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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