On the night of Sunday, July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. He played a Fender electric guitar, and he was backed, for the first time onstage, by an amplified rock ’n’ roll band. They performed three songs. Chaos ensued.
That much everyone can agree on. For almost 60 years, though, the details of this cataclysmic concert have been endlessly analyzed and debated. A depiction of these events makes up the climax of the new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” with Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. The film recreates the Newport show complete with deafening boos, objects being hurled at the stage, and fury from the folk music establishment like festival board members Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist.
Dylan recently tweeted that Newport was a “fiasco” (yes, he’s tweeting now), but those 20 minutes became one of rock’s most legendary moments. “Dylan going electric” remains universal shorthand for artists pursuing their own musical path, bravely defying the expectations of their audience regardless of consequence.
“The remarkable thing about that weekend,” said Joe Boyd, who was the production manager at Newport in 1965, “was that so many big historical events become hinges of history in retrospect, but this was one of those events that everybody saw coming and everybody was alert to and conscious of as it was happening.”
The set has been represented on film before — in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, “No Direction Home,” and Murray Lerner’s two chronicles of Newport, “Festival” (1967) and the Dylan-specific “The Other Side of the Mirror” (2007). In Todd Haynes’s 2007 Dylan meditation, “I’m Not There,” the singer (in this scene played by Cate Blanchett) and his musicians take the stage, open their instrument cases, pull out machine guns and fire on the crowd.
The portrayal of Newport in “A Complete Unknown” (which is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties”) plays fast and loose with the timeline but gets across the sense of pandemonium and conflict.
The most complicated element to unpack is the booing. At a news conference later in 1965, Dylan said, “They certainly booed, I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.”
But why was the audience booing? Was it simply because Dylan was playing amplified, beat-driven music?
By this time, he had already released the album “Bringing It All Back Home,” one side of which was fully electric, and the single “Like a Rolling Stone” came out a week before Newport. Even his very first official single, “Mixed-Up Confusion” from 1962, featured a rock backing. So could the crowd really have been that surprised?
Wald pointed out in a recent phone conversation that even the documentary record had been altered to skew the story. In “The Other Side of the Mirror,” there is loud booing after Dylan finishes “Maggie’s Farm.”
“That’s not real,” Wald said. “Lerner took the wild booing that happened when Dylan left the stage after only playing three songs and spliced it in after ‘Maggie’s Farm’ to create the illusion that the crowd was booing him for playing electric.”
Wald continued, “There certainly were people who were upset at him playing electric, but how many people were booing him for that and how many were booing because he had left the stage is impossible to sort out.” (Dylan eventually returned and played two acoustic songs.)
Boyd, who estimated that between a third and half of the crowd was booing, noted that everyone would have been aware of Dylan’s electric recordings. But he remembered overhearing conversations during the festival in which people were asking whether he would dare bring the band that played on the new record to the sacred ground of Newport.
“A lot of people had a very passionate belief in the folk festival for its ethos, for what it represented,” he said, then added, referring to the singer Theodore Bikel and other folk luminaries, “It wasn’t just Seeger and Bikel and Lomax; an awful lot of ordinary people in the audience felt that way.”
Wald said, “The people who were upset had always thought of Dylan as one of them, and this performance was very much an in-your-face declaration that he wasn’t.”
Then there’s the simple matter of volume. Wald describes Dylan’s set as “probably the loudest performance that had ever happened,” adding that an electric set by the Chambers Brothers had opened the festival without incident.
Seeger — who is played by Edward Norton and presented in “A Complete Unknown” as a narrative foil to Dylan — gave differing versions of his response to the Newport set over the years, but mostly explained that his frustration came from the sonic distortion, which impeded the ability to hear Dylan’s lyrics. (Dylan later said that Seeger’s unenthusiastic reaction was like “a dagger” in his heart.)
“It was pretty obvious that a lot of people were shocked,” Boyd said. As part of the new generation overseeing the sound board, he added that his own attitude was “we were on Dylan’s side — we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s stick it to everybody.’ Now I have more sympathy for Seeger and the others’ vehement objection to what was going on, because they understood it in a way more acutely than we did.”
“A Complete Unknown” fudges some of the Newport set details. Dylan did not close the 1965 festival, which Wald said the artist took as an insult and which became yet another source of tension. While “Like a Rolling Stone” was on its way to becoming Dylan’s first Top 10 single, it wasn’t the final song in his set — he played it second.
Most obvious to even casual Dylan fans is a sequence that involves one of the iconic moments in his career: when an audience member yelled “Judas!” during an early electric concert, he responded by encouraging his band, “Play loud” (adding an expletive), and roaring into “Rolling Stone.” This exchange is shown in the film, but it didn’t happen at Newport; it occurred almost a year later, in Manchester, England, and by then booing electric instruments had become a frequent ritual on Dylan’s world tour.
Meanwhile, there was a fistfight between Lomax and Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, on the Newport grounds, briefly shown in the movie. It didn’t happen during Dylan’s set, though, but during the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose appearance Lomax had opposed all along — not because the group was amplified, but because it was mostly made up of young white musicians.
Since the director James Mangold decided to bring all the principal characters in “A Complete Unknown” together for the conclusion at Newport, a few other liberties are taken.
Dylan had broken up in 1964 with Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo for the film at Dylan’s insistence and played by Elle Fanning), and she did not attend the 1965 Newport show. In fact, Dylan married his first wife, Sara Lownds, just a few months after Newport. Dylan and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) did cement an important friendship at the 1964 festival, but the country singer was not there in 1965.
Those storytelling filigrees are easy to understand given Mangold’s intention of creating a “fable” from Dylan’s early years, not a documentary. Newport is unquestionably the pivot point of this period, and the greatest paradox may be that the hostility Dylan faced, whatever the real reason, proved to be crucial in the creative future of the man who would ultimately win the Nobel Prize for literature.
“The crazy thing is, if Dylan had not gone to Newport and been booed, and had that not made news, I doubt he would have been booed all the other places,” Wald said. “And if he hadn’t been booed, the narrative would be that Dylan quit doing folk music and became a pop star. The booing is actually the thing that accomplished Dylan’s aim of going electric while still being viewed as someone who completely went his own way and didn’t care about stardom.”
Boyd said, “We’ll never know exactly what he wanted, but we do know that everything changed after that night.”
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