The iconic and controversial performance of Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 only adds to the singer-songwriter’s mythical lore and black-and-white divisiveness. Dylan’s choice to play electric ruffled the feathers of the folkies and excited those looking ahead to the amplified sounds of the future, which inevitably led to noticeably mixed reactions from the massive crowd.
Some say people booed. Others say no one booed and that the rumor was just a way to hammer home Dylan’s aesthetic as an unruly vagabond. During a January 2025 appearance on The Bob Lefsetz Podcast, production manager Joe Boyd set the record straight once and for all.
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Confirming Rumors About Bob Dylan’s Newport Folk Festival Set
For such an iconic moment in musical history, there seems to be no hard and fast account of what happened during Bob Dylan’s revolutionary set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Some stories claim that Dylan’s mentor, Pete Seeger, was so irate over Dylan’s choice to go electric that he tried to cut the power to the stage with an ax. Other accounts say that Seeger only said he wanted to do that, not because of Dylan, but because of the poor sound. Depending on the story, the audience either booed or cheered.
According to production manager Joe Boyd, who was watching Dylan’s set from the press enclosure at the foot of the stage, it was “absolutely a mixture.” Boyd described the “waft of sound” as the combination of boos and cheers. After Dylan’s portion of the set with the Band was over, some attendees started shouting “more!” With so many people yelling the same word, the end result sounded a lot like more booing. “You can hear it on the recordings,” Boyd said, adding, “I don’t think there’s any real debate about it.”
“The whole event was a schismatic event, and everybody knew it beforehand,” Boyd continued on The Bob Lefsetz Podcast. “If you just overheard conversations in passing, it was like, ‘What about Dylan? What do you think he’s gonna do? Would he dare? No, he wouldn’t dare. Would he?’ That was the kind of talk that was going around, not just backstage but among the audience. People were intrigued. It was one of those moments that was…kind of a world-shaking moment in retrospect. It was at the time we knew that things would never be the same.”
The Controversy Surrounding The Songwriter Didn’t Stop There
If Bob Dylan had even a fleeting notion that controversy over his new electric sound would die down following the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, he would have been sadly mistaken. The folk scene continued to bristle at his louder, more abrasive sound that, to them, seemed to abandon the principles on which Dylan founded his career. People wanted him to be the voice of the people, of a generation, not some aloof rock star. These angry folkies made sure to tell Dylan that when he went on the road shortly after Newport.
During this time, Dylan toured with the Band, who also backed him at the iconic festival. During a 1966 performance, a heckler shouted at Dylan before the band hit their downbeat: “Judas!” The crowd laughed, no doubt highly aware of why the shouter said what he did. “I don’t believe you,” Dylan replied. “You’re a liar.” Unfazed and perhaps even inspired by the taunt, Dylan turned to the band as they began to play and said, “Play it f***ing loud!”
Not everyone was as immune to the crowd’s jeers. Drummer Levon Helm eventually quit mid-tour, writing in his memoir, “We were seriously booed during a two-night stand at the Back Bay Theater in Boston. That’s when it started to get to me. I’d been raised to believe that music was supposed to make people smile and want to party. Here was all this hostility.”
Despite all the boos, Bob Dylan still came out on top as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, even if some folks needed a little convincing.
Photo by Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images