Bob Dylan was caught in the pincer jaws of his own myth from the very moment he decided to become "Bob Dylan". He had taken several definitive steps. He had changed his name, he had bought the shades and he had begun to establish himself as a thing called a folk singer in New York's Greenwich Village. He did it because everybody was doing it. He was young, he was full of it, "folk" music was a very cool thing to be at, and he happened to be an exceptionally talented devotee of the craze.
Dylan had loyally (and lovingly) modelled himself on Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and assorted black blues singers like Jesse Fuller. In The White Horse, The Clancy Brothers were singing Brennan on the Moor, in the coffee houses poets such as Allen Ginsberg were promoting an outpouring of words, and in the outside world the times really were beginning to change. All bright and keen, Dylan soaked it all up and got busy with the typewriter. These were the great and actual days in which he revealed his particular genius and we've been taking it apart ever since.
Nowadays when Dylan does a Picasso rearrangement of It Ain't Me Babe, it seems quite clear that he means what he's singing. It ain't him. He's not Bob Dylan at all! At least he's not the one we think he is and it's not him we're looking for. It sometimes seems like a vain last-minute effort at deconstruction, but the unfortunate thing is that it simply cannot work.
We have all paid good money to see Dylan and, even with his hood up, it's still him. When actually confronted by a walking, talking myth of this magnitude the observer has no real choice. That myth is bigger than the reality and is therefore entirely unavoidable especially, I confess, in this brief look back at of one of the major episodes in Dylan mythology, the 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert, recently issued on CD. Even the actual recording is talked about in terms of the sacred, described in the Sony press release as being "a Holy Grail" for collectors.
Certainly, as a bootleg, it has been quietly copied and passed among thousands of Dylanites over the years, all of them eager to hear the sound of history as they listen to the following tense drama unfold. Dylan first delivers a strong acoustic set and is reverently applauded. Then he vanishes only to reappear with that outrageous hydra known as a rock band.
It is basically The Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins's former backing group soon to be known simply as The Band. They plug in, they play very loud and the folkies are horrified. There are slow-hand claps, boos, long silences and finally someone shouts: "Judas!" Dylan sneers back: "I don't believe you . . . you're a liar!" If you turn it up you can hear him all charged-up, roaring off-mike "Play f***ing loud!" They do precisely that and it's wonderful stuff. The betrayal is complete.
For years this recording was known as "The Royal Albert Hall Concert". Again another myth. In fact it's the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and it's May 17th 1966. Dylan was in the middle of a tour which had already seen him play Dublin and Belfast on the 5th and 6th respectively (one of the Dublin tracks later appeared on the Biograph box set issued some years ago). The Irish audiences hadn't been impressed by the electric set either, and in Belfast, where they knew their Bible, they even flung money at the traitor.
But what was Dylan supposedly betraying? What exactly was the nature of this sell-out? And what precisely was it that provoked many of his disciples to turn on him so viciously? First of all we must remember that, at the time of these concerts, Dylan was already "a spokesman for his generation" etc. He had been a singer of protest songs and political ballads and the last thing anybody imagined was that he would ever move away lyrically or musically from the many movements who had begun to see him as their man. But then it must be remembered that many of that crowd had given up on him already. They had all been well disappointed with Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), an album full of love songs and long surreal rambles that seemed to have no particular political target. There was no room for subtlety with those people, and Dylan had grievously broken the rules.
In terms of electricity, the acoustic-nazis really should have seen it coming. Dylan had already seriously rocked the folk boat at the venerable Newport Festival in 1965, making such a rock 'n' roll racket that Pete Seeger had apparently (literally) tried to pull the plug on him although, again, that might be a myth. Other advance notice came with The Byrds who were already singing souped-up Dylan songs, and of course Dylan himself had recorded the odd dangerously rockin' song like Subterranean Homesick Blues just a year before. All of this might have indicated that he was as close musically to Chuck Berry as he was to Peter, Paul and Mary and that going electric had always been a distinct possibility.
In fairness to those offended by electricity in 1966, some of them may have seen it as a genuinely disappointing move towards the mainstream and the commercial. Again in fairness to them, it seems unlikely that any fan in the de-sensitised 1990s would ever dare to seriously challenge one of their heroes and so perhaps their genuine dissent is, to some extent, admirable. And again given the passion and idealism that was around in the 1960s, it is perhaps possible to understand the actual sense of abandonment for those who thought their greatest ally had lost the plot.
But even so we should not forget that this Judas carry-on had been hyped in advance by the music press, and what happened at the concerts was probably inevitable. A Dylan audience split down the middle had become part of the show on this particular tour.
One possible explanation for Dylan going electric is that for him it was that short early spell as a protest folkie which was the weird bit. The whole folk thing had been to some extent an affectation and something he could not have sustained, artistically, for much longer.
He had been caught up in a craze, had very quickly become its leading light but, like any great artist, had felt the need to keep moving. He began by going back to the rest of his roots - rock 'n' roll. Dylan had not, as it might have appeared, emerged from the backwoods as some kind of unpolluted traditional singer. He had in fact spent his earlier days playing rock 'n' roll with his mates and listening to Little Richard - long before he ever found The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. He had even played a few gigs with Bobby Vee of all people! Much like Paul Brady, it wasn't that Dylan had turned to electric rock 'n' roll, but rather that he had returned to it.
Not long afterwards Dylan broke his neck in a motorcycle accident. When he finally reappeared in public he had changed again. Among other things, he had grown a beard. And that is entirely his business.
Bob Dylan Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert is available from Columbia Legacy