Bob Dylan's Electric Folk Hits Newport: Let's Go!
This night in 1965, they were watching Bob Dylan. They were listening to something else.
ON THE BALMY EVENING of Sunday, July 25, 1965 in the scenic surrounds of Fort Adams, Rhode Island following a gentle bluegrass set from 62-year-old country singer, Cousin Emmy, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, accompanied by two organists (Barry Goldberg and 21-year-old Al Kooper) and three wired representatives from a group of electric agitators known as The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: bassist Jerome Arnold, drummer Sam Lay, and their hunch-shouldered 22-year-old lead-guitarist, Mike Bloomfield. Miss Emmy had played a gentle comic set, just what the sound-system was set up to deal with. The audience were in a mellow mood, and looking forward to an extra performance from Dylan following the brief three-song acoustic workshop performance he'd offered up the day before.
Following the announcement from Master of Ceremonies Pete Yarrow that "the person that's going to come up now has a limited amount of time... His name is Bob Dylan", there follows one of the most dizzyingly and unruly rock performances ever captured on film, a public presentation that still sounds weird and out-of-time to this day.
Right from Dylan's opening cry of "Let's go!" the whole three-song electric performance buzzes with a nervy feral power. From the opening number, Maggie's Farm, Dylan glows with a proud candescent arrogance as the band chug machine-like, Kooper's liturgical organ drone pushes at the limits of accepted folk amplification while Bloomfield's lead electric repeatedly spits out what might best be described as a kind of razor-edged swarf, joyous guitar noise somewhere five years down the road of little ol' 1965.
Retellings of Newport '65 focus on the booing that accompanied the performance – were they jeering electric Dylan, the weedy Newport sound system or a mixture of both? – but what remains in the reviewing is the near hysterical mood of excitement that buzzes around Dylan and band, the sound of a group of people being roused to an particular emotional response they may never have actually experienced before.