Rock 101: Dylan Goes Electric

It's another one of those events everybody knows -- at the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan "went electric," playing plugged-in instead of acoustic for the first time. The great folk singer Pete Seeger hated it so much that he threatened to cut the sound system cables with an axe. Dylan was booed off the stage, but not before someone in the crowd shouted "Judas!"

Like other things everybody supposedly knows, there's a grain of truth in it, but also much that didn't happen precisely that way. In the summer of 1965, Bob Dylan was the leading light of the folk scene. His half-acoustic, half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home, released in March, had been well-received by folk fans. It had already produced his first hit single, Subterranean Homesick Blues, and a second single, Like a Rolling Stone, was climbing the charts. On the night of July 24, after appearing at a workshop session during the Newport Folk Festival (the folkies took their art very, very seriously), Dylan asked organist Al Kooper, who had played on his album, to put together an electric band for a performance the next afternoon.

The band Kooper assembled consisted mostly of members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. There wasn't much time to rehearse -- the band worked on only three numbers, and by many accounts, the rehearsal didn't go well. But the show had to go on, and the booing started almost immediately after Dylan and the band kicked into Maggie's Farm. It continued sporadically throughout Like a Rolling Stone and Phantom Engineer, although there was intermittent cheering, too. After the third song, Dylan told the band, "Let's go, man." Concert MC Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary coaxed him back onto the stage, where he performed two more songs acoustically. The crowd cheered wildly, but when Dylan left the stage that night, he would not return to Newport for 37 years.

As years have passed and witnesses have told their stories, exactly why Dylan was booed and who booed him has become less clear. Some fans certainly objected to his new electric sound, but others were angry over the poor sound on the PA system. Yarrow claimed he was; Seeger later said he wanted to cut the cables because the sound was so poor,and that he wanted the crowd to be able to hear the words Dylan was singing. Other witnesses claim the booing came from other performers watching from the wings, or even from members of the press, and not from fans. (The incident is examined in detail in the 2005 documentary No Direction Home.)

For the rest of 1965 and into 1966, Dylan played both acoustic and electric sets during his live shows. The electric sets often brought strong negative reactions. (The "Judas" incident happened not at Newport, but in Manchester, England, in May 1966.) Despite the reaction, Dylan never backed down from his electrification. The success of Like a Rolling Stone made it clear that electric Dylan was going to be more popular than acoustic Dylan had ever been.