Dylan Goes Electric
I am reading Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. It concerns the time, 1965, when Bob Dylan shocked people (and the world!!!) at The Newport Folk Festival by playing a set with electric instruments. The book brings some vital thoughts to mind.
At this time, fifty years later, the idea that using electrified instruments could shake people up seems quaint. I mean, I survived Blue Cheer’s first album. The thunder of Blue Cheer's amps shook the walls, but I understood that you could make interesting sound that way, too.
You can find Dylan’s performance at Newport online at Eyeneer. His set starts with “Maggie’s Farm”. Dylan plays a driving rhythm guitar as he sings. Mike Bloomfield, then of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, adds scintillating blues fills on electric guitar. Bass and drums supply a nice hopping movement. A solid rocking performance, all in all. Nonetheless Dylan got booed, and left the stage after a couple of songs. Really?
As Elijah Wald notes, many complained simply that the sound system could not handle the very loud music pouring thru it. Distortion resulted. Fair enough. Others, however, felt betrayed. They believed that folk music, by whatever definition, should not be electrified. They felt that folk music lost authenticity because of the electric instruments. To understand this requires a little history.
Two separate but intertwining folk music currents developed following World War II. The first, with Pete Seeger central, gathered traditional music from around the world. To Seeger, to sing and play the folk music of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, Great Britain, Africa, was to help bring us together. My elementary school seemingly teemed with teachers who brought their guitars to class and had us sing songs that Seeger and others had unearthed. The idea was to respect the varied humans of the world. And it is true, one hundred years ago, people did not use electric instruments.
The second current of the folk music boom derived from Woody Guthrie. He wrote his own songs, often using traditional songs as basis. His motive was to politically activate people. Such songs would later be called protest songs. Segregation, nuclear war, Vietnam, were all ready subjects for protest songs.
Dylan grew up in that nexus, but also the early rock nexus of Elvis and Chuck Berry. His early songs derived pretty straitly from his influences, notably Guthrie’s songs of social conscience. He was Guthrie’s poetic heir, or so people thought. If nothing else can be said of Bob Dylan’s work, it has been ever-changing. When people have tried to encapsulate him, he does something different.
When you start out as an artist, by which to say any sort of creative work, you tend to follow the work of others. You wrap yourself around the work of artists you respond to, who have performed the appreciable task. Consciously or unconsciously, you take from these mentors.
If you can keep your feet, not become slavish to the precepts, you develop your own way. It takes persistence. Enough outer voices will try to direct you. You’ll hear an inner voice too, that just wants to be loved. You have to be mindful of these distractions.
Bob Dylan played in rock bands while in high school. He also had a broad and deep knowledge of folk music traditions, blues, country, and such. Eventually his influences submerged into his work. He found his own path.
Lesson to be taken:
Artists are conduits. The more they let go of rules, mentors, and classifications, the better they can receive the surprise. Those rules, mentors, and classifications serve a purpose, they give you a sense of place, but then the developing artist moves on.
By that same token, audiences should try letting the thing before them be the thing before them. As the noted guru Bill Belichick insistently repeats: It is what it is. Value judgments interfere with seeing what the thing is. The complainers at Newport were hearing the amps, not the music.
I do not propose that we should like everything. Instead, I suggest that tamping down on the like/dislike instinct so that you can see what you can see has value. For the artist and the audience both, mindful of the seed, mindful of the earth, mindful of the water: see the flower bloom.
Note: Photo rights Alberto Caballo, Creative Commons