Episode 130: “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 130

Like a Rolling Stone

by Bob Dylan

There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend.

It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him and in all those coffee table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines.

Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring folk scene, until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracized him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man.

Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers.

He was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival.

And, like all these stories, it's an oversimplification, but there's an element of truth to it, too.

So, today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric.

We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe.

And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever.

We're going to look at Bob Dylan, and Like a Rolling Stone.

How does it feel

to be without a home

like a complete unknown?

Like a rolling stone.

While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes, most recently the episode on Mr.

Tambourine Man, the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on Blowin' in the Wind, and when we left him there, he had just recorded his second album, The Free Wheel in Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released.

As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album.

While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave Van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals.

The Free Wheel and Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson.

We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a black Harvard graduate and political conservative, whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music.

But Wilson saw two things in Dylan, the undeniable power of his lyrics and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles.

Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing.

But his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success.

Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band, Mixed Up Confusion, backed with Karina Karina, a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson.

Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmy Rogers-style keening that foreshadow his work of the late 60s.

Karina, Karina,

yeah, what's on your mind

I'm a thinking about you, baby

I just can't keep from crying

A different take of that track was included on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals.

Those originals fell into roughly two types.

There were songs like Masters of War, Blowin' in the Wind, and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, which dealt in some way with the political events of the time.

The fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and more, but did so in an elliptical poetic way.

And there were songs about distance in a relationship, songs like Don't Think Twice It's All Right, which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings.

The girl has left him and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.

While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Ratolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again.

And he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back, through to anger and resentment.

The surprising thing about the Free Wheeling Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rottolo, and a change of producers.

If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was.

You'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson-style Delta Blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life.

By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.

But the free willing Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of spokesman for a generation, a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited.

Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream and becoming more politicised.

And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootanani boycott.

But how about Hootanani?

Hoopa Nanny Saturday night.

You'll raise the roof and the rappers the song.

Yell out your favourite, we'll say that loud loud and strong.

Come and bring your lady love along.

We'll throw a hoot and a hoot any Saturday night.

And if you think we'll be rowdy, you're right.

We'll loop and holler and raise all whiny game

every Saturday.

We've talked before about Hootin Ali, the folk TV show.

But what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time.

The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band The Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's communist leanings.

The Weavers were, according to some sources, told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused.

It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s.

To give a relevant example, Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan.

Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for.

Again, someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album.

So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly.

Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootinani until they asked Sega on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave Van Ronk, Rambling Jack Elliott, and Peter Paul and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result.

But the odd thing was, whenever anyone actually asked Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music.

So while the Kingston Trio and Peter Paul and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a communist, that communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootanami with his band the new Lost City Ramblers.

And when the Taviers were invited onto the show, but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear.

Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why.

When he spoke about the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say:

a friend of all yours, I'm sure, Pete Siggers in Blacklist.

He

and

another group called the Weavers who were around New York.

Now I turned down that television show, but I got no right.

But I feel bad turning it down because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it.

They ought to turn it down, but they are not even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted.

Which is a bad thing.

I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad.

It's bad all around.

Hootanani started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before the freewheeling Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him, but turning the show down was also good publicity.

Hootanani wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered, it would also not be the only one he turned down.

In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan show, but he agreed on one condition, that he be allowed to sing Talking John Birch paranoid blues.

For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right wing in the middle of the 20th century and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time.

They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason.

We heard the Chad Mitchell trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on Mr.

Tambourine Man a couple of weeks ago.

So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan show, it would only be to perform his song about them.

Sitting home alone and I started to sweat.

I figured they was in my TV set.

I peeked behind the picture frame, got a shock from a feet that hit my brain.

Them reds did it.

Putting any television

now, the Ed Sullivan show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was, after all, meant to be an entertainment show.

And so Dylan didn't appear on the show, and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost.

It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song.

He never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades.

By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again-off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Ratolo.

Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Ratolo, she was extremely politically motivated.

She was also a fan of Dylan's writing and had started recording versions of his songs on Herb albums.

anyhow

when the rooster crows at the break of dawn

look out your window and I'll be gone

You're the reason I'm travelling on

but don't think twice

The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.

The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959 as a spin-off from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously.

As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases, both musics appealed at this point to educated middle-class liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit bohemian, the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked, and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill.

Both New Put Festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as 3,000 more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans.

But the Jazz Festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the Folk Festival came back as well.

By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee, headed by Pete Seeger.

At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of The First Night,

which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Byers, Peter Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on Blowin' in the Wind and We Shall Overcome.

To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being one of the rising stars of the folk movement to being the most important musician in the movement.

Still just one of many, but the first among equals, he was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them, like he was a star.

And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs, though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours.

Baez's pure, trained voice rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive.

is common midwest

as heart and water

that all you

have

and that the land that I live

in

has gone.

At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964.

The Times They Have a Change In seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kinds of songs that people wanted and expected from him.

There were songs about particular recent news events, like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, The True Story of the Murder of a Black Woman by a White Man, and Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the murder of the civil rights activist Meg Garevers.

There were fictional dramatizations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like North Country Blues, in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or The Ballad of Hollis Brown, about a farmer driven to despair by poverty, who ends up killing his whole family and himself.

As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up.

But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums.

Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Ratolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time.

He also started to distance himself from Bayers at this point, though the two would remain together until mid-1965.

He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.

He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.

The entire album was recorded in one session.

along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut, like the early version of Mr.

Tambourine Man with Ramblin' Jack Jack Elliot that we heard in the episode on that song.

Elliot was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing.

Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for The New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.

Dylan told Hentoff, There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here either.

Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them.

But some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard, and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing.

Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs.

You know, pointing to all the things that are wrong.

Me, I don't want to write for people any more.

You know, be a spokesman.

Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him.

From now on I want to write from inside me.

And to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten, having everything come out naturally.

Dylan was right to say that there were no finger pointing songs.

The songs on another side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal.

Ballad in Plain D, in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rottolo, laying the blame, unfairly as he would later admit, on her older sister.

The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions.

The opening track, in particular, All I Really Want to Do, which in Dylan's version was a Jimmy Rogers-style hillbilly tune, became the subject of dueling cover versions.

The Birds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of Mr.

Tambourine Man.

Classify you, simplify you, deny, defy, or crucify you.

All I really

want to

do

is make me be friends with you.

But Cher also released a version, which the Birds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a birds live show, where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement.

I really

wanna do

is baby be friends with you,

baby be friends with you.

In America, the Birds version only made number 40 on the chart, while Cher made number 15.

In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number 9, but the Birds charted higher at number 4.

Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs.

He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time.

Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time, and indeed he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful.

as Cash had lobbied for him within the company, and he'd recently started to let that influence show.

His most recent hit, Understand Your Man, owed more than a little to Dylan's Don't Think Twice, it's Alright, and Cash had also started recording protest songs.

At Newport, Cash performed his own version of Don't Think Twice.

I can't hear you anyhow.

I've been a thinking, I've been a wondering, while I'm walking down the road.

I once loved a woman,

a child I'm told.

I gave her my heart, and she wanted my soul.

Cash and Dylan met up.

with June Carter and Joan Baez in Baez's hotel room.

And according to later descriptions, they were both so excited to meet each other, they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds.

They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash.

One of them was It Ain't Me, Babe, a song that seems at least slightly inspired by She Loves You.

You can sing the Yeah, yeah, yeah, and No, no, no together, and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top-five country hit.

Now, now, now, it ain't me, babe.

It ain't me, you're looking

But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song, and his meeting with the Beatles seemed to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records.

This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while.

Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands.

As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of House of the Rising Sun, basing the new backing on the Animal's hit version.

The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums.

Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr., the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene.

Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British RB bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album.

His So Many Roads album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks: Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson, who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist, but who is credited on piano for the album.

Walk 47 miles, a barb wild, use a copra snake for a necktie.

Got a brand new house on the road side, made from rattlesnake hide.

Got a brand new chimney

Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians.

Instead, for his next album, he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg, a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cario Parkway, and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others, the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee.

Not all of these played on all the finished tracks, and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all.

But that's the line-up that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing It All Back Home.

The first single, Subterranean Homesick Blues, actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old school folk singers Dylan was still associating with.

Its opening lines seem to be a riff on Taking It Easy, a song that had originally been written in the 40s by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac singers, where it had been a song about air raid sirens.

just take it easy if a narrate comes, just a taking it easy,

just a taking it slow,

and I ain't a gonna worry when the sirens blow,

just a takin' it easy,

just a taking it slow,

and I ain't a gonna worry when the sirens blow.

But it had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original.

I'm taking it easy.

I'm taking it slow.

I ain't gonna worry.

Dylan took that verse and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm and connected it to Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics.

Too much monkey business.

Too much monkey business for me to be involved in.

Sailor

But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a free-form, stream-of-consciousness, proto-psychedelic lyric, inspired as much by the beat poets as by any musician.

It's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the beach poet Alan Ginsburg makes an appearance.

God knows when, but you're it again, you better drop down the alleyway.

Looking for a new friend, a man in a coonskin cap and a pig pen wants $11 bills.

You only got 10.

Subterranean Homesick Blues made the top 40 in the US.

It only made number 39, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US, and it made the top 10 in the UK.

But it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction.

To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of The Times They Are a Change In, and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets.

The opening side of Bringing It All Back Home is all electric, but the B side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody.

It's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side, that this was still the same Dylan they knew.

And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him.

Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style.

A young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to be Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to blowing in the wind.

Standing in your arm

is where I want to be and long to be.

And I miss where trying

cash the wind.

On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had, though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage.

Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Don't Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had duetted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored.

It's even worse to see Bob Newworth, a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same.

It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship.

Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record, but he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians.

Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England, he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayle's Bluesbreakers: Mayle, Huey Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McPhee, though it was unsuccessful, and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates.

But if you got to go,

it's alright.

But if you got to go,

Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief.

During the session, Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording I'll keep it with mine until a couple of years later.

But one other thing happened in England.

After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC, his first full televised concert.

Unfortunately, that show never went ahead.

There was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it, with what was said to be food poisoning.

It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while and took the opportunity to write what is variously described as being ten or twenty pages of Stream of Consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen.

He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his break up with Baez, it's not hard to guess.

The first attempt at recording the song was a false start.

On June the 15th, Dylan and most of the same musicians who played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan, and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield blues band.

Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of.

But the song was, at this point, in Walt's time.

How does it feel

to be out on your own?

So unknown,

like a rolling stone.

My voice is gone, man.

Do you want to try

The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni, and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on House of the Rising Sun, overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up.

But we'll hear more about the sound of silence in a few weeks' time.

The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one.

Al Cooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded.

He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in, and got tuned up before Wilson arrived.

But then Cooper heard Bloomfield play, realized that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.

But then, before they started recording Like a Rolling Stone, which by now was in 4 4 time, time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on.

Cooper saw his chance.

He played a bit of keyboards too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in.

Cooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Cooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.

Cooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track.

This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Cooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor.

Indeed, for much of the song, Cooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure.

Luckily, Cooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound.

The finished record came in at around six minutes, and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was 6 minutes and 13 seconds long.

That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album.

The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is 5 minutes 58 as it has a shorter fade.

I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix.

Whatever the exact length, it was much, much longer than the norm for a single.

The Animal's House of the Rising Sun had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes, and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single, but eventually it was released as one side in full.

When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

out of it.

That's Bruce Langhorne there, playing that rather sloppy tambourine part high in the mix.

The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US.

only being held off from the top spot by help by the Beatles.

It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan.

Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together, and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the spring, the two were very friendly, but they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death, in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records.

In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-70s.

So, Like a Rolling Stone was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music.

The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments.

The Newport Folk Festival had always had electric performers.

John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and the Staple singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared.

What there was was a backlash against pop music.

You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge.

Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio and so on.

had been massive.

Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sellouts, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved.

But at the same time, those acts were doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music.

They were making programmes like Hootanani possible.

And the Folkies didn't like Hootanani, but Hootanani existing meant that the new Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got.

There was a recognition then that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene, and it was those acts, the Kingston trios and Peter Paul and Mary's, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music.

If Hootanani gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cook, but it's not so great if you want to hear Tom Dooley or If I Had a Hammer.

And so many of the old guard in the folk music weren't wary of electric guitars as instruments, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music.

For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem.

The fault lines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues presented by Alan Lomax.

Lomax had no objection to rock and roll.

Indeed, earlier in the festival, the Chambers Brothers, a black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and RMB songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said, I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music, Rock and Roll.

But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield Band met his criteria of authenticity.

And he had a point.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group.

Their rhythm section were black musicians who had played with Howl and Wolfe, and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the south side of Chicago.

But their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they quickly moved to playing clubs on the north side, where black musicians had generally not been able to play.

Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann.

There was a difference.

They were from Chicago, not from the home counties, but they were still scholars coming at the music from outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture.

The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will.

He wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howling Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything, one he'd never even heard, but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing.

So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite, but hardly rapturous.

He said, Uz white cats always moved in a little bit late but tried to catch up.

I understand that this present combination has not only caught up, but passed the rest.

That's what I hear.

I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not.

He then introduced the musicians and they started to play an old little Walter song.

But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be.

Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth.

Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling around in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around.

But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused.

Lomax tried to get the festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded.

until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary, would also be out.

Nobody is entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues band to back Dylan on stage as a snub to Lomax.

But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Cooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member.

Grossman gave Cooper a pair of backstage passes and told him to meet up with Dylan.

And so for Dylan's performance on the Sunday, scheduled in the middle of the day rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Cooper.

He opened with his recent single Maggie's Farm and followed it with the new one, Like a Rolling Stone.

with no direction home

like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone

After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called Phantom Engineer, which they hadn't rehearsed properly, and which was an utter train wreck.

And then they left the stage, and there was booing.

How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some.

Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short.

Others say that the audience was mostly happy, but there were just a few people booing.

and others say that the booing mostly came from the front, that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front.

That's certainly what Pete Seeger said.

Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage.

He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound.

He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound.

According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer, but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bickel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothschild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume.

When Boyd got there, he found Rothschild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul and Mary, who was also on the board.

When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was adequately represented at the sound controls, that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger.

Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction.

While it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him.

Eventually, Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs.

He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played Mr.

Tambourine Man.

man, that song for me

in the jingle jangle morning.

I come following you.

But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency 56 years later.

Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said he's gone to get his axe, using musician slang for a guitar.

But many of the crowd didn't know that slang.

But they had seen Pete Seeger Furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work work songs sung by people who kept time by chopping wood.

And according to some people, Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang.

So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival.

Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric, he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so.

Paul Rothschild even later claimed to have seen Seger brandishing it.

The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away, by saying that he might have said something like, I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables.

In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan so much as he was concerned.

Shortly afterwards, he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part, I like some rock and roll a great deal, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.

I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch.

I just don't feel that aggressive personally.

But I have a question.

Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?

I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs.

I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer.

Who knows but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry.

It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words.

asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended, hoping that perhaps I'm wrong, but but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again.

Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public.

He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words, and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan.

But the end result was the same.

Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd.

He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that.

He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group.

From now on, Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation or the leader of a movement.

He was a young man with a leather jacket and a stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music.

And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

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