join Dylan on stage at Newport for the infamous electric set.)
With Wilson at the controls, Dylan and company start laying down tracks. After warming up with repeated takes of a couple of throwaway blues jams, they’re ready to take a swing at the new song. They rehearse it but it flops. The song was written in a somewhat galumphing waltz time, and the words don’t sync up. Dylan doodles at the piano and ponders. Later, not long after Dylan announces his “voice is shot,” Wilson sends everyone home.
When they reassemble at 2:30 the next afternoon, things have changed. They try the new song again, but this time in a straight-ahead rock tempo—one, two, three, four—heavy on the downbeat. It clicks. The musicians feel—and sound—exhilarated. By the second complete take, they’ve nailed the definitive version of a song that Dylan would later say “changed it all. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.”23 It convinced him not to give up on music.
The song became what many consider to be the greatest rock anthem ever cut on vinyl, “Like a Rolling Stone.”24
Yes, Dylan had worked with bands before.
And he had most definitely brought it all back home.