Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Walk 3.6 stars

Ladies and Gentleman, the runner up of the Hibbing, MN Talent Show is....

In 1957, The Hibbing Chamber of Commerce held a talent show, open to everyone in Hibbing, Minnesota, whether they did magic, ventriloquism or played an instrument.

Bob Dylan entered.

He came in second.

That actually wasn’t too bad. The next year at the Hibbing Winter Frolic, two students named Sharon and Nancy sang their way to the $25 first prize. Dylan didn’t make it past try outs. At another High School show, the principal closed the curtain mid-song because Dylan was “out of control.” The other students didn’t mind, they’d been booing anyway.

When Dylan moved to New York, he told an astonishing pack of lies about himself. He said he’d been taught to sing by cowboys while growing up in New Mexico. That was a lie, he’d been raised in Minnesota where there were no cowboys. He claimed he was a runaway, also untrue, and that he’d joined a carnival when he was 13 (nope..though he was Bar Mitzvahed in Hibbing that year). Best of all, he claimed he’d learned guitar from a one eyed Black man named Wigglefoot, which, well…no.

His look was manufactured too. His girlfriend saw him, “in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on.”

None of that’s shocking. Of course, it isn’t, we live in the world Dylan helped make. The fact that Dylan was a liar is the only part of this story I had no trouble believing.

Pete Seeger, on the other hand, lived in a log cabin he built himself. That was in 1949, so it’s not like log cabins were in style, but that was his style. When Seeger was blacklisted for associating with Communists and was not allowed to appear on TV to sing We Shall Overcome, he insisted his friends go on without him. The songs, passed from The People, were what mattered.

When Seeger helped form The Newport Folk Festival it wasn’t meant to be a concert where stars came to entertain, it was a hootenanny, where everyone could sing and play their banjos together. Newport was about promoting The People’s Music, songs meant to radicalize the US. It wasn’t about money, or fame. It was about The Music, The People, and Our Freedom.

I mean, honestly, can you even fathom that shit?

Dylan couldn’t. He played there one year, strumming folk songs on an acoustic guitar, but in 1965 he came back and played rock and roll on an electric guitar.

And here’s something I really can’t understand.

People cared.

When Dylan played those three songs, people wept, because it was the end of believing you could change the world by holding hands and singing ‘If I Had a Hammer’. Dylan had a hammer but he wasn’t interested in holding anyone’s hands. Read Dylan’s lyrics, the ones where he taunts a woman about ‘having to scrounge for your next meal’ and you can’t help but see his gleeful cruelty.

He was never a guy who was interested in hammering out love between his brothers and his sisters. Bob Dylan demanded that you look at him. He didn’t care about looking at, or, saving you. When someone told him he should be more active protesting the Viet Nam War, Dylan replied, “how do you even know I’m against it?”

Dylan, a brilliant writer, was wholly original and, strangely, entirely himself even when lying about who he was, but a star wanting to be a star is as familiar to me as Pete Seeger and his log cabin are foreign. Nobody cares about selling out anymore. But believing that selling out was wrong also meant believing that you had something inside of you that was worth something, and might just be worth holding onto.

I barely remember that world anymore. But I miss it anyway.