Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

The night that folksinger Bob Dylan (b. 1941) "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is a pivotal moment in 20th-century American music history. While much has been written about the event (e.g., Andrew Grant Jackson's 1965), this book places Newport in the context of the seismic shift that happened in popular music in the 1960s. Wald (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll) devotes the first 200 pages to the musical strands that led up to Newport with an emphasis on musician/activist Pete Seeger's career and the folk revival of the late 1950s. He discusses Dylan's early influences and writes engagingly about the folk scene in Greenwich Village in which the musician thrived. By 1965 Dylan was on the verge of becoming a rock star and that did not sit well with the folk purists at Newport. Wald, whose impressive research draws heavily on interviews with other musicians as well as many attendees, provides an encyclopedic account of the festivals in which Dylan participated and gives almost equal attention to the other performers.