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(Elijah Wald is a great writer and a solid leftie. I plan to read and
review this book the first chance I get but I doubt it will do much to
change my mind about Bob Dylan, who I regard as a great songwriter and
performer until he lost his voice.)
NY Times, July 24 2015
Review: ‘Dylan Goes Electric!’ Considers Folk, Rock and a ’60s Divide
By Janet Maslin
DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC!
Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties
By Elijah Wald
Illustrated. 354 pages. Dey St. $26.99.
Saturday night is the 50th anniversary of Dylanageddon: the night Bob
Dylan savaged the Newport Folk Festival by making loud, electrified
noise at a sanctuary that had never been thus sullied. The story of his
1965 assault on Newport is very well known. Its effects have been
contemplated ad nauseam. Its details show up in every Dylan biography.
It’s so essential to the Dylan story that it may even have engendered
folk songs of its own. So the idea of a book to commemorate this geezer
milestone seems unnecessary, to put it kindly.
But what a surprise “Dylan Goes Electric!” turns out to be. This
splendid, colorful work of musicology and cultural history is written by
Elijah Wald, whose broad range of other books (“Narcocorrido,” “How the
Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Global Minstrels”) allows him to
approach Newport with a broad base of knowledge. He is perhaps best
known for “The Mayor of Macdougal Street,” a collaboration with Dave Van
Ronk that became Mr. Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir. That book
reads like a labor of love. This one does, too.
Mr. Wald is a superb analyst of the events he describes. And his
analyses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Even his introduction
includes enough startling context to indicate “Dylan Goes Electric!”
will be seeing the old story with new eyes. What if Mr. Dylan, with his
new non-folk songs “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It’s All
Over Now, Baby Blue,” was not presenting something mind-blowingly
visionary, as he is in most versions of the Newport myth, but signaling
a retreat into solipsism and selfishness instead?
“In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people
who booed were stuck in the dying past,” Mr. Wald writes. “But there is
another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and
Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking
himself in a citadel of wealth and power.” The Bob Dylan who became the
spirit of the 1960s — that is, the hipper second half of the decade —
was part phantom, after all. He had his motorcycle accident, holed up in
Woodstock and in 1968 asked an old friend “How do you know I’m not — for
the war?”
Mr. Wald knows that it is impossible to think about the Dylan of the
Newport Folk Festival — the one who arrived as a new deity in 1963, the
one who supposedly divided the place into a battlefield of angry
factionalism two years later — without thinking equally hard about Pete
Seeger: the folk music movement that Seeger built, the ideals it
nurtured, the ways it spun away from those ideals as folk turned
commercial, the story of “what Newport meant to him, and the lights that
dimmed when the amplifiers sucked up the power.”
And although Mr. Wald tries his best to resist oversimplifications, he’s
just too good at creating and parsing them. Yes, Seeger can be seen as
having tried to use folk music to accomplish an ideal of democracy, of
people working together in a spirit of optimism; and, yes, Mr. Dylan can
be seen as the loner, the cynic following a path all his own. There are
big flaws in these stereotypes, which Mr. Wald acknowledges, but not in
the larger truth that Newport drew an idealistic young audience that
could be either crushed or encouraged, depending on what kinds of
messages an ever more commercialized folk music craze delivered.
Mr. Wald does a fascinating job of describing the ways Seeger’s hard
lessons about the collision of ideals and commerce came into play here.
By the time of Newport, he had seen both extremes of commercial success:
chart-topping as one of the Weavers, then being blacklisted. For all of
his self-sacrifice, he was a man with both a family to support and a
message to communicate, and he was at a pinnacle of respect and success
in 1963, when he was welcomed into the Newport fold.
(The famous photograph showing Newport royalty — Seeger; Joan Baez;
Odetta; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Freedom Singers; and the newbie Bob
Dylan — linking arms to sing Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome”
includes Theodore Bikel, who died on Tuesday. This major moment received
scant mention in Mr. Bikel’s obituaries.)
Two years later, the ground had begun to erode beneath Seeger. For all
his hard work in assembling a folk song movement, not everyone agreed
with his notion of what contemporary folk music was. And his singing
style had become a kind of musical wallpaper, eclipsed even by such
arrivistes as the Kingston Trio. “Dylan Goes Electric!” is dense with
detail about many rivalries, including one that actually looked like a
bear fight between the great but pedantic song collector Alan Lomax and
the manager Albert Grossman.
The factionalism at Newport allowed this kind of antagonism to have huge
consequences. Grossman managed the most popular so-called folk musicians
of the era, from Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia, and Peter, Paul and
Mary to the sainted Dylan himself. Lomax embodied the old guard’s
contempt for them. And the vengeful Grossman had the power, by sparking
Dylan’s interest in Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield’s rhythm
section, to make the music planned for Sunday night’s performance even
louder than it was already going to be.
The ensuing racket is famously said to have made Seeger want to grab an
ax, and in time even Seeger himself repeated this apparently bogus
story. Mr. Wald has not only examined all sides of an epochal showdown
but also conducted a 2014 interview with a witness who heard Seeger
speak to his father, Charles Seeger, about the event when it was over.
“I thought he had so much promise,” he said about the apostate Dylan.
Granted, you need an entry-level interest in this subject matter to care
about some of it, but Mr. Wald selects his examples very well. The press
of the early ’60s, very slow to figure out what those hairy bohemians
were up to, are a fine source of quotable material: When Billboard wrote
about Peter, Paul and Mary’s hit “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it described
their version as a “slick ditty by Bob Dylan, a sailor’s lament, sung
softly and tenderly.”
Concert reviewers could be equally dense. When Joan Baez, at Newport in
1965, made “a quick little dedication to President Johnson on his
marvelous foreign policy” and sang a verse of “Stop! In the Name of
Love,” ending with the line “Think it o-over,” a local newspaper
reported that she simply couldn’t resist breaking into a Supremes hit.
Then there were the flaps over so-called controversial songs. Protest
songs about war and race met little opposition, but Seeger was taken to
task for singing something called “Manyura Manyah,” from the British
Isles. It told the tale of a manure shoveler whose trade had been wiped
out by the automobile.
This is a book from which to learn that Mr. Dylan’s epochal 1965 set was
so badly timed that the act he followed was a woman named Cousin Emmy,
who played “Turkey in the Straw” by slapping the melody on her cheeks.
But it’s the agility of Mr. Wald’s thinking and his willingness to treat
a long-ossified event as living history that give “Dylan Goes Electric!”
its bite. He winds up thinking that Mr. Dylan managed, in one 35-minute
Newport set, to do irrevocable damage to Seeger’s reputation and destroy
much of the folk movement he had worked so long and hard to build. “It
was not news that Dylan was the future,” he writes. “The news was that
Seeger was the past.”
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