Dylan Goes Electric! Newport Seeger Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties (Audible Audio Edition) Elijah Wald Sean Runnette Tantor Audio Books
Download As PDF : Dylan Goes Electric! Newport Seeger Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties (Audible Audio Edition) Elijah Wald Sean Runnette Tantor Audio Books
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 20th-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.
Dylan Goes Electric! Newport Seeger Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties (Audible Audio Edition) Elijah Wald Sean Runnette Tantor Audio Books
At 50 years, I guess this famous sixties event seems about as pertinent as a Reformation church schism, but the book is entertaining. Wald uses the wide lens and possesses the requisite historical imagination to attempt to describe the campfire crew that was the butt of the joke. This isn't easily done because it's hard to imagine today's analogy to that innocence (Apple fanboys?). I suppose Joe Boyd was a little closer to the mischief in his description in White Bicycles but essentially the small group responsible for the sound seems to have wished to give part of the audience a little poke in the eye before watching it be buried in the sand of history. Dylan comes off like a mist driven by storm, creating what he can with scarcely a thought toward marketability (which was definitely part of the charm) and this is a big turning point in his performing biography: the ensuing ten months or so got nasty enough audience response that drummer Levon Helm quit to work on an oil rig. Dylan persisted to the end (and his motorcycle accident) but seldom seemed comfortable with his audience when he resumed performing ("all I see is dark eyes").I think Wald had yet a more interesting book but there's such an industry in Dylan biographies that he took the deal he could. He's especially good at perceiving and explaining all the social fissures within the broad folk "movement." And having been close enough to Dave Van Ronk to finish his autobiography Mayor of McDougall Street, Wald certainly has the inside scoop. He understands the commercial angles and he's listened to all the bootleg tapes. Finally, he's enough of a wit that there are plenty of laughs. Not your standard "artist versus audience" triumphal Dylan book and that's a good thing.
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Dylan Goes Electric! Newport Seeger Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties (Audible Audio Edition) Elijah Wald Sean Runnette Tantor Audio Books Reviews
There is a lot of this book that sets us up for Newport. I get that and it is done well, but it has a lot of
information that a Dylan fan and a 60's survivor already knows. The best part of the book is when it zones in on Newport, the history, the growth of the festival, the shows each year leading up to the electric meltdown.
The reporting on the Dylan Goes Electric weekend is precise and complete.
I'm glad I read the book.
Elijah Wald is one of the best musicologists I've ever read. His How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n' Roll is eyeopening, and this history of Dylan's electronic move shows the underlying revolutionary changes that were happening in the mid-1960s. Incidentally, Wald's father was a Nobel-Prize winning biologist and anti-Vietnam War activists and his mother, Ruth Hubbard, is a brilliant feminist biologist. Elijah understands the political climate of the 1960s like no other musicologist. He's also a player, so he understands the music from the inside.
IF you have an interest in the history of the late 1950s-early 1960s 'folk' revival, and in Bob Dylan's impact on that movement and on the history of rock and roll, you will find this book fascinating. It's well written, fast paced, and told me a great deal I didn't know about a subject I thought I knew a great deal about. This is not, however, a book for Dylan fanboys - it is as much a book about Pete Seeger and the folk movement into which Dylan crashed, as it is about Dylan.
Interesting to a point, but far too detailed for my taste. Also, the last two chapters are like groundhog's day, he just keeps saying the same thing over and over again. Ok, I heard you the first time, I know what you think the meaning of that night was, there is no need to restate it 30 times.
This is a fantastic book about a moment in popular music that many people, including myself, thought was settled. Wald incorporates multiple source materials to show how the career paths of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan both converged and diverged to culminate in the conflict over folk music that happened in Newport in 1965. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is when Wald lets various participants, including fans, recount their experience during Dylan's "electric" performance. The reader can then easily see that how music history remembers this moment is tied to the claims and stakes made about folk music. Maybe Wald spends a bit too much time getting to the 1965 performance, but the payoff is immense. Well-written and enjoyable overall, especially if like me you love reading about the history of American folk and popular music from around 1945-1965.
Wald does what so few writers on popular music manage to do--he offers an historical argument. There is as much here about Pete Seeger and the folk revival scene as there is about Dylan. Reflecting his deep immersion in a variety of source materials, Wald contextualizes Dylan's (in)famous electric kiss-off better than any other writer I've read. In the process, he demythologizes and historicizes it. This is no simple-minded paean to Dylan-the-Genius. Instead, it is a brilliant exposition that illustrates how committed yet precious many of the Newport folkies were, yet also how diffident and careless Robert Zimmerman already was by 1965-66. As befits a truly great book, it offers no easy or definitive answers, and leaves the reader with more questions than when he first opened it.
If you are a Dylan devotee, this book is a detailed, readable, objective account of Dylan's life through that famous/infamous night at the Newport Folk Festival. Wald does an excellent job of tracing the times and the people that in sum-total lead to the inevitability of this 20th Century Icon plugging a cord into his guitar. The story articulates the rise of folk-rock as a synthesis of its foundational forms (including blues), the juxtaposition of Dylan and Pete Seeger leading up to the cultural transformation, and the impact Dylan's music has had on so many musicians (of many genres) who came after him. Only small criticism is that one group, The Grateful Dead, is not mentioned in the discussion, and probably should have been. A great cultural history of the 1960s.
At 50 years, I guess this famous sixties event seems about as pertinent as a Reformation church schism, but the book is entertaining. Wald uses the wide lens and possesses the requisite historical imagination to attempt to describe the campfire crew that was the butt of the joke. This isn't easily done because it's hard to imagine today's analogy to that innocence (Apple fanboys?). I suppose Joe Boyd was a little closer to the mischief in his description in White Bicycles but essentially the small group responsible for the sound seems to have wished to give part of the audience a little poke in the eye before watching it be buried in the sand of history. Dylan comes off like a mist driven by storm, creating what he can with scarcely a thought toward marketability (which was definitely part of the charm) and this is a big turning point in his performing biography the ensuing ten months or so got nasty enough audience response that drummer Levon Helm quit to work on an oil rig. Dylan persisted to the end (and his motorcycle accident) but seldom seemed comfortable with his audience when he resumed performing ("all I see is dark eyes").
I think Wald had yet a more interesting book but there's such an industry in Dylan biographies that he took the deal he could. He's especially good at perceiving and explaining all the social fissures within the broad folk "movement." And having been close enough to Dave Van Ronk to finish his autobiography Mayor of McDougall Street, Wald certainly has the inside scoop. He understands the commercial angles and he's listened to all the bootleg tapes. Finally, he's enough of a wit that there are plenty of laughs. Not your standard "artist versus audience" triumphal Dylan book and that's a good thing.
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