Bob Dylan

July 25, 1965 is one of those dates in rock history that deserves to be marked with a big red circle. That day, sixty years ago, in Newport, saw the concert that nearly cost Bob Dylan his career and that changed music forever. A reckless event, one that didn't happen by chance and that its protagonist conceived as the ultimate challenge to the boundaries of his chosen genre: folk.

The night before, the man from Duluth performs a brief acoustic set of three songs. But, according to sound engineer Jonathan Taplin's account, it's that night that he makes the final decision: to challenge the audience and the organizers. In secret, he assembles a band made up of members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (Sam Lay, Jerome Arnold and Barry Goldberg) and the musicians he had just recorded the explosive single "Like A Rolling Stone" with: Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. He spends the night rehearsing in a house nearby, without telling anyone.

On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan takes the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, stronghold of the intellectual circle of folk-revival purists. In 1965, folk is the sound of America's civic conscience: committed, militant, heir to the tradition of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. It's the music of college campuses, increasingly present on the radio, the soundtrack of change. Rock'n'roll, by contrast, is still seen as a frivolous, commercial phenomenon with no cultural depth. Dylan decides to smash that framework.

The Newport Folk Festival, founded by George Wein in 1959, had already crowned artists like Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and Dylan himself, who in 1963 had won over the crowd with "North Country Blues" and in 1964 had firmly established himself with "Mr. Tambourine Man". But by 1965 something has changed: Dylan is already in the midst of a metamorphosis, driven by an idea of art as authenticity in constant motion. With "Bringing It All Back Home" he had released his first electric album, opening new paths for American music with songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Maggie's Farm". Many believe his encounter with the Beatles in August 1964 was also crucial: "Rock'n'roll was never very interesting until the Beatles came along," he would later say. But more broadly, Dylan is starting to move away from the protest song to explore more introspective territory, pushing the song form toward new expressive possibilities.

So the turning point of that July 25 doesn't come out of nowhere. But the way it unfolds is certainly sensational. Introduced by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan walks on stage dressed in black, in a leather jacket and boots. On stage with him are guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold, drummer Sam Lay and keyboardist Al Kooper. He gives a nod to the band and makes an unexpected, explosive move: he plugs his Fender Stratocaster into an amplifier. It's the start of the so-called "electric turn", a watershed moment in his career and in the history of popular music.

Could it really be that this 24-year-old in a leather jacket and boots, striding onto the stage brazenly wielding an electric Fender, is the same Bob Dylan who, just two years earlier, was leading the crowd in "Blowin' In The Wind" dressed as a working-class folksinger? And what is that deafening din pouring over the audience like a flow of molten lava? Rather than a premeditated affront, Dylan's move is an act of pure, reckless folly. Dylan is eager to let everyone know about the new path he's taking, and when he hears the Paul Butterfield Band's performance, he immediately goes to Bloomfield and, without a second thought, asks if the group wants to back him on a couple of songs along with Al Kooper.

"Maggie's Farm" hits the crowd right away with a nervous energy that makes the version on "Bringing It All Back Home" look pale by comparison. Bloomfield's abrasive guitar plays off Dylan's mocking voice. The volume is so high that the words are almost impossible to make out, the band's ferocity overwhelms the details. The audience starts to grumble, boo, protest in bewilderment: legend even has it that Pete Seeger, backstage, tries to cut the power cables with an axe.

After “Like A Rolling Stone” and the raw, crackling blues of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, Dylan leaves the stage: he hasn't had time to rehearse any other songs with the band. The crowd feels cheated, and what breaks out is something like an uprising. At the microphone, Peter Yarrow looks around, lost, then tries to calm things down by announcing that Bob is coming back with an acoustic guitar. But when Dylan reappears on stage, shaken and stung in his pride, to launch into “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”, what he delivers sounds like a definitive farewell, certainly not a defeat. The applause mixes with calls for an encore. But he won't come back. And he won't return to Newport for the next 37 years. When he finally does, in 2002, he'll walk on stage in disguise: white cowboy hat, wig and fake beard. Once again, he confounds expectations.

That Fender guitar would be auctioned off in 2012 for nearly a million dollars, while the Telecaster Mike Bloomfield used to back him on stage that night changed hands in 2025 for a quarter of a million.

The biopic “A Complete Unknown”, starring Timothee Chalamet and nominated for the 2024 Oscars, recreated the atmosphere of that night: deafening boos, objects hurled onto the stage, the fury of the folk establishment embodied by Pete Seeger and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Dylan recently wrote on X that Newport was “a fiasco”, but that performance instantly became legendary, taking on ever more meaning over time as the ultimate example of an artist following his own path, whatever the cost, in defiance of the audience's expectations.

“Many historic events only become crucial in hindsight. This was one of those moments where everyone knew something important was happening”, Joe Boyd, the producer of Newport 1965, told the New York Times. The concert has been portrayed on the big screen several times before Mangold's film: in Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary “No Direction Home”, and earlier still in Murray Lerner's “Festival” (1967) and later “The Other Side of the Mirror” (2007). That same year, in Todd Haynes's kaleidoscopic “I'm Not There”, it's Cate Blanchett who takes the stage as the band members open their instrument cases and open fire on the crowd: a theatrical, violent, hallucinatory scene meant to symbolize the rupture and the betrayal felt by the folk audience.

The 1965 Newport performance remains one of his most iconic moments, not just for the boldness of the gesture, but because it marks rock's entry into modernity. Dylan redefines the boundaries of what's possible, showing how an artist must, above all, stay true to his own inspiration.

With the echo of Newport's boos still ringing in his ears, between late July and early August Dylan returns to the studio to complete the trajectory set in motion by the stone thrown with “Like A Rolling Stone”, which in those very days is climbing the charts in America and Britain. Dylan decides to part ways with Tom Wilson, for reasons never fully explained, replacing him with a far less intrusive producer, Bob Johnston, after even considering approaching Phil Spector. The recording sessions take up less than a week in total and are dominated by the usual Dylanesque chaos. By the end of August, “Highway 61 Revisited” hits record store shelves, its cover announcing it with a Dylan in a bright floral shirt and biker t-shirt, staring down Daniel Kramer's lens with a defiant gaze. And for Mister Zimmerman, it will be yet another triumph.

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20/01/2026