Read Online The Dylanologists by David Kinney - Free Book Online

system. That’s why his admirers loved him so. That’s what had given him such power.
    He wore a black leather coat—“a sell-out jacket,” one observer called it—and carried a sunburst electric guitar. In a set that began and ended in a few short minutes, a brief summer squall, Dylan proceeded to cause a controversy of such epic proportions that nobody could agree exactly what happened. It passed into mythology so quickly that nobody had time to nail down the facts. If you believed the most incendiary accounts, Dylan caused a near riot. Men fought around the soundboard. The great Pete Seeger was so angry he threatened to chop the power lines with an ax. The crowd booed Dylan from the stage. He left in tears. By all accounts, some people did jeer Dylan, but it was unclear why. Were they upset by the electric band, or by the poor sound quality that made Dylan impossible to understand, or by the brevity of the performance? No one could say for sure. What’s interesting is that if you listen to the recording, you will hear, of all things, cheering. Raucous, enthusiastic cheering. “I don’t hear any fuckin’ boos,” Peter says. “Where they booed was Forest Hills. That’s where they fucking booed. I was there, and they booed .”
    Word about Newport had filtered down through folk circles, and Dylan’s rocking “Like a Rolling Stone” was in heavy rotation on the radio. So as Peter and the other kids packed onto the benches in the concrete stands at Forest Hills, they had a sense of the spectacle they were about to witness. They were euphoric but surly. The atmosphere was tense. The courts, broad expanses of perfectly manicured grass, separated the kids from the stage. Cops stood watch.
    As showtime approached, cold gusts whipped around the arena. A reviled disc jockey from commercial radio gave an introduction during which he appealed to the kids to keep an open mind about Dylan’s new sound. “I would like to say this: There’s a new, swingin’ mood in this country, and I think Bob Dylan perhaps is the spearhead of that new mood. It’s a new kind of expression, a new kind of telling it like it is, and”—here he slipped in a plug for the pop music special he had hosted on television earlier in the summer—“Mr. Dylan is definitely what’s happening, baby.”
    The kids in the audience booed with glee.
    A spotlight followed Dylan onto the stage. He came on alone with his guitar and harmonicas. The wind whipped his hair. He played a long new song, one the audience had not heard before. Cinderella looks like she might be “easy” as she slips her hands into her back pockets. Ophelia wears an iron vest. Einstein dresses as Robin Hood. The fans didn’t catch all of “Desolation Row,” but they loved what they could make out. They laughed and laughed at the hip reinventions of characters they knew from school. This was their man.
    Then, intermission. Backstage, Dylan told the band to stay cool. Anything might happen. Just keep playing.
    The band came on and the crowd made noises that, to music critic Greil Marcus, sounded like “someone being torn to pieces.” A Village Voice correspondent described a riotous throng split evenly between nascent rock fans, who cheered, and folk purists, who chanted, “We want Dylan!” “The factionalism within the teenage sub-culture,” he wrote, “seemed as fierce as that between Social Democrats and Stalinists.”
    â€œScumbag!” somebody screamed between songs.
    â€œAw, come on now,” Dylan said.
    Peter watched it all in astonishment. “It was insane!” Kids jumped the barricades and scrambled across the tennis court and up onto the stage, with guards stumbling in pursuit. It was hard to tell whether the fans had foul designs or just wanted to dance. They scurried around, ducking security. Later, the musicians said they