Sixty years ago a singer-songwriter/musician (who, in later years, wrote and recorded a pro-IDF song, "Neighborhood Bully", in the 1980s and, in the early 21st-century, entered into a business agreement with a firm, Victoria's Secret, which the BDS campaign has called for a boycott of), Bob Dylan, was booed by the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
And in 2022 the University of Minnesota Press published a book, titled The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan, which Stephanie Trudeau edited, that contained some of the transcribed texts of interviews that writer-journalist Anthony Scaduto did, while doing research for his early 1970s biography of Dylan.
According to the text of an interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Carla Rotolo recalled Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life in NYC and also recalled her initial response to the lyrics Dylan wrote to a song, titled "Ballad in Plain D", that Dylan recorded on his early 1960s "Another Side of Bob Dylan" album, which CBS's Columbia Records then marketed and distributed:
"The song [`Ballad in Plain D'], such an absolute screech. I was going to sue the pants off him [Dylan]. I decided--my lawyer said, don't even bother. Because `parasite', the `parasite' is someone who feeds off somebody. And I was the only person who was working at that time...Bobby [Dylan] of course, he makes me the `parasite' when I was working...It wasn't a nice thing to do, particularly when it was all made up out of whole cloth...
"...I think a good part of his guilt was he couldn't be real. I know it was. And he couldn't sort things out himself at that point, because of where his career was going. Just couldn't get himself out of himself...
"...Dylan needed victims, you know what I mean?...When he was a kid, he wasn't being that mean. As he got older, he started getting very nasty. But when he was first in the city, he was a very sweet kid Just not too articulate...He got tighter and tighter and nastier and nastier...He decided he would pick out your weakness and then suddenly grab it and use it on you. Which is what he did with everybody. Find their vulnerable spot and that was it...
"...I remember him saying once about his `Masters of War' song, for example, saying `it's just a whole big put-on, a whole crock of shit. That's what they wanted'...And I got the feeling...he wasn't befuddled and a confused little kid that he came on as...He was using that befuddled act as a weapon, because it worked..."
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