Review of Elijah Wald's "Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties"

“The refinement of our historical past,” said the critic Lionel Trilling, “chiefly means that we keep it properly complicated.”  Elijah Wald, author of a string of fine books about the history of American music, including How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (2011), and co-author of Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2013), not only properly complicates a superficially simple musical moment, but also clarifies and contextualizes it.  And he does it all with admirable precision and thoroughness.  Well, sometimes he gets carried away with the thoroughness.  But, even so, his book is a lively, enlightening read.

Wald first summarizes the standard narrative:  “On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in black jeans, black boots, and a black leather jacket, carrying a Fender Stratocaster in place of his familiar acoustic guitar.”   Backed by four musicians who produced “the loudest music ever to hit Newport, he snarled his opening line:  ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!’”   The ensuing chaos, which featured booing from the audience, an apparent backstage threat by folk icon Pete Seeger to take an axe to the electrical cables, and Dylan’s hasty departure from the stage, became an essential part of both Dylan’s own legend and the creation myth of late’60s folk rock.  In an instant, one musical era had ended, and another had begun.

Well, yes, and then again, no, says Wald.  He’s not rejecting the master narrative, now half a century old:  his subtitle announces that he’s analyzing “the night that split the sixties.”  But he’s at pains to point out how multi-faceted that inflection point was.  “In the shock of Dylan’s electric reinvention,” he observes, “it is easy to forget that Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had all already played electric sets at Newport that weekend,” and that Dylan himself had “gone electric” in the recording studio.  Moreover, Dylan didn’t exactly flee the stage: he came on, as scheduled, in the middle of the program and played his three allotted songs.  When the crowd called out for more, he gave in and asked for an acoustic guitar (an “axe”) from backstage.  Was that the axe that Seeger then called for?  And then he played even more songs.

Finally, Wald’s detailed dissection of first-hand accounts suggests that the crowd’s reaction was much more mixed and hard to interpret than the standard story would have it.  Attendance at the Newport Folk Festival mushroomed in 1965—it was 50 percent larger than that year’s Newport Jazz Festival’s—and many there reported hearing cheers rather than boos.  And some (many? most?) of those who booed were apparently expressing disappointment not with how or what Dylan played, but with the brevity of his performance: they wanted more, not less.

Wald’s scrutiny of that night in Newport is alone worth the price of the book.  But it doesn’t commence until page 200.  Preceding it is an equally effective, if sometimes overly detailed, rendition of the important people and events who set the context for what was to come, with particular attention given to the folk music scene and the Newport Folk Festival’s place in it, the part played by folksinger and idealist Pete Seeger, and, finally and most problematic, the ambiguous role played by the elusive, shape-shifting Bob Dylan.  

Seeger’s biography—from his leftist politics, to his performing career with the Almanac Singers and then the Weavers (“Goodnight, Irene”), to his invocation of his First (not Fifth) Amendment rights in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the many songs he wrote (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” just to name a couple)—is well known.  In Wald’s view, he “was a hard man to know and sometimes a hard man to like, but he was an easy man to admire, and he backed up his words and beliefs with his actions.”  Wald may underestimate how hokey and naïve Seeger seemed, even to many sympathetic activists, by the early 1960s, but he makes clear just how catalytic Seeger was in linking the folk revival and the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  He was especially influential in getting the Newport Folk Festival off the ground.

Wald embeds that Festival, a disparate collection of activities that included songwriting and performance workshops, concerts, and (most important in its earliest years) after-hours jam sessions and schmoozing, in the increasingly commercialized pop music culture of the time.  As he says, “anyone hoping to understand the cultural upheavals of the 1960s has to recognize the speed with which antiestablishment, avant-garde, and grass-roots movements were coopted, cloned, and packaged in saleable products and how unexpected, confusing, and threatening that was for people who were sincerely trying to find new ways to understand the world or to make it a better place.”  Seeger had an expansive vision of folk music, but what was one to make of the clean-cut, apolitical Kingston Trio, who were leading a parade of similar “folk” groups to fame and fortune?  What was “folk music” anyway?  Was it of the folk and by the folk, or could it be written for the folk?  Was it “Greensleeves” and “Barbara Allen,” or could it also be “Blowin’ in the Wind”?  Just as political movements fragment and splinter over ideological differences, musicians (joined by promoters, record companies, and various hangers-on) debated who was in and who was out.  In what Wald describes as the “neo-ethnic” movement alone, the “twin poles” were “white old-time, hillbilly, and bluegrass and black blues, jug band, and gospel.”  Dave Van Ronk, a leading neo-ethnic, also played “jazz, ragtime, vaudeville novelties, British ballads, spirituals, and whatever else caught his fancy [although] blues was his meat.”

Relentlessly insinuating itself into the Newport Festivals was also the dirty little question,  what will sell?  In addition to the countless performers whom Wald locates along the music spectrum, he highlights the growing controversies revolving around promoters and managers—depicted most vividly when Albert Grossman, manager of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dylan, and others, gets into a clumsy but vigorous fight with folklorist Alan Lomax.  

In the midst of all this, and yet somehow apart from it, stood 24-year-old Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota.  He had already gone through several identities, starting with rock-n-roller—one photo in the book shows a poster advertising a “Rock & Roll Hop for Teen-Agers” at Hibbing’s National Guard Armory, with music by the Golden Chords, featuring, among others, “Bobby Zimmerman”—and then his quasi-Woody Guthrie phase, when he invented an entire rovin’-the-country past for himself as he broke into the New York scene.  And he was already famous, but probably more as a songwriter than a performer.  Just how calculated his kaleidoscopic adoption of personas is still a source of conjecture, and Wald doesn’t try to solve the mystery.  (Dylan’s father’s contribution to the conversation came in the fall of 1963:  “My son is a corporation and his public image is strictly an act.”)  Wald notes that “his reputation was largely spread by [Joan] Baez—who brought him onstage, sang duets with him, and recorded his compositions—and Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

Whatever he was (and is), his refusal to label himself (except to say over and over that he  was NOT a folksinger) and his ability to shift gears brought him more attention and made him a flexible, useable symbol.  People who wanted to “believe” in him (unlike John Lennon, who in 1970 famously asserted, “I don’t believe in Zimmerman”) found it expedient to perpetuate the myth of his hostile reception at Newport.  “If the booing at Newport has often been exaggerated,” Wald says, “that is because it was essential to the legend, proof that no matter how high Dylan’s records climbed on the pop charts, he was neither selling out nor buying in, but bravely going his own way.”

If that’s what you choose to believe, Wald seems to say, that’s your choice.  But the copious, contradictory evidence regarding what Dylan actually did at Newport and how he was actually received makes that choice more symbolic than real, more an assertion of faith than an historically-based argument.

Wald’s argument is, most certainly, historically based.  He has combed the archives, looked at film, listened to recordings, and conducted his own interviews (perhaps most notably with George Wein, founder of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals.)  Sometimes there is a little too much nitty-gritty, too many paragraphs that amount to lists (in one not-unique paragraph that attempts to capture the diversity and magnitude of the Festival’s workshops, I counted over 30 names of performers and groups—too much!).  But Wald writes fluidly and precisely and does not shrink from advancing his own interpretations about the figure that this particular cultural poem makes.  “The fissures of the mid-1960s were multifarious and multivalent—generational, chemical, political, musical, and, of course, racial—and they did not open along clear, consistent lines.”  When it comes to tracing the musical fissures, Wald is an extraordinarily reliable guide, because of his exceptional ability to interrogate, not just print, the legend.