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Dylan Goes Electric!

Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

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THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. One of the music world's pre-eminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed look at the day Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.

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 world—Dylan's declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation—and 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 Dylan's 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 Dylan's 'declaration of independence' . . . This is one of the very best accounts I've read of musicians fighting for their honor." — Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation

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    • Library Journal

      July 1, 2015

      The night that folksinger Bob Dylan (b. 1941) "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is a pivotal moment in 20th-century American music history. While much has been written about the event (e.g., Andrew Grant Jackson's 1965), this book places Newport in the context of the seismic shift that happened in popular music in the 1960s. Wald (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll) devotes the first 200 pages to the musical strands that led up to Newport with an emphasis on musician/activist Pete Seeger's career and the folk revival of the late 1950s. He discusses Dylan's early influences and writes engagingly about the folk scene in Greenwich Village in which the musician thrived. By 1965 Dylan was on the verge of becoming a rock star and that did not sit well with the folk purists at Newport. Wald, whose impressive research draws heavily on interviews with other musicians as well as many attendees, provides an encyclopedic account of the festivals in which Dylan participated and gives almost equal attention to the other performers. VERDICT Anyone interested in Dylan, folk music, or rock and roll will adore this volume. It might not resolve the questions of what really happened in Newport in 1965, but it comes very close.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2015

      Writer/musician Wald, who has delivered major books on blues, folk, and rock, revisits a watershed moment in popular music: Bob Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 with electric guitar in hand, singing "Like a Rolling Stone." After the hysteria that erupted, folk broke, rock became the voice of a generation, and Dylan showed everyone that he was forging his own musical path. Electric for sure.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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