The most notorious live performance in rock & roll lasted about fifteen minutes: three songs played at assaultive volume by a plugged-in blues band fronted by the young poet-king of American folk music, at the sacred annual congress of acoustic purists, the Newport Folk Festival. In that quarter-hour, on the warm Sunday evening of July 25th, 1965, at Freebody Park in Newport, Rhode Island, Bob Dylan, 24 -- backed by the electric-Chicago charge of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band -- declared his independence from the orthodoxy of the folk scene and publicly unveiled his rock & roll heart.

Dylan paid for his daring. Some witnesses claimed that he left the stage in tears -- shocked by the shouting and heckling from several members of the Newport audience -- before going back out to do penance: two acoustic numbers. Butterfield guitarist Mike Bloomfield said Dylan "looked real shook up." But Al Kooper, who joined the Butterfield Band that fateful night as guest organist, insists that the catcalls are a myth: "It wasn't 'Boo, boo, boo.' It was 'More, more, more.' "

When Dylan walked onstage at Newport, dressed in black pants and a green shirt, and armed with a Fender Stratocaster, it was the first time he had appeared in public with an electric guitar since his days with his Minnesota high school combo the Golden Chords. A month before Newport, on June 16th, Dylan cut his first Top Five hit, "Like a Rolling Stone," in New York with a group that included Kooper and Bloomfield. Yet Dylan's first performance that weekend, at a Newport workshop on Saturday, was a pair of older folk songs, "All I Really Want to Do" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." Afterward, Kooper, who was hanging out at the festival, was approached by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. "He said that Bob was looking for me," Kooper recalls. "I went backstage, and Bob told me, 'I wanna play electric on Sunday.' "

Dylan, Kooper, Bloomfield and the rest of the Butterfield Band -- booked to play their own set on Sunday -- rehearsed in a nearby mansion all Saturday night, with pianist Barry Goldberg. "The Butterfield Band didn't have the best chemistry to back Dylan," Kooper notes. "It was a tough night - complicated and ugly." The ad hoc group mastered only three songs: the caustic "Maggie's Farm," from the electric side of Dylan's March '65 album, Bringing It All Back Home; "Like a Rolling Stone"; and a new song, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," which would be on Dylan's next LP, Highway 61 Revisited. The lack of preparation was evident as soon as Dylan's set started on Sunday: Drummer Sam Lay turned the beat around in "Maggie's Farm," confusing the whole band.

There is no apparent booing on the surviving soundboard tape of the show. There is yelling. It has been suggested that the audience was complaining about the PA mix. Folk icon Pete Seeger admitted he was so enraged by Dylan's set he wanted to "chop the microphone cord," but only because Dylan's voice was so distorted. (On the tape, Dylan is front, center and bitingly clear.) The crowd was mostly upset because Dylan, the top god on the Newport bill, was on- and offstage in less time than it took some folkies to sing a murder ballad. He was so rattled when he returned alone (at the urging of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary) to sing "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," that he had the wrong harmonica for the latter song. "Does anybody have an E harmonica -- an E harmonica, anybody?" Dylan asked the crowd. "Just throw 'em all up." He got one.

The folk scene never recovered, rock & roll was never the same, and Dylan knew he was responsible. In Eric Von Schmidt's Sixties-folk memoir, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, Maria Muldaur recalls seeing Dylan sitting in a corner, alone, at a post-Newport party. She asked him if he wanted to dance. "I would," he said, "but my hands are on fire."