August 29, 2004
Dylan Plugs in.
39 years ago this week Bob Dylan "turned his back" on folk for rock and plugs in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. He came back though...
...roughly 37 years later. Boy "Bringing it All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", and "Blonde On Blonde" all suffered for it didn't they? :p
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Heh. The wig was a good gag. :-) The "Return to Newport" is a great boot.
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I'm no Dylanologist, but I know there's a debate about exactly what happened at Newport. Legend has it that the audience of folk-purists were outraged when Dylan went electric; but surviving recordings suggest that he was received with rapturous applause. Pete Seeger was supposedly so outraged that he wanted to cut the power cable with an axe; but Seeger now claims he was only complaining that the amplifiers were turned up too high. It makes me smile when I read Dylan biographers earnestly trying to tie their man into the great Modernist tradition by comparing the Newport Folk Festival to the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. That noise you hear is the sound of my bullshit detector going bleep! bleep! bleep!
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Great link. I always thought of Bob's appearance at Newport as the start of modern rock 'n roll. He moved the music beyond the two to three minute pop song into a more free form composition.