Imagine, if you will, that Greil Marcus' book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997)[1] is a map, a town or a country -- some kind of imagined space. In and through this space run three lines that can be thought of as streets, highways or railroads:
1) The incredible backlash among fans of folk music to Bob Dylan's rock 'n' roll, especially the pioneering song "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965). This line leads ahead to Greil's book Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), which also documents and describes the backlash.
2) The music Bob Dylan (with the Hawks, later called The Band) made in the basement of Big Pink in 1967, that is to say, in response to what he and they had experienced on tour of America and the UK in 1965 and 1966. This line leads back to the first "official" release of some of the "Basement Tapes" (1975), for which Greil wrote the liner notes.
3) Images of America -- what it is and what it could be -- as they appear in popular music, especially old folk and blues records from the 1920s. This line leads back to Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll (1975), Greil's first book.
Want to have a look around? Let's start with the first line and work our way to the third.
Many people will recall (or will have heard) that Bob Dylan was booed at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965 for using electric, rock 'n' roll instrumentation, but few will know that what Greil calls the "uproar" -- "a torrent of shouts, curses, refusal, damnation and perhaps most of all confusion" -- didn't only break out at Newport, but also at Forest Hills (New York) on 28 August 1965 and at several stops along the tour, which from September 1965 to May 1966 took Dylan and the Hawks all over America and the United Kingdom.
In Like a Rolling Stone, Greil quotes what Dylan said about the American response to the 1965-1966 tour: "You can't tell when the booing's going to come up. Can't tell at all. It comes up in the weirdest, strangest places, and when it does it's quite a thing in itself." Greil goes on to note that, "in Britain the sort of protests that had followed Dylan and the Hawks around the U.S.A. were organized."
In the U.K. [Greil notes] the Communist Party had long operated a network of Stalinist folk clubs, where what songs could be sung, who could sing what, and in what manner, was strictly controlled. The idea was to preserve the image of the folk [...] Along with fans of Bob Dylan who were now disappointed, or confused, or angry over his new music, people were recruited out of the folk clubs to come to his shows and break them up; in other words, people paid to leave [...] There were group walkouts and foot-stomping. There were banners unfurled and signs raised. There were cheers and applause, curses and cheers for the curses. In Sheffield, a bomb threat was phoned in to the hall. People in the crowds tried to shout each other down. There was unison slow clapping to throw the musicians off their timing, or to make a noise too big for even their own noise to overcome.
On 17 May 1966, at the concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, right before the band played "Like a Rolling Stone," a man stood up and shouted "Judas!" at Dylan, who screamed back "You're a liar!" Had this incident taken place in America, Dylan -- "the man who betrayed our holy folk music" -- might have been shot and killed. In Invisible Republic, Greil quotes Phil Ochs as saying, "Dylan has become part of so many people's psyches -- and there're so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now [since the assassination of JFK]."
What accounts for this widespread, sometimes organized and nearly murderous rage at Bob Dylan's "switch" from folk to rock 'n' roll? [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
-- NOT BORED! 3 December 2005
[1] Retitled The Weird, Old America.