Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport Seeger Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties

About this book

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN including Best Picture Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for Timothee Chalamet. On the evening of July 25 1965 Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band and roared into his new rock hit Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet reacted with a mix of shock booing and scattered cheers. It was the shot heard round the worldDylans declaration of musical independence the end of the folk revival and the birth of rock as the voice of a generationand one of the defining moments in twentieth-century music. In Dylan Goes Electric! Elijah Wald explores the cultural political and historical context of this seminal event that embodies the transformative decade that was the sixties. Wald delves deep into the folk revival the rise of rock and the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylans artistic evolution his special affinity to blues his complex relationship to the folk establishment and his sometime mentor Pete Seeger and the ways he reshaped popular music forever. Breaking new ground on a story we think we know Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoughtful sharp appraisal of the controversial event at Newport and a nuanced provocative analysis of why it matters. In this tour de force Elijah Wald complicates the stick-figure myth of generational succession at Newport by doing justice to what he rightly calls Bob Dylans declaration of independence . . . This is one of the very best accounts Ive read of musicians fighting for their honor. Todd Gitlin author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation