OK, my youth is flashing before my eyes. I guess that’s what WUNC-TV and PBS intend for people in my demographic when they hold these fund-raising evenings.
I just watched young callow, justice-seeking Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, and then Beat poet Dylan at the 1964 festival. Now comes the infamous 1965 festival, at which he appeared with electric instruments, prompting the ever-annoying Pete Seeger to threaten to cut the electrical cords with an axe. He must not know much about electricity. Would that he had tried.
I have to say that when I first heard the opening bars to “Like a Rolling Stone,” with Al Kooper on the Wurlitzer and Mike Bloomfield on guitar, I thought it was the greatest song ever recorded. I still do. But the old folkies hated the Stratocaster Dylan, they just couldn’t get it. The wanted their moldy odes to equality and collectivism, songs about union victory and war machines built by evil corporations. So they booed. The Atlanta Folk Music Society, to which we belonged, sniffed and coughed and looked down their noses. But I cheered, as did most of my friends at the University of Georgia in 1965.
When Dylan played at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium in October of 1965, his first set (as in Newport) was acoustic. When the curtains parted after intermission, there he was on stage with Al Kooper on organ, Robbie Robertson on lead guitar, Rick Danko on bass and Garth Hudson on piano (those last three would later be in The Band together). When they hit those first bars of “Like a Rolling Stone” (which was Number 1 at the time), half the audience leaped to their feet and cheered and the other got to their feet and left in disgust.
We promptly left our nose-bleed balcony and went down to the orchestra level and enjoyed the rest the the concert in the expensive seats.
