 "When Dylan changed the times")
Dylan Goes Electric
Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties
Author: Elijah Wald
Publisher: Dey St
Pages: 354
Price: $15.99
More From This Section
The Nobel Prize for Literature is usually one of the least contentious of the Swedish Academy’s annual awards. Not so this year, and appropriately so. The announcement that a certain Robert Allen Zimmerman has been awarded the prize set off a hurricane of controversy and commentary. Did a singer-writer deserve this most rarefied of literary awards? Did his inscrutable silence mean he was going to do the Jean-Paul Satre thing and turn down the award? Yet others pronounced his taciturn response as confirmation of his artistry.
In the hullabaloo, everyone seemed to have missed the point: Bob Dylan has always done what’s least expected of him, even at the danger of alienating his closest friends and devoted followers.
Grammy winner and music historian Elijah Wald provides a timely reminder in his protracted history of June 25, 1965, when Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in his familiar outfit, but carrying an unfamiliar instrument. Instead of an acoustic guitar, Dylan went on stage that night with a Fender Stratocaster. Since then, the event has acquired mythic status. One example is the myth that as Dylan began singing, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”, Pete Seeger tried to hack the cords of the guitar with an axe. Though Seeger could wield an axe and did so, on stage, during a performance of a Texas work song in the 1950s, he didn’t do it that night. According to his own memoirs, he only shouted that he would if he had an axe.
What did it matter that Dylan had used an electric instrument, asks Wald in the Introduction to his book, promptly rejecting any “neat decimal” divisions of his story. As he asserts, what Dylan did that night was a complex decision made by a complex person in response to complex times. The counterculture of the sixties made it one of the most tumultuous decades in the second half of the 20th century. Remembering the optimism of the time, Hunter S Thompson would write in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), “San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and space... Maybe it meant something... There was madness in any direction, at any hour... that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...” In retrospect, Dylan was the voice of the time; Wald plunges us into its contemporary chaos.
The book, however, is not only about one night, or one character. It begins almost two decades before, with folk revivalist Seeger and his wife, Toshi, starting building a log cabin outside the town of Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson. The house and the community of artistes and performers it attracted represented for Seeger the ideal of a socialist commune. It was a sort of experiment in art and society being imitated in different parts of the world, including in India where members of the Indian People’s Theatre Association and Progressive Writers often lived in communal settings. It was also the soul of the politics of labour movements and non-commercial folk music with which Seeger identified. Wald projects Dylan as a writer with distinctly different political and aesthetic motivations.
“Bob Dylan grew up worlds away from Pete Seeger,” he writes. “Seeger came of age in the Depression and never lost the sense that economic inequality was the root of humanity’s problems... Dylan grew up in the most economically equitable era of American history.” Yet the calm of the era was only a precursor to the storm that would follow — the Cold War, anti-communist purges, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. The myriad forces knocking against each other in the crucible of history could hardly be in contained in a tidy narrative. For Wald, the moment that serves as the rupture in the play — to borrow Derrida’s formulation — is when Dylan goes electric. To quote one fan-journalist present that Sunday night, he had “electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other”. It was a wound from which the folk festival would never recover: it lasted only for four more years.
As music producer George Wein later wrote, “When Dylan went electric, that was the beginning of the end.” It was an end, of course; but it was also a birth: Of a new principle of aesthetics and protest. Early in the book, Wald quotes Seeger, quoting his father Charles, “The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. One can rarely put one’s hand on it.” Now, perhaps, after all these years, we can look back with a clearer eye at the rabbit of what happened that night. Wald’s book transcends the limits of musicology and popular history to combine with sparkling success and emotional engagement.