Life Bookazines - Bob Dylan - 2020

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had missed the message of “Maggie’s Farm” still missed it

with this closing number, and the response this time was

rapturous. Dylan, for his part, wouldn’t return to Newport

for 37 years.

There is a never-settled debate concerning the hostil-

ity exhibited at Newport: Was it largely due to a short set

list, or to poor sound quality, or to the material (“tenth-rate

drivel,” according to folksinger Ewan MacColl), or to the

fact of electric music? Dylan surely bought into the final

reason and felt he had been betrayed by old friends and fans.

Four days after returning to New York from Newport, he

recorded “Positively 4th Street,” which seemed to promise

that he would get his revenge on his former fellow travel-

ers in the Village. If they wanted to see the future—at least,

Dylan’s future—they only needed to consider that “Like a

Rolling Stone,” a groundbreaking six-minute rock single,

was at Number Two on the Billboard chart and was shaping

the sound of a summer every bit as much as were the songs

of Motown, the Beatles, the Stones and the Beach Boys. If it

sold a couple fewer copies than the Kingsmen’s “Jolly Green

Giant” by the time the year was out, and if that was folk-

dom’s rebuttal, well, so be it.

Not all of the old crowd deserted him. The late and great

Dave Van Ronk, who always saw Dylan clearly even when he

had cause to detest him for his aberrant and even unethical

behavior, wrote in his posthumously published memoir: “I

thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby

to take. I did not care for all his new stuff, by any means, but

some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension

of what he had done up to that point. And I knew perfectly

well that none of us was a true ‘folk’ artist. We were profes-

sional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we

all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are

very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kib-

itzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was

absolutely right to ignore them.”

T

he latter half of 1965 was no less eventful than the

first. In confirmation of Side One of Bringing It All

Back Home came the album Highway 61 Revisited,

with Bloomfield, Kooper and other rockers along for the

ride, and the songs even more out there—the 11-minute

“Desolation Row” but one example. Dylan was going to ap-

pear in support of the record and his new sound, and needed

to cobble together a band. From the Highway 61 and “Like

a Rolling Stone” sessions, he brought Kooper and bassist

Harvey Brooks, adding to them members of that bar band

called the Hawks—the same band John Hammond Jr. had

PHOTOGR APH © DANIEL KR AMER

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