Sunday, July 26, 2015

How Does It Fucking Feel

50 years ago today, Dylan shocked the world by going electric:
There were other people playing electric guitars at Newport. But Dylan, as you say, had been seen as a hero and more than that. He was the man who had written one of the anthems of the freedom movement, and one of the people who was holding it all together to create this new world, this new youth movement that would change the world.The fact is, Dylan was not comfortable in that role, and by 1965, that role was feeling constricting and frightening to him, the fact that people were looking to him for answers.

When he got on stage at Newport with that band, I think the way that story is often told is that there were all these traditionalist folkies, and they hated rock 'n' roll, and here he was playing rock 'n' roll and the stupid folkies were lost in the past. I'm not saying that's completely wrong, but there's the other side of it. It was a very tricky time: That was the weekend that Lyndon Johnson fully committed the United States to victory in Vietnam. The civil rights movement was falling apart. SNCC [The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] — which was the group that had brought all the kids down for Freedom Summer the previous year — now was throwing all the white members out, and the new chant was "black power." That communal feeling of the first half of the '60s was getting harder and harder to feel like it was all going to work and the world was going to be a better place. Dylan was someone a lot of people were looking to to hold that together — and instead, he comes out there with an electric band and doesn't say a word to them. Dylan was always somebody who had been very cheerful, friendly, chatting with the audience — doesn't say a word. And is playing the loudest music they've ever heard and screaming, "How does it feel to be on your own?" A lot of people were upset by that, and you can sort of see why.

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