White Bicycles (12 page)

The festival extended over a four-day weekend, with concerts every evening, workshops all day Friday and Saturday and a ‘New Folks’ concert on Sunday afternoon. This year the crowds began arriving days in advance. A field set aside for camping was quickly full and the concerts sold out. This unique event, conceived in idealism and full of the most obscure performers from the ethnic byways of America, had become the centre of American popular culture that summer.

On Wednesday, Paul and I started shuttling artists out to the site. He made careful notes as each played a few songs, keeping a chart of mic positions, levels and equaliza- tions. There would be no screaming feedback, no inaudible harmony parts, no booming basses; everything would be under control. Board members seemed puzzled when they stumbled across our obsessive project. Their New York wisdom held that any group worth its salt could gather around a single mic and get its music across. They revered the authentic representatives of indigenous music but were sceptical of the middle-class kids who emulated them. They sensed, correctly, that the excitement generated by the Beatles and the fascination with ‘sounds’ that young audiences were developing did not bode well for their approach. Bostonians, on the other hand, were conscious of wanting the right balance and the best microphones in all situations.

The day before the first concert, I met a bus arriving at the Greyhound terminal. Off it stepped a small, shy man with a tiny suitcase. He was Spokes Mashyane, the king of township
kwela
, a penny-whistle virtuoso and the best-selling artist in apartheid South Africa, who seemed dazed by the distance he had travelled. Soon he was sitting in one of the dorms amid Appalachian fiddlers and blues guitarists, amazing everyone with his joyous style on the whistle. In a nearby room, a ballad singer from North Carolina swapped verses with a Gaelic speaker from the Hebrides. Many of the Southern musicians had never shared a table, much less a dormitory, with people of a different colour.

One of the performances I was most looking forward to was by the Texas Prison Worksong group. They were life prisoners discovered by musicologist Bruce Jackson, who obtained permission to bring six of them to Newport. One of their key numbers was a cross-cutting song, where four men would stand around a tree trunk, chopping and singing in rhythm, trading verses – and axe strokes – as they brought down the tree. The sound of the chops and the rhythm of the work were integral to the song, but you could hardly plant a tree in the middle of the stage. Pete Seeger asked for a flatbed truck, chains and a chainsaw, drove off with them and their guard into the bogs of southern Rhode Island and returned with a gigantic tree stump. They could stand around it onstage, chopping and singing as if they were felling a tree in the East Texas hills.

On Friday, the workshops were packed, with crowds from one overflowing into the backstage area of another. I ran from one sound control to another, adjusting levels so as not to drown out a ballad singer from Nova Scotia with a gospel group from Carolina. In the crowds, you could hear people asking, ‘Where’s Dylan? Is he here yet?’

I remembered watching the close of the 1963 festival from the audience. Dylan stood arm in arm onstage with Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers and Theodore Bikel as they sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ while the fog rolled in off the bay. It was moving and inspiring. Young students like those in the audience had been in the Deep South that summer taking lethal risks registering voters and integrating lunch counters. When Baez invited Dylan to join her on a nationwide concert tour, his popularity surged. Then ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, in the facile hands of Peter, Paul & Mary, got to number one in the charts. The old guard of the folk left couldn’t believe their luck: they finally had an heir to Woody Guthrie writing powerful songs against injustice, racism and war. Their dreams flowered in the idealism of the Kennedy years. The Newport Folk Festivals of ’63 and ’64 represented redemption, the pinnacle of the journey back from the wilderness of the 1950s.

But Dylan’s new songs were not about politics. His former mentors could barely understand
what
they were about. Like the Acmeist poets in Russia in the ’20s, he confused and frightened the commissars with his opacity. He was no longer outer-directed. They sensed he was slipping away from them and their New York rigidities. Already close to Von Schmidt and involved with Baez, Dylan had a new sidekick, a friend of mine from Boston named Bob Neuwirth.

The radio that month was playing ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny & Cher, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ by the Byrds and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ by the man himself. The first shamelessly pilfered his vocal style, thereby acknowledging what an important figure he had become. The second was a more sophisticated homage that fascinated Dylan by the way it opened for him a new vision of his own music. The third was his own challenge to the way the folk world saw him. The presence of drums, electric guitars and Al Kooper’s Hammond organ on his new LP alarmed the purists who thought that once they had crowned him he would stay on their throne. He wasn’t the first singer-songwriter to record with a rhythm section, but
Bringing It All Back Home
’s predecessors had been different, more…
polite
.

Dylan’s whereabouts were the subject of rumours and conflicting information: he was at the Viking Hotel in a suite; he was at a private house on an island in the bay; he was still in New York; he had brought Al Kooper with him; no, Kooper wasn’t here. Kooper had an aura of his own, with the cachet of coming from the world of rock’n’roll. He had played on Brill Building records! (He had been a member of the Royal Teens!)

By Friday night, there were confirmed sightings. Dylan, Kooper and road manager Victor Maimudes were at the Viking Hotel with Grossman and Neuwirth. There had been late-night rehearsals – but with whom? Among the young urban folkies, there was a ripple of excitement; speculations hung over the festival like a cloud of amphetamine gas. By Saturday, we knew that Dylan had rehearsed with his new stable-mates, the Butterfield Band. The gauntlet
would
be thrown.

Other rumours started circulating – this time among the board and the older performers – that the pot smoke wafting around the grounds and in the dorms was coming from a particular source: Grossman! The older leftists could not accept that marijuana might be just, well, popular. In an eerie echo of their right-wing tormentors’ view of communism, they felt pot had to have an evil and corrupting wellspring. Grossman was the perfect demon for the left, the moneychanger at the gates of the temple, the commer-cializer of folk music. Now they wanted to add drug dealer to his list of crimes.

Dylan surfaced on Saturday for the Songwriting Workshop in his familiar guise of troubadour with acoustic guitar. In years past he would have worn a denim work shirt and jeans but he and Kooper turned up in bizarre puff-sleeved polka-dot ‘duelling shirts’, a momentary fashion fad from a Bleeker Street boutique. In hindsight the shirts look ridiculous, but Dylan’s endorsement made them mock-proof and they served as advance notice of provocation. He played his allotted half-hour and left to roars from a gigantic crowd in front of the tiny stage. This was the Folk Festival: no encores, the timetable had to be kept, and the Appalachian Fiddlers had to start on time.

The first skirmish in the battle of Newport took place later that afternoon at the Blues Workshop. Alan Lomax was introducing a strong programme of country blues, including Robert Pete Williams and Son House, to a crowd almost as large as the earlier one for Dylan. At the end it was announced that there would also be a performance by the Butterfield Band. Even without an LP on the market (Rothchild was still re-recording and remixing) people wanted to see what the fuss was about. Newport was becoming more and more a part of the world of show business and that, too, upset many on the board. The Weavers may have gone on
Make-Believe Ballroom
in 1950 to plug ‘Irene’, but Newport was supposed to be a world apart. Events were starting to spin out of their control.

When Son House finished, I started resetting the stage. Lomax scowled as we lugged amplifiers on to the platform and ran wires from the extra mics to the sound board. He told the audience that having heard real blues played on acoustic instruments, they would now hear some kids from Chicago try and play the blues with the help of all this equipment. As he walked offstage he passed Grossman, who muttered, ‘That was a real chicken-shit introduction, Alan.’ Lomax pushed Grossman out of the way. Suddenly, round one of the
kulturkampf
began, with two large grey-haired men rolling around in the dust. Sam Lay, Butterfield’s burly drummer, helped pull them apart.

Word of the fight spread through the crowd and added to the charged atmosphere. The set was loud – other stages complained of the volume – but a triumph. Lomax called an emergency board meeting which convened without Yarrow (who supposedly couldn’t be found) and voted to ban Grossman from the grounds. His crimes included not just the ‘assault’ on Lomax but being a source of drugs.

When the verdict was delivered to Wein for implementation, he reconvened the board and explained the facts of life to them. If they banned Grossman, Dylan, Peter, Paul &Mary, Kweskin, Odetta and Butterfield would leave with him. George was not sure the festival could survive the alienation of its biggest stars and the demands for ticket refunds. There was, moreover, a documentary film crew onsite (Murray Lerner’s
Festival
) recording everything for posterity. With heavy hearts, the board withdrew the order. Grossman was spared, but the old guard seethed.

That evening’s highlight was the set by the Kweskin Jug Band. They had the Bostonian affection for commercial recordings of the ’20s and a style amalgamating elements of ragtime, blues, jazz and country music. Their stage presence was confident, knowing and hip, full of double-entendres and dope references. Geoff and Maria had become consummate lead singers, lending their soulful technique to a wide variety of songs. Fritz Richmond, the washtub bass and jug player, was never without his deep blue granny glasses. He had explained his affection for them to Steve Allen on national TV earlier that year – ‘They keep my mind quiet back here’ – making him an instant cult figure for stoners from coast to coast.

Mel Lyman, their harmonica player, looked like an Okie refugee in a Walker Evans photograph. He was a fervent believer in the sacramental use of drugs of all kinds, and his quietly powerful personality dominated Jim Kweskin and caused fissures within the band. Their set climaxed in Geoff’s crooning rendition of the Rudy Vallee hit, ‘Sweet Sue, Just You’. The crowd adored them and the roars added to the old guard’s sense of unease. Following the Jug Band, some of their veteran colleagues had trouble holding the audience’s attention.

Saturday was also the night for the Texas prisoners. During Seeger’s introduction, the prisoners lifted the immense chunk of wood on to the stage. After some hoeing songs and chants performed in a line, four of them gathered around the stump for the chopping song. They swung their axes in a beautiful rhythm as they sang, two diagonally across on the beat, the others on the offbeat. During the second verse, the mic cable came loose and drooped dangerously close to the path of the axes. I watched from the shadows, counting the rhythm in my head. As the nearest axe swung back, I grabbed the cable and secured it around a knob. The singers kept chopping and trading verses of elegant folk poetry, improvised against the fall of the blades. Seeger gave me an approving nod.

I suspect this incident gave rise to the myth that Seeger tried to attack the speaker cables with an axe during Dylan’s performance on Sunday night. Seeger, axes, cables… somehow, in the way of legends, things got muddled up. I can say with complete assurance that this was the closest any cable came to being severed all weekend.

During the Saturday concert, Paul and I spoke to Grossman about Dylan’s sound check. Since the New Folks concert took up all of Sunday afternoon, the ideal opportunity would be Sunday morning, but that would be too early for night-owl Bob. We would have to finish rehearsing the other Sunday night artists in the morning and devote the entire 5.30 to 6.30 period before the gates opened to Dylan.

On Sunday afternoon, as the parade of singer-songwriters and young folk virtuosi trooped on and off the stage, the sky began to darken. By the time Butterfield was due to go on, the clouds had opened. The stage was sheltered by the barest of cloths, designed to protect one singer with a guitar. Butterfield performed with a metal harmonica and microphone held to his mouth. We turned off the amps and covered them with a tarpaulin. The group was devastated but it was far too dangerous to play. I imagined Lomax somewhere, snorting with satisfaction.

The closing group, Mimi and Dick Fariña, had no electric instruments and were happy to go on despite the rain. They had released a popular LP that year and the crowd was eager to hear them. Mimi was Joan Baez’s younger sister and Dick a charismatic Cuban Irishman with dark curly hair and an impish grin. A pal of Dylan’s – and Thomas Pynchon’s – he had just finished his first novel and was torn between the worlds of literature and music. His fast strum on the dulcimer, normally a delicate instrument identified with Appalachian ballads or medieval music, drove the group’s unique swing. As ‘Pack Up Your Sorrows’ began, the crowd surged forward into the press area, now abandoned by the shelter-seeking ushers. Dick and Mimi’s friends started drifting onstage with their guitars or clapping time and dancing. The images that would become rock festival clichés in the ensuing years – young girls dancing in flimsy tops made transparent by the rain; mud staining the faces of ecstatically grinning kids – made some of their earliest appearances during the Fariñas’ set that afternoon. If later events had not imprinted themselves so vividly on the memories of journalists and audience, Dick and Mimi’s performance would have been the defining memory of Newport 1965. Particularly since, a few months later, Dick was killed in a motorcycle accident the night of his publication party.