singemonkey wrote
Alan Ratcliffe wrote
Boyd says that Seeger never went for the cables with an axe. Interviewed in Scorsese's Dylan documentary Seeger says he wanted to do it but doesn't say that the made an actual attempt.
True dat! Anyway, what would a treehugger be doing with an axe? ?
I always found it funny that so many people who spent so much of their time challenging the norm and preconceived notions were so incensed when someone challenged their norms and notions. Dylan always marched to his own drum though.
I think it's that they figured that using electric instruments was embracing soulless corporate culture rather than challenging their rather contrived obsession with keepin' it pre-industrial.
There was an element of that.
The controversy was wider than Dylan's 2nd set (he'd already done an acoustic set that hadn't featured any protest songs). It all seems to have centered around Dylan's manager Albert Grossman who had contrived to get the Butterfield Blues Band on the bill. The Newport Committee was torn over this - eventually there was a punch up between Grossman and Alan Lomax (who thought that the BBB weren't "real" blues). Grossman was also rumoured to have a stash of hydroponic dope at home and - scandal! - to be profititing from dope sales at Newport.
But Grossman held all the aces. Piss him off and he'd go, taking Dylan, Odetta, the Butterfield Band and Peter, Paul and Mary with him.
Ironically Grossman was one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival, but by the early 60s he was widely reviled, especially in New York circles, for being rather too concerned about seeing his artists got well paid.
Yes... ironies abounded. Men like Seeger who had challenged the status quo and taken a knock for it (Seeger was investigated during the McCarthy era and blacklisted for years by radio and TV) could not accept seeing more gauntlets being thrown down.
Joe Boyd also speculates about the audience who, he feels, may have left with very mixed feelings because they had seen the defiant birth of the next great new thing but also had witnessed the death rattle of something beautiful - and knew it.
IMO Lomax was a big part of the problem. He was a vain, intolerant man and thought he had a moratorium on "authenticity". He'd made a lot of money out of Leadbelly, but it wasn't clear that Leadbelly himself had done that well out of the deal.
Another irony, of course, was that it was Dylan who have revived the folk scene in general and Newport in particular with his appearances in '62 and '63, in a way that even Joan Baez or Peter, Paul and Mary had not been able to. By '64 there had been concerns because he was still playing solo acoustic sets but no longer doing overt protest material.
So maybe there were a couple of strands of self-interest here. Concern that Dylan going electric and dropping protest song would take a large audience away from folk music and Newport. And maybe guys like Seeger and Lomax were not just about the music but on a political mission too - just as Ewan MacColl was in Britain - and so the message, the cause had to be more important than anybody's personal aspirations.
