[I related to this, because I lived in Providence in 1965, and I was at the Newport Folk Festival on the night when Dylan first strapped on his electric guitar. And … truth be told … I was among the half of the crowd who booed him. Why? Was I anti-rock ‘n roll? Hardly. As a member of the fabulous Van Goghs, I was a charter member of the British Invasion. No, my reason for disliking Dylan as a rock ‘n roll performer is that he was a lousy rocker. Moreover, most of the bands he surrounded himself with in those early we equally lousy.
The Band, you say? Lousy, you say? No, The Band was great, as they proved when Dylan left them to their own devices. Add him to the mix, and it was straight downhill. “Like a Rolling Stone,” the recorded version, is the exception that proves the rule. Played live … lousy, lousy, and even worse. Dylan’s early material and persona kept him on top for many years, and he continued to produce some good material, but more of it was mediocre and performed poorly. Sorry, fans, but the great Silverback has spoken. SB SM]
by Lloyd Kahn, from his Substack, Live From California
I was an insurance broker in San Francisco in the early ‘60s until I bought a “lid” of marijuana from a tattooed sailor who had a girlfriend named Zoe — and, that night, got on to the right side of my brain for the first time.
The counter-cultural movement of the ’60s was in full bloom. I’d witnessed the magic that was happening in San Francisco in ‘63-’65, and I wanted to see what was going on in the rest of the country, so I decided to take a month off to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I took along a hardbound copy of In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, a disciple of the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. (I now realize that this was a “vision quest,” except I was heading across America instead of out solo into the wilderness.)
I left my home in Mill Valley at 8:30 one night with backpack and sleeping bag, caught a bus to the Greyhound depot on 5th Street in San Francisco, took a bus to Bakersfield, got there at dawn, and made my way to the train yard, where I hopped on a freight car bound east.
Got off the train in Barstow, got a grilled cheese sandwich, and started hitchhiking. I got a ride with a guy who’d been picking apples in Washington (state) and was heading to Needles to pick tomatoes. He had an ice chest of beer in the back seat, and we had beers as we rolled along, and he talked about his life. He was peaceful, “…in his skin,” as Alan Ginsberg used to say.
I got out, walked to the outskirts of Needles and started hitching again. It was starting to get dark when a 1950 two-door Ford pulled up the driver said “Where you going.”
“ New York,” I replied, and he said “I can take you as far as Detroit,” so off we went, sharing driving and gas expenses eastwards.
In Detroit, I caught a greyhound to New York, spent a week there with friends, did the I Ching (with arrow stalks), saw The Lovin’ Spoonful in the Village, then hitchhiked out to Provincetown on Cape Cod to hang out with my cousin Mike, a painter.
I was hitchhiking back to New York on a Saturday when a car full of students from The Rhode Island School of Design stopped for me. “We’re going to a Bob Dylan concert tonight, you want to go? You can stay in our loft.” Well, yeah-uh!
It was $2.75 to get in. Things were so loose in those days — just having the camera (Nikon loaded with tri-X black-and-white film) meant the cops let me stay right up next to the stage. Told them I was a photographer for The Philadelphia Enquirer, heh-heh.
The first half of the concert was folk music, not thrilling to me.
After the intermission, a bunch of musicians came out and guess what — rock and roll!
About half the audience got up and left, muttering. Dylan didn’t care. The world was opening up for him. A great concert. (This was his 11th rock and roll gig since the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965, and the folkies were still pissed off at him.)
I shot a bunch of pix and had a front row vantage point. In looking back at these old photos, I realized that one the musicians here is Robbie Robertson — history in the making.
I got back to San Francisco eventually in drive-away cars (VW from NY to Miami, Pontiac from Miami to Phoenix), Greyhound to SF. The morning after I got back, I got up, heard the faint hum of commute traffic going into SF on the nearby freeway, quit my job, and started to work as a carpenter.
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Judge for yourself. By the time the entire band checks in, it has gotten pretty sloppy:
The equipment for electric music in a live situation was so inadequate. They didn’t even use stage monitors. In light of that and in light of the rebellious nature of Dylan and Rock and Roll, I think the performance was exquisite and the musicianship was not sloppy in this context. Raw would be a better term.
I saw Dylan perform about a half dozen times in later years. Maybe “sloppy” was the wrong word to use, but as great a songwriter as he is, he is not a great musician.