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    Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning
    Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning
    Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning
    Ebook44 pages1 hour

    Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning

    By Edward Renehan

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    About this ebook

    One of the most famous moments of the Sixties - and one which continues to this day to be grossly misconstrued, mistold, and loaded with undeserved meaning - is the night in July of 1965 when Bob Dylan played an electric set (or at least tried to play an electric set) at the Newport Folk Festival: an event after which, supposedly, the culture of the Sixties was never quite the same again.

    Seeger biographer David Dunaway speaks of Dylan understanding that at Newport “the electric guitar meant a declaration of war” and that, intensely ambitious, he sought publicity by smuggling “rock into the citadel of folk music.” In this narrative, battle lines were drawn, a fight waged, and a revolution begun.

    The over-simplification is too attractive to resist. Our tribal memory absolutely yearns for Dylan's abbreviated, 15-minute performance to be a pivot point not just from acoustic to electric, but also from traditional to commercial, from topical to cynical, and from roots to revolution. We also want Newport to be a “citadel of folk music,”and to be comfortable with any number of other safe, easy assumptions.

    For this symbology to work, however, we need an “old guard” to rebel against, and a youthful “new guard” to do the rising up. We also need to believe that traditional acoustic music cannot be (and was not at that time already) commercial, that electric music can never be traditional, that electric music is always commercial, that the Newport Fest (only a few years old) represented some sort of “hollowed ground” of acoustic music, and that various other straight lines apply. They don't. This book examines how and why.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Edward Renehan has written critically-praised books published by Oxford University Press, Crown, Doubleday, Basic Books, and other houses. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Hearst's VERANDA. His latest volume is PETE SEEGER VS. THE UN-AMERICANS: A TALE OF THE BLACKLIST.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Street Communications, LLC
    Release dateNov 22, 2016
    ISBN9781540145765
    Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning
    Author

    Edward Renehan

    Edward Renehan is the author of more than twenty books published by Doubleday, Oxford University Press, Crown, and many other imprints. He and his wife live in Wickford, Rhode Island - near Newport. 

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      Book preview

      Dylan at Newport, 1965 - Edward Renehan

      Pivot Point

      ––––––––

      For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

      - Jerry Garcia

      ––––––––

      Mention of `the Sixties' rouses strong emotions even in those who were already old when the Sixties began and those who were not even born when the Sixties ended. So wrote the eminent cultural historian Arthur Marwick. For some it is a golden age, for others a time when the old secure framework of morality, authority, and discipline disintegrated. In the eyes of the far left, it is the era when revolution was at hand, only to be betrayed by the feebleness of the faithful and the trickery of the enemy; to the radical right, an era of subversion and moral turpitude. What happened between the late Fifties and the early Seventies has been subject to political polemic, nostalgic mythologizing, and downright misrepresentations.

      Emphasis on mythologizing and, I might add, gross over-simplification.

      In the popular mind – our tribal memory, if you will – a number of key moments and utterances have come to define the arc of the Sixties.

      Politically, these include the August 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington and Dr. King's I Have a Dream Speech, the November 1963 assassination of JFK, the 1965 assassination of Malcom X, the 1968 assassinations of Dr. King and RFK, the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the subsequent trial of the Chicago Seven, and the shootings at Kent State (a fundamental part of the Sixties even though they happened in May of 1970). Culturally, these include such watershed events as the so-called Summer of Love and the Woodstock Festival.

      Individuals too have become iconic benchmarks. Fundamental aspects of the Sixties come to mind when we recall Timothy Leary and his cult of awakening one's mind through LSD, Ken Kesey (both as a novelist and as an LSD evangelist via the famous Acid Tests),  Jack Kerouac (primarily a Fifties writer who, despite himself, became a Sixties phenomenon and hero to a generation he did not pretend to understand), Wavy Gravy, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, Abbie Hoffman, Janice Joplin, Jerry Rubin, and so on.

      Generalities are easy, especially when it comes to what has gone before. While we are more likely to see present events as nuanced and conditional, we tend to view events of the past as absolute. So far as our tribal memory and imagination are concerned, we like our history rendered in straight and definitely drawn lines. Black and white, with few if any grays. We like fast, blunt, and all-too-simple facts. You know, stuff like: The Civil War was all about freeing the slaves; and the stock market crash of Black Friday caused the Great Depression.

      One key way we simplify

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