JULY 25, 1965 – Dressed in Carnaby Street threads, the ever changing Bob Dylan plugged in for his headlining set backed by the Butterfield Blues Band at The Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Performing a rock-and-roll set publicly for the very first time, he was met with a chorus of shouts and boos from folk music purists while the rest of the audience gave him an enthusiastic response. It is usually said that the reason for the crowd’s hostile reception was Dylan’s abandonment of the folk orthodoxy, while others maintain that it was due to poor sound quality that night (or a combination of the two).
Before he took the stage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival (the annual event that had given him his first real national exposure one year earlier) Bob Dylan was introduced by Ronnie Gilbert, a member of The Weavers: “And here he is…take him, you know him, he’s yours.” In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One”, Dylan wrote how he “failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction.”
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