The Night Dylan Went Electric
How Dylan’s Electric Guitar Sparked a Riot — and Rewired American Music
To accomplish his vision, Dylan went beyond vocals. He told lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield: “I don’t want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues. I want you to play something else.”
The fans at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival came to hear protest songs, but when Dylan played rock, they started protesting.
1962
Robert Zimmerman had the qualities we usually find in great innovators — curiosity, vision, instinct, and most importantly, guts. What else could have motivated him to leave Hibbing, Minnesota, and reappear as a 21-year-old folk singer named Bob Dylan in New York City’s Greenwich Village? He did it for the reason pitchers throw changeups — to break the rhythm. His dream was inspired by the music he heard in the smoky cafes of the Village. The moment he heard this new sound, he wanted in.
“You’re born, you know, the wrong name, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
Dylan came looking for his artistic muse. But first, he had to find something to eat. He began as a street musician, learning to play whatever the moment — and the audience — called for. In his 2016 Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan recalled that period:
“You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and when because I was playing for small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room on a street corner. Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.”
One occasion started his transformation. Early in his New York period, Dylan heard The Byrds perform a cover of his song, Mr. Tambourine Man. Their version, arranged with electric guitars, wasn’t just a cover — it was a revelation. Dylan later wrote: “I picked up the vernacular…internalized it.” The sound liberated him from the acoustic purity of the folk scene, a genre that in that era treated “electric” like a dirty word.
The Byrds’ lead guitarist, David Crosby, later confirmed the shift: within months, Dylan started an electric band. He fused folk and blues into a suspiciously rock-and-roll rhythm. And it wasn’t just a new sound — it was the voice of a generation still trapped in the folk departure lounge.
“I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard.”
1965
By 1965, Dylan was a folk legend. His protest anthems had become scripture for a generation. Blowin’ in the Wind asked, “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” The Times They Are a-Changin’ was a clarion call against racism and war:
“There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’ / It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’.”
But when Dylan arrived at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, he didn’t look like Woody Guthrie. He looked like Marlon Brando — black jeans, heeled boots, sunglasses, leather jacket. He took the stage and opened with Maggie’s Farm, a declaration of independence not just from protest songs, but from the folk movement itself.
“Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them / They say sing while you slave…”
Then came the turning point.
Dylan walked across the stage and picked up a Fender Stratocaster. He set his acoustic guitar on a stand like a cowboy hanging up his spurs. To the Newport crowd, it was betrayal. He launched into Like a Rolling Stone, a six-minute anthem of schadenfreude:
“Once upon a time you dressed so fine / Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? / Now you don’t talk so loud, now you don’t seem so proud / About having to be scrounging your next meal…”
The crowd squirmed. Then they booed. Loudly. They had come for protest songs — not electric guitars and ballads about downwardly mobile socialites. What they got was a protest against protest culture. The audience protested the protester.
Dylan’s Muse
To accomplish his vision, Dylan went beyond vocals. He told lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield:
“I don’t want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues. I want you to play something else.”
That “something else” would define modern music. Dylan wanted the freedom to play real songs — not sermons. His electric set was a musical rebuke to what Tom Wolfe would later call “Radical Chic” — the elite’s love affair with fashionable outrage. In My Back Pages, Dylan delivered his verdict:
“…I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing that I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach… / Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now…”
Like a Rolling Stone wasn’t a betrayal of folk; it was its offspring. A “chip off Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba,” Dylan later said. It fused folk structure with the rhythm of rock. And it dared listeners to stop moralizing and start feeling. When Rolling Stone magazine named it the greatest rock song ever written, they declared:
“It thoroughly challenged and transformed the artistic conventions of its time, for all time.”
And in naming their magazine, they chose the Rolling Stone — not Mick Jagger, but Bob Dylan.
The Heretic
Dylan didn’t reject protest music. He rejected its orthodoxy. He wasn’t anti-message; he was anti-manifesto. As he told the Nobel Prize committee:
“Songs are alive in the land of the living. They’re meant to be sung, not read. In the way that Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard.”
His former fans didn’t listen. They were “reading” Dylan’s music like scripture. And they called Like a Rolling Stone “the worst sort of heresy.”
They had no idea how right they were.
Heresy, after all, is just another name for innovation.
Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, 1965
