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 his interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Izzy Young also recalled the following additional biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:
"...It was around this time that the blacklist letter about Pete Seeger [in which a group of early 1960s folk music scene musicians protested against Seeger being blacklisted from ABC's Hootenanny television show in the early 1960s]--I was the secretary of that group, and we had a big meeting...And everybody signed. Except Bob Dylan.
"He said, `It doesn't mean anything...'...
"...He was there. He was there. He was at the big meeting [of folksingers] at the Village Gate.
"...He didn't sign. That I can say definitely. Then the second point, where he was supposed to record `Talking John Birch Society Blues' [but allegedly was never allowed to include this on a pre-1965 vinyl album].
"...That song...did go on the album. And...I have the original downstairs.
"First you do the shit, then you can do what you really want to do when you get more famous. And then--so that's the album and then the attack on the Civil Liberties Union. But that came later.
"And still people accepted him as a revolutionary, as the person changing things. Well, because in my mind now I see the pattern...There's no such thing as a person not knowing when he sells out...There's no such thing as a person consciously changing, unconsciously changing...
"...This is how it works...The artist has to start from a point. Eventually they accept you...But the instant you make it into the mass thing, then you have to say goodbye to the starting group, no matter what it is. And that's what the sellout is, really.
"...Making $1,000,000 is what's killing everybody, what's making the wars necessary, that sense of competition with the whole world. And then they're saying life is beautiful, which it is to them...
"Dylan didn't start it, but it really comes after him, like in Woodstock. On one side they're getting, grabbing, grubbing all the money. On the other side they're the `sensitive artists'. Now with Dylan what I found is--to this day the kids will not accept the fact that he's a sellout. I do not understand this..."
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