Levon & the Hawks at Tony Marts

Dylan Goes Electric

NOTE: This book focuses on just the times of Dylan when he "went electric" in 1965, yet it doesn't mention Levon and the Hawks, Tony Marts or any of the deep background that is provided in Waiting on the Angels - The Long Cool Summer of '65 Revisited. 

Dylan Goes Electric – Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald (Dey St. Harper-Collins, 2015)

Elijah Wald:

“On the evening of July 25, 1965 Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band and roared into a blistering version of ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ followed by his new rock single, ‘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, booking, 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.”

 “The first appearance after Newport was at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens (New York) on August 20, and Dylan played the first set alone and acoustic and then was joined by Robertson, Al Kooper on organ, Levon Helm on drums, and Harvey Brooks on bass.”

“Backstage, Dylan prepared the band, saying, ‘If they start yellin’ and booin’ don’t let it bother ya. Just keep playin’ the best ya know how.’”

DJ Murray the K introduced Dylan as part of a “new, swinging mood in the country – what’s happening, baby.”

“The first, solo set was universally cheered, and the crowd listened rapt through the new, ten-minute-long ‘Desolation Row,’ but when the band came on in the second half, angry fans booed, threw trash, and chanted, ‘We want Dylan,’ and one yelled ‘Scumbag!,’ provoking Dylan’s only retort of the evening, a restrained ‘Aw, come on now,’ which was approved with laughter and applause.”

“Forest Hills was a tennis stadium, and the crowd sounds like it is at a combination concert and sports event, there to listen but also the cheer its favorites and boo the opposing team. It was terrific theater, and while Dylan was upset by Newport, he was exhilarated by Forest Hills.”

“When Kooper and Brooks arrived at Grossman’s apartment for the post concert party, ‘Dylan bounded across the room and hugged both of us, ‘It was fantastic,’ he said, ‘a real carnival.’”

“Dylan had been getting bored with his solo concerts, going out every night, singing the same songs, seeing the same faces, getting the same reactions. In early 1965 he told a friend, ‘I ask myself: Would you come to see me tonight?’ and I’d have to truthfully say, ‘No, I wouldn’t come. I’d rather be doin’ something else.’”

“’Now, he said, ‘When I ask myself would I wanna come hear this tonight I gotta say I would. I dig it. You know? I really dig it. I don’t think about quitting anymore.’ He had always loved rock ‘ roll, and if some fans were disappointed, his true supporters were with him.”

“In hindsight,…Newport, in 1965 it made the news because it captured the tensions and conflicts of the moment, and for people who lived through that moment it only became more emblematic with the passage of time. That was the year of Vietnam, Watts, of the Free Speech Movement and the first acid tests, and the confrontation at Newport marked the end of the folk boom and the arrival of rock as a mature art form, the break of the New Left from the old, and the triumph of the counterculture. It as a handy, compelling symbol, recycled in myriad documentaries, and eventually became something of a cliché. But it continues to resonate because, if its details are emblematic of a particular moment, the central conflict was timeless. It was not the death of an old dream and the birth of a new, but the clash of two dreams, both very old and both very much still with us. They are the twin ideals of the modern era: the democratic, communitarian ideal of a society of equals working together for the common good and the romantic, libertarian ideal of the free individual, unburdened by the constraints of rules or custom.” 

The War at Home

Flashback - February 1965 - Fort Dix, New Jersey 

Evan Thomas – From - The War at Home

“For a brief period the new military equipment, and especially the introduction of helicopters in large numbers, appeared to be stemming the Vietcong tied.” 

“Like everyone else who read newspapers, I was reminded periodically of Vietnam…(But) the war did not really force itself upon me until February 7, 1965, when LBJ ordered the second bombing raid on North Vietnam following a Vietcong attack on American military barracks at Pleiku.”

“Two days earlier I had been inducted into the Army for National Guard training and had been transported to the snowy, windy, flatland of Fort Dix, New Jersey.”

“The lights went out at ten o’clock that night, but we all remained awake in the dark, covered by green army blankets, staring in the dim lights at the ceiling of army barracks, listening to transistor radios report the raids and half-believing (since anything seems possible in the army) that we would be on an early plane to South Vietnam.”

“The army, of course, made maximum use of the heightened situation during our eight weeks of basic training.”

“’This is important,’ Sergeants snapped. ‘What are you going to do if your M-14 jams in Veet-Nam?’”

“Since they jammed only too frequently on the Fort Dix firing ranges, we took this more or less seriously. We lay on the cold ground, looking at devastated areas where every living thing had long since been shot to pieces. The trunks of trees razed even twenty and thirty feet above the ground, the very ground itself literally poisoned by millions of copper jacketed bullets. A sergeant in a wooden tower shouted over a loud speaker system: ‘Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Firers, lock and load one fourteen round magazine and commence firing.’”

“When the stiff olive green silhouettes popped up behind the sand dunes and next to shattered tree stumps, it was not too hard to believe this was leading towards the dark and steaming jungles we imagined in Southeast Asia.”

“I was ‘against’ the war in an abstract way, but its impact on me personally was more confusing, it seemed possible the National Guard might be called up and that I might go. I’m not all together certain if I feared this would happen, or I wanted it to happen.”