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Authors: David Kinney
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were scared because they couldnât make out what was happening in the crowd. In the stands, Peter thought there was a real chance of violence.
But the show ended and the masses streamed toward their homes unscathed. Peter hadnât joined in the chorus of discontent. It would have been perfectly understandable if he had thrown in with the traditionalists who felt betrayed by this commercial sound. He loved the folk music heâd grown up hearing. He was upset when he first learned that Dylan was going electric. But the sinking feeling only lasted for a couple of days. He was only fourteen; he couldnât be permanently disillusioned.
What changed his mind were the songs. Listening closely, he could tell it was the same man he had been obsessed with for the past two years. If the words were still uncompromisingly Dylan, what was the problem?
That night in Forest Hills, Dylan dashed backstage and into a station wagon. He sped back to his managerâs apartment in Manhattan for an after-party, where he got to talking with a woman who had seen the concert. How did she like it? She demurred. When he pushed, she admitted she didnât much like the new songs. He asked if sheâd booed. No, no, nothing like that, she replied. To which Dylan said, Why not? If you didnât like it, you shouldâve booed.
Some days later an interviewer asked what he thought of the catcallers in Queens. âI thought it was great,â he said. âI really did. If I said anything else Iâd be a liar.â He loved the confrontations and he wasnât backing down. He had found a way to make the music he wanted to make, and it would take more than jeers for him to go back to what he had been doing before he rolled into Newport. âThey can boo till the end of time,â he added. âI know that music is real, more real than the boos.â
4
He had been asked to explain himself before, and heâd tried. A year earlier, he had sat for an interview with writer Nat Hentoff, and the resulting piece in the New Yorker elegantly captured Dylan in his early twenties. He was no one-dimensional Guthrie clone, but a young man who was still growing, and evolving, ârestless, insatiably hungry for experience, idealistic, but skeptical of neatly defined causes.â
The magazine gave Dylan the space to voice, at length, his idiosyncratic view of the world. Hentoff asked why he stopped writing âfinger-pointing songs,â as Dylan called them, and instead had recorded an album almost entirely about women and love and relationships. âI looked around and saw all these people point fingers at the bomb,â he explained. âBut the bomb is getting boring, because whatâs wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. Whatâs wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesnât let them really speak , so they just add their confusion to the mess. I mean, they have some kind of vested interest in the way things are now.â There could be no change because peopleâindividualsâwere too concerned with their own status.
Dylan said he held the same views on civil rights as the youthful activists, but he couldnât bring himself to join in their work, go south, and carry a picket sign or something like that. âIâm not a part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldnât be able to do anything else but be in âthe Movement.â I just canât have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow. I just canât make it with any organization.â
He said a lot in this vein, to Hentoff and a few other sympathetic writers. But the mainstream press didnât catch on. He was moving too fast. And anyway, these were not the sorts of ideas reporters on deadline could fit into a tidy, uncomplicated newsprint narrative. He thought about the world in fundamentally different ways. He rejected what
But the show ended and the masses streamed toward their homes unscathed. Peter hadnât joined in the chorus of discontent. It would have been perfectly understandable if he had thrown in with the traditionalists who felt betrayed by this commercial sound. He loved the folk music heâd grown up hearing. He was upset when he first learned that Dylan was going electric. But the sinking feeling only lasted for a couple of days. He was only fourteen; he couldnât be permanently disillusioned.
What changed his mind were the songs. Listening closely, he could tell it was the same man he had been obsessed with for the past two years. If the words were still uncompromisingly Dylan, what was the problem?
That night in Forest Hills, Dylan dashed backstage and into a station wagon. He sped back to his managerâs apartment in Manhattan for an after-party, where he got to talking with a woman who had seen the concert. How did she like it? She demurred. When he pushed, she admitted she didnât much like the new songs. He asked if sheâd booed. No, no, nothing like that, she replied. To which Dylan said, Why not? If you didnât like it, you shouldâve booed.
Some days later an interviewer asked what he thought of the catcallers in Queens. âI thought it was great,â he said. âI really did. If I said anything else Iâd be a liar.â He loved the confrontations and he wasnât backing down. He had found a way to make the music he wanted to make, and it would take more than jeers for him to go back to what he had been doing before he rolled into Newport. âThey can boo till the end of time,â he added. âI know that music is real, more real than the boos.â
4
He had been asked to explain himself before, and heâd tried. A year earlier, he had sat for an interview with writer Nat Hentoff, and the resulting piece in the New Yorker elegantly captured Dylan in his early twenties. He was no one-dimensional Guthrie clone, but a young man who was still growing, and evolving, ârestless, insatiably hungry for experience, idealistic, but skeptical of neatly defined causes.â
The magazine gave Dylan the space to voice, at length, his idiosyncratic view of the world. Hentoff asked why he stopped writing âfinger-pointing songs,â as Dylan called them, and instead had recorded an album almost entirely about women and love and relationships. âI looked around and saw all these people point fingers at the bomb,â he explained. âBut the bomb is getting boring, because whatâs wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. Whatâs wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesnât let them really speak , so they just add their confusion to the mess. I mean, they have some kind of vested interest in the way things are now.â There could be no change because peopleâindividualsâwere too concerned with their own status.
Dylan said he held the same views on civil rights as the youthful activists, but he couldnât bring himself to join in their work, go south, and carry a picket sign or something like that. âIâm not a part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldnât be able to do anything else but be in âthe Movement.â I just canât have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow. I just canât make it with any organization.â
He said a lot in this vein, to Hentoff and a few other sympathetic writers. But the mainstream press didnât catch on. He was moving too fast. And anyway, these were not the sorts of ideas reporters on deadline could fit into a tidy, uncomplicated newsprint narrative. He thought about the world in fundamentally different ways. He rejected what
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