Dylan Goes Electric in 1965

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.' "