Theodore Bikel remembers Bob Dylan's appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk...

Did Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan Sell-Out The Movement In 1965?

In his 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, Elijah Wald described what apparently happened in the world of U.S. folk music, historically, in the summer of 1965--during the same year when the Democratic Johnson Administration ordered U.S. warplanes to bombard North Vietnam on a daily basis and sent over 200,000 U.S. soldiers to wage war in South Vietnam, in violation of international law:

"On the evening of July 25, 1965...Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival...carrying a Fender Stratocaster in place of his...acoustic guitar...The New York Times reported that Dylan `was roundly booed...' Many were dismayed and angry...

"In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past. But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power, abandoning idealism and hope and selling out to the star machine. In this version, the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture...and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it...

"...1965 marked a significant divide...The weekend Dylan walked onstage with his Stratocaster, President Johnson announced he was doubling the military draft and committing the United States to victory in Vietnam.

"...Dylan...spent the rest of the decade making...albums that seemed willfully oblivious to the events...in the headlines...In 1968, pressed by an old friend to explain why he was not more engaged in the Vietnam protests, he responded: `How do you know I'm not...for the War?'...

"In 1965 Dylan was...24 years-old...When he turned from sharp topical lyrics, followers who had hailed him as the voice of a generation lamented...

"...Seeger and Dylan can stand for the two defining...ideals: Seeger for the ideal of democracy, of people working together, helping each other, living and believing and treating each other as...equals...

"...There is some truth in the simplification that Dylan was a cynical careerist..."

Hip Capitalist Multi-Millionaire Musician Dylan's Albert Grossman Connection Revisted

One reason a 21st-century hip capitalist multi-millionaire musician named Bob Dylan apparently was able to personally enrich himself and his individual family during the Vietnam War Era of U.S. history was that a hip capitalist businessman named Albert Grossman was Dylan's manager during most of the 1960s.

Hip Capitalist Businessman-Manager Albert Grossman and Dylan in 1960s

 As Elijah Wald observed in his 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!--Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties:

"Grossman's talents as a promoter were more than equaled by his backroom financial savvy. He seems to have become interested in Dylan during the spring of 1962, and by most reports it was `Blowin' in the Wind' that caught his attention...

"...Folk agents tended to be fans first...which...preserved separation from the commercial mainstream. Grossman was another beast entirely: he had started one of the first folk night clubs, Chicago's Gate of Horn...He was...a...rapacious businessman who enjoyed distinguishing himself...with...displays of wealth and power...In 1962 most people on the folk scene were only tangentially aware of Grossman, but over the next few years he would become widely regarded as the snake in the garden.

"Bob Neuwirth, who was one of Dylan's closest companions in the mid-1960s, has argued that Grossman `invented' Dylan..: `Bob Dylan could not get arrested before Albert came along!...Albert made it possible to have a $50 [equal to around $415 in 2018 dollars]-a week allowance to have enough money to pay the rent.' Dylan had an album on a major label...before Grossman got involved, but the record sold badly, and paying jobs were few and far between..."