© Text by Robert Barry Francos /
FFanzen.blogspot.com
Images from the Internet
Images from the Internet
It was
inevitable that Bob Dylan would go electric, sending the folk masses either
running towards or away from the electronic medium. It wasn’t as much a rebellion when he showed
up and plugged in his Strat during the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, shocking and
rocking the status quo with “Maggie’s Farm,” as a growth spurt.
Dylan’s previous
albums started out professing their loyalty to what preceded, nodding a head to
Woody Guthrie, Delta Blues, and his upbringing in small city Minnesota. When he hit the folk circuit in New York, his
retro sound and vocal meanderings were as shocking to that audience used to the
more subdued folk sounds of the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter Paul
& Mary, as his hard hitting excursion in 1965. However, the first time was
a revivalism to the hootenanny crowd who grasped his sincerity and bravery, putting
him at the head of the pack. This became especially true when he started
producing original numbers that were not about sea shanties (“Greenland
Fisheries”), lost loves (“Barbara Allen”) and murder (“Down By the River”,
“Willow Garden”), but of current events (“Blowin’ in the Wind”) and the changes
in society (“The Times They are A-Changin’”); he even wrote nasty ditties about
people he didn’t like (“It Ain’t Me Babe”).
Much like
the beginning of rock and roll, where the smaller songwriters were copied and homogenized
by the larger, and more mainstream sounding artists, this also followed in the
folk milieu, with many artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary covering Dylan, or
even Judy Collins having a hit with “Suzanne” before its creator, Leonard
Cohen. But as with the examples for both folk and rock, having the smoothed out
versions led the way for the lesser known artists, especially Dylan, whose
voice was hardly AM radio friendly.
Dylan was in
a constant mode of expanding and stretching, each album being more progressive
and far reaching, with fame and ego pushing him ever forward. By the time he
played England in spring of 1965, it was obvious he was bored. As much as he
was influencing the whole folk genre, spurring on new sounds from the likes of
Phil Ochs and Simon & Garfunkel, he was also, in turn, tuned into the newer,
relatively harder and updated eclectic electric sounds of the British Invasion, as well as the more harsh
music that was coming out of the Pacific Northwest, with bands like the
Kingsmen and the Wailers. Most likely drugs were also spurring him on, as
evidenced by the classic footage of Dylan and John Lennon completely in an
outer range of mind alteration in the back of a limo, as they mumble and burble
along; it’s as painful as it is unintentionally funny.
If Dylan had
not plugged in, surely someone else would have eventually, as technology manages to eventually change everything, but it was the
combination of Dylan’s stature as a folk artist and being in the bailiwick of
the traditional celebration of the genre that broke the folk rock sound
barrier. If Dylan had played somewhere else, even Folk City on Bleecker St., or
it was someone else who had electrified Newport, the shock wave would not have
been as big and certainly not as electrically instantaneous at that moment. It
was all the elements forming into a perfect time-binding flash that changed not
just one genre, but many, and forming a completely new sound that would spark
the likes of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. This kind of moment would not
occur again until the Beatles would release Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
Side note: Music historian Tom Bingham
states that “Some of us would argue that the
release of Pet Sounds a year earlier was a far
more groundbreaking moment (and current historical perspective seems to
corroborate that).” While I agree with him on some level, I believe the effect
of Pet Sounds was more on a music industry level, and Sgt. Pepper’s was more on a mass cultural one, i.e., everyone had the Beatles record, but the Beach Boys’
excellent release was less populous.
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