PODCAST: Bob Dylan A Headful of Ideas Season Two 13) Minstrel Boy: Isle of Wight 1969

Isle of Wight Festival

It had been over three years since Bob Dylan had actually played a concert. The show, the second of two at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 May 1966, was the climax of perhaps the most startling, historic and iconoclastic musical tour of all time in which Dylan, backed by most of what would become The Band, faced a nightly campaign of booing by a section of his supposed ‘fans’ who saw his move into playing ‘electric’ as a commercial ‘sell out’ and a betrayal of what they interpreted as his political leanings, as supposedly displayed in his earlier ‘protest’ material. Even though The Band’s drummer Levon Helm left the tour early (Being unable to stomach the nightly onslaught) Dylan and his musicians had carried on defiantly. Indeed, the opposition from this part of the crowd drove them on to levels of musical and emotional intensity which had never been seen on a rock music stage. After the final show, Dylan had retreated from the public eye, making only brief appearances with The Band at a Woody Guthrie Tribute in early 1968 and at a festival in Mississippi in mid 1969. Even more shockingly for his fans, his music had gone through yet another transformation. His most recent album Nashville Skyline had eschewed the long, mysterious and enigmatic songs of his mid-60s ‘golden period’ in favour of short, sometimes twee was but often infectious country music- influenced ditties with simple, direct lyrics. He had even appeared as a guest on the Johnny Cash TV show, singing his plaintive lovelorn ballad I Threw It All Away.

Isle of Wight…

If most of the crowd had watched this performance, or seen the brief interview Dylan had given to TV cameras before the show, they might have been more prepared for what about to occur. But the expectation that he is about to unleash a loud, energetic rock show is still immense. The Beatles had also been off the road for this entire period and the rumour that they might be ‘jamming’ with Dylan was getting the crowd even more excited. Of course, it is highly ironic that the audience actually wanted Dylan to perform the kind of show which he had been lambasted for just three years earlier. But in the context of 1960s musical and cultural revolution, three years was a very long time. Now the entire way that rock shows were staged, along with the expectations of the audience, had changed almost beyond recognition. Advances in amplification had meant that bands could now play very loud music without too much distortion. At their last show at Candlestick Park in August 1966 The Beatles were still playing through PA announcement speakers. Naturally, the screams of their fans completely drowned out the music. Some of the reactions against the rock music that Dylan and The Band played in 1965-66 were actually protests against the poor, often distorted sounds they heard coming out of equipment on which the volume had never been turned up so much. Even now, despite the massive stacks on each side of the stage, the wind could carry the sound away from those at the back. But none of this appears to calm the ardour of the crowd, fired up as they were for Dylan’s appearance.

Despite his having apparently ‘disappeared’ into his rural retreat for several years, in 1969 Bob Dylan was at the absolute height of his cultural influence. But he certainly never had a ‘tie dye’ or ‘psychedelic’ period. He came from a slightly older musical generation whose music was firmly rooted in traditional forms. Indeed, the preponderance of studio effects in albums like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper seems to have set him and The Band on an opposite path, as the highly stripped down John Wesley Harding and The Band’s groundbreaking and quietly impressive Music from Big Pink had demonstrated. Yet when he finally steps onto the stage, dressed in – of all things at such a huge gathering of ‘freaks’ – a white suit – there is a ripple of surprise. He mumbles a hello to the crowd and then is straight into a sweetened, countrified version of 1965’s She Belongs to Me, which begins with the lines …She’s got everything she needs/ She’s an artist, she don’t look back… There will, indeed, be no looking back. In comparison to the wild eyed, wild haired spaced-out screaming poet of ’66, Dylan is reserved and modest. He wears a short beard that makes him look a little like a travelling preacher. At the end of the number he merely mutters …Great to be here….sure is…..