Topic: When Bob Dylan Went Electric
Article from WSJ , that says Dylan changed rock when he picked up a Stratocaster ............ IDK , bout this ... I think what people call " rock music " came from Delta and Chicago blues, interpreted by Clapton, Beck, Winwood, Led Zep, et al , who brought it back to America.
I think maybe the writer is giving Dylan more credit than he deserves.
When Bob Dylan Went Electric
Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan picked up a Stratocaster and changed the world of rock ’n’ roll forever.
By MARC MYERS
July 20, 2015 6:45 p.m. ET
17 COMMENTS
When Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival on the night of July 25, 1965, he had a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar around his neck. Three of his five backup musicians also took up electric instruments. Minutes into the first song, “Maggie’s Farm,” roughly a third of the 17,000 people in the audience began to boo. The media covered the rude reaction the next day.
Mr. Dylan couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. In the months ahead, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter was transformed from folk’s boy wonder into the poet equivalent of Elvis Presley. His newly released single “Like a Rolling Stone” would reach No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart, while the album on which it appeared, “Highway 61 Revisited,” would climb to No. 3. For rock musicians, Mr. Dylan’s uncompromising lyrics and stripped-down delivery were a creative wake-up call.
By year’s end, the Beatles responded with “Rubber Soul,” and Mr. Dylan’s influence went viral. After 1965, the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed and dozens of other ’60s rock musicians found the courage to write songs that reflected their own perspectives and aesthetics. By plugging in, Mr. Dylan had put a pin in pop and started rock’s singer-songwriter revolution.
Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss was about at Newport. In recent years, folk fans and artists who were there have insisted, almost out of embarrassment, that the boos were in response to the sound system’s high volume and distortion, not Mr. Dylan’s electric band. But in truth, the outrage was more complicated and deeply rooted in folk’s anti-materialism, the music’s orthodoxy, and a snooty belief that pop-rock of the early ’60s was mindless.
As evidenced in the 2005 documentary “No Direction Home,” Mr. Dylan was shaken when he left the Newport stage after cutting his set short after three songs. But months later, he shrugged off the reaction, telling a print interviewer, “I think there’s always a little boo in all of us.” Nevertheless, for many in the Newport audience, Mr. Dylan “going electric” was an act of betrayal by a misguided schemer trying to pass himself off as a British invader.
Folk fans were on a mission in 1965. Many saw the music’s early-’60s boom as proof that folk was winning over young, college-educated adults in the fight against the Vietnam War, segregation and conformity. In their minds, the only obstacle to expanding folk’s appeal to teens was the infernal electric guitar.
Viewed by folkies as the instrument of cheaters, the electric guitar was considered a sexually charged shortcut that could be cranked up to mask a lack of ability and artistic integrity. While folk fans and musicians seemed to accept the electric guitar in the hands of black blues musicians, they clearly detested the instrument when played by white pop-rock bands singing silly love songs.
There also was a political component. To the folk fan, Mr. Dylan’s use of an electric guitar was an insult to folk’s elders and a brash power grab. Fans believed that legitimate folk musicians played acoustic instruments, which kept the focus on the emotional power of the lyrics and vocals. Early on, two of those elders—Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger—had even given Mr. Dylan their blessing.
But perhaps the final outrage was Mr. Dylan’s perceived ego. By playing a flashy Stratocaster in a black leather jacket and tight jeans while singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” Mr. Dylan touched a nerve. Since the Depression, American folk songs were largely about protest and the collective “them”—victims of economic misfortune and oppression. By contrast, Mr. Dylan’s new single was interpreted as a snarky upbraiding of a woman who in her prime “threw the bums a dime” but now, on the skids, found herself with no direction home. To many folkies, the lyrics seemed condescending and mean-spirited.
American folk had changed considerably since the music’s early days in the 1940s, when artists like Guthrie, Seeger, Lead Belly, Josh White, Cisco Houston and Susan Reed were selfless, left-leaning troubadours singing to raise public awareness about corruption, racism and injustice.
Unlike the blues—a personal expression of rural hardship—American folk became an urban call to action. As Elijah Wald notes in his recently published book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” folk “was not a particular sound or genre; it was a way of understanding the world and rooting the present in the past.”
Mr. Dylan’s rise in folk circles was rapid. He arrived in New York in January 1961 and by year’s end had a record contract with Columbia. In 1963 his “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a No. 2 pop hit for Peter, Paul & Mary, and by 1965 several of his songs were covered with chart success by pop-rock artists such as the Byrds, the Turtles and Sonny and Cher.
In June 1965, Mr. Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.” Originally planned as an acoustic waltz, Mr. Dylan decided on a rock beat instead—with Mike Bloomfield on electric guitar and Al Kooper on organ. The single was released on July 20.
Up at Newport on July 24, Mr. Dylan rehearsed an electric set with Bloomfield, Mr. Kooper and several members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, an electric blues ensemble. The next night, the stage’s sound system was cranked up. In addition to the boos that followed, Seeger reportedly was livid.
But despite the initial displeasure with Mr. Dylan’s amplified experiment, his fusion of folk and rock didn’t take long to catch on with fans. A month later, when he played an electric set at the Forest Hills Music Festival in Queens, N.Y., catcalls again went up in protest. But this time, something strange happened. As Mr. Dylan kicked off “Like a Rolling Stone,” the audience began to sing along.
Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.com.
"
