Rant #2,415: It Ain't Me Babe

Today is July 25, the 206th day of the year.

And just think, that in leap years, today is the 207th day of the year.

In an era where people get outraged at everything--spurned on by the Internet, social media, and simply being completely bored with their own lives, 54 years ago on this date, a segment of the population also became outraged at something that most people wouldn't normally give a wink at, but it helped change the course of popular music.

Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, the young wonderbrand folk singer who was taking the world by storm at the time with his musicianship and songwriting, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in, and it outraged folk music purists, who believed that the "spokesman of the generation" had sold his soul to rock and roll.

Traditional folk was basically a guitar, a stand-up bass, and maybe some light drumming, along with adept singing full of purpose, but when Dylan went electric at Newport, some folk fans went with the flow, others were ready to cut his throat.

It wasn't as if this all came out of the sky for Dylan, The groundwork for his "electric coming out" was planted in his current music direction at the time.

In March 1965--or a full four months before his musical epiphany--Dylan released his fifth album, "Brining It All Back Home." The first side of the disk features the singer backed by an electric band, while side two has him accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.

Right before his electric appearance at Newport, his song with a definite rock bent, "Like a Rolling Stone," was released, and it became one of his biggest hits.

So the seed was there for Dylan to go electric, and he did just that, joined by fellow musicians Mike Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg on stage.

Again, some people loved what he was doing, but others booed him, criticizing him for selling out, moving away from political songwriting and selling out to the devil--money--by going electric and joining the burgeoning rock and roll scene.

Although no one knows why Dylan made such a great U-turn with his music at that very moment--other than getting the biggest bang for his buck, so to speak--it is known that he was very impressed with what rock bands were doing with his songs, namely the Byrds, who were taking his more simply arranged folk songs and gearing them up for a much louder rock explosion.

With the success that the Byrds had with Dylan's tunes, seemingly every rock and pop act of any renown began adding Dylan's songs to their set lists and recordings; literally everyone from the Turtles to Davy Jones were recording Dylan's tunes with a rock bent.

After Lennon and McCartney, the most covered songwriter of the time was probably Dylan, fueled by the rock and pop successes that his songs were enjoying.

But folk fans thought that he had sold out, period, never to return to pure folk music ever again.

One can scoff at this controversy more than 50 years later, but on an audience weaned on the Kingston Trio, Peter Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, and the intimacy of what folk music brought to the table, the very spokesman of the folk generation going electric to a rock beat must have been catastrophic, much as if, let's say, the Rolling Stones moved away from rock and roll and went operatic.

The hero of the folk generation was gone, and the folk boom of the late 1950s to early 1960s was dead, too.

The Kingston Trio were never the force that they were a few years earlier, and Peter, Paul and Mary turned to more rocking tunes themselves.

Protest music had morphed from folk to rock, and it was just something of a natural progression. Dylan just firmed up that progression by leading that movement along with his electric guitar.

But even more than a half century later, there are people who still rue the day that Dylan went electric, just as the singer continues to play concerts all around the world and continues to record music that maybe doesn't stir the masses to action anymore, but remains viable nonetheless.

Today, not only is folk music dead, but so is rock and roll, so what is the new music to rue our consciousness?

It is hard to say--some say it is rap music, but it is too brutal to be held within that context--but something might just come along that will do that.

Right now, that type of music is in a holding pattern, but maybe the next "Dylan" is on his or her way to wake us up.