In his Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, James Mangold references the legendary Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1966. This same period forms the backbone of Robert Gordon’s film, featuring performances by Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and oth...
As with any art form, and especially with rock, there’s a temptation to pinpoint the epiphanies – the crucial moments after which, it goes without saying, “nothing was ever the same again.” The chart-syndrome never ages and never will. So, to keep it brief, among many, three key moments stand out in the art form of the new social subject of the mid-20th century, the youth: Elvis’s television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 16, 1956 – a watershed moment marking the definitive, primarily physical emancipation of young people from centuries-old codes in which they had been confined; Bob Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, to which we will return shortly; and the nihilistic, furiously insolent rampage of the Sex Pistols on December 1, 1977, on the Today show with a stunned Bill Grundy, which media-wise sealed punk’s tabula rasa on everything that had come before, not only musically (symbolically, they replaced the Queen at the last minute).
Newport Folk Festival, July 25, 1965. At this epochal moment, immediately following the release of Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan’s electric shock to the body from which he had burst onto the New York scene in the early ’60s, the folk world has already been analyzed endlessly. This year, we needn’t dwell on it thanks to James Mangold’s fairly solid film A Complete Unknown, featuring a reasonably credible Timothée Chalamet as Zimmerman. So there’s little to add beyond acknowledging that Like a Rolling Stone and Maggie’s Farm surely ruffled the nerves and stomach of Pete Seeger and Lomax – but to claim the performance was meticulously planned to stun the audience? That’s a stretch.
The masterpiece album had been out for months, and those who listened knew Dylan had changed course, defying any canon, driven by the urgency to explore new horizons – his unmistakable, defining trait. Certainly, in that moment, he changed the course of the Sixties and the future of rock forever. But what did Newport itself represent in those years for the generation that would radically transform the culture and customs of the 20th century? Quite a lot. Unlike later Monterey and Woodstock, which marked both the apex and the end of the naive yet fertile flower-power dream, the festival inaugurated in 1959 in this Rhode Island seaside town became, more or less consciously, a hinge between the worship of American blues, country, gospel, and bluegrass roots, and the emerging new folk developing thanks to artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The original identity of this historic festival lay in the sometimes uneasy dialectic between reverence for the roots and the urgency for new impulses, new expressive modes within a tradition already shaped through acts of breaking pre-established codes. Thus, as folk began to surf the solid wave of the Beat Generation, tracing paths demanded by new cultural and political urgencies, Newport gradually transformed from an incubator of emerging novelty – protected by a solid roots fence – into a trench defending a peaceful army suddenly feeling almost outdated, thanks to the more or less spontaneous insurrection that rock’n’roll and electric folk unleashed within it, courtesy of the new generation of folk-rockers. Returning to this pivotal festival, just before and during Dylan’s revolution, is a way to measure how inevitably any irreverent, innovative movement risks becoming mannered – a disposition ill-suited to the insurgent, urgent newness that has always defined the arrival of new generations. This fate spared not even the remarkable live creation built by Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, Albert Grossman (Dylan’s manager, in fact), and their fellow collaborators.
