Joseph Hass: Can you explain why you were booed at the Newport Folk Festival last summer when
you came on stage with an electric guitar and began singing your new material? Bob Dylan: Like, I don’t even know who those people were. Anyway, I think there’s always a little boo in all of us. I wasn’t shattered by it. I didn’t cry. I don’t even understand it. I mean, what are they going to shatter, my ego? And it doesn’t even exist, they can’t hurt me with a boo.
(Joseph Hass interview – Nov 1965)
“They certainly booed, I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place. I don’t know who they were… they’ve done it just about all over… I mean, they must be pretty rich to go some place and boo. I mean, I couldn’t afford it if I was in their shoes.”
~Bob Dylan ( San Francisco press conference in December ‘65)
“The reason they booed is because he only played for fifteen minutes, when everybody else played for forty-five minutes or an hour. They were feeling ripped off. Wouldn’t you? They didn’t give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.”
~Al Kooper
On July 25, 1965, Dylan performed with a rock band at the Newport Folk Festival. Some sections of the audience booed Dylan’s performance. Leading members of the folk movement, including Irwin Silber and Ewan MacColl criticised Dylan for moving away from political songwriting, and performing with an electric band. (wikipedia)
Freebody Park Newport, Rhode Island 25 July 1965 Newport Folk Festival
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
~Desolation Row
Bob, where is Desolation Row? Bob Dylan: Where? Oh, that’s someplace in Mexico. It’s across the border. It’s noted for it’s coke factory. Coca-Cola machines are… sells -… sell a lotta Coca-Cola down there.
~San Francisco Press Conference – Dec 3, 1965
Bob Dylan: As I look back on it now, I am surprised that I came up with so many of them. At the time it seemed like a natural thing to do. Now I can look back and see that I must have
written those songs “in the spirit,” you know? Like “Desolation Row” – I was just thinkin’ about that the other night. There’s no logical way that you can arrive at lyrics like that. I don’t know how it was done.
KL: It just came to you?
BD: It just came out through me.
~Bob Dylan – Kurt Loder interview, Oct 1987
“I never wanted to write topical songs,…. Have you heard my last two records, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61? It’s all there. That’s the real Dylan.”
~Bob Dylan (to Frances Taylor – Aug 1965)
“Highway 61 Revisited is the product of a series of recording session in which Dylan is performing at his peak, pure creativeness, sheer intensity, inspired by and pulling forth equivalent performances from the musicians around him. Whichever way he turns, something new and remarkable happens.”
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)
Studio A Columbia Recording Studios New York City, New York 2 August 1965 The 5th Highway 61 Revisited session, produced by Bob Johnston
I never wanted to write topical songs,…. Have you heard my last two records, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61? It’s all there. That’s the real Dylan.
~Bob Dylan (to Frances Taylor – Aug 1965)
If you had to sum up Highway 61 Revisited in a single sentence, suffice it to say that it is the album that invented attitude and raised it to an art form. Just take a look at the cover. Nobody from Johnny Rotten to Eminem has done it better to this day.
~Nigel Williamson (The Rough Guide To Bob Dylan)
Studio A Columbia Recording Studios New York City, New York 29 July 1965 The 3rd Highway 61 Revisited session, produced by Bob Johnston
….would be Like A Rolling Stone because I wrote that after I’d quit. I’d literally quit singing and playing, and I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took Like A Rolling Stone and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that that was what I should do, you know. I mean, nobody had ever done that before.
~Bob Dylan (to Martin Bronstein – Feb 1966)
.. The sound is so rich the song never plays the same way twice
~Greil Marcus
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind
~Bruce Springsteen (Jan 1988)
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