Jingle Jangle Morning: Folk-Rock in the 1960s

By Richie Unterberger

Jingle Jangle Morning is the story of how folk and rock merged in the 1960s to create folk-rock, injecting social consciousness and poetic lyricism into popular music to scale heights that neither folk nor rock could have reached without blending. It draws on more than 100 first-hand interviews with key musicians, producers, promoters, and journalists, from stars like Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Donovan, John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, and Judy Collins to behind-the-scenes producers and cult artists. Starting with the folk revival of the early 1960s, it covers the folk-rock movement from the first stars to electrify folk (especially the Byrds and Bob Dylan) to stars like Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as well as underrated greats (like Richard & Mimi Fariña, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, and Nick Drake to nearly unknown cult artists. Previously published in two separate volumes as Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High, this combines those books into one, adding nearly 100,000 words of updates and new material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991589210

Book preview

Jingle Jangle Morning:

The Birth and Heyday of 1960s Folk-Rock

[Special Combined/Updated Ebook Edition of the

Books First Published in Two Volumes as

Turn! Turn! Turn!

and

Eight Miles High]

By Richie Unterberger

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jingle Jangle Morning: The Birth and Heyday of 1960s Folk-Rock

[Special Combined/Updated Ebook Edition of the

Books First Published in Two Volumes As

Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High]

Preface

VOL. 1: Turn! Turn! Turn!: The Folk-Rock Revolution

Foreword

Introduction

Prologue: The Great Folk-Rock Clash: The 1965 Newport Folk Festival

Onstage and backstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan gave his first electric rock concert, eliciting both jeers and cheers from the audience and defining a generational divide between purist folkies and newborn folk-rockers.

Chapter 1: Before the Revolution

The forces that shaped the generation of 1960s folk-rockers: the slow growth in urban popularity of folk music in the first half of the twentieth century; the explosion of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-’50s; the birth of the folk revival as early rock tapered off; the folk boom of the early 1960s; the first topical and protest songs by young performers such as Bob Dylan; the very first, nearly unknown experiments with mixing folk and electric rock.

Chapter 2: Meet the Beatles

In 1964, The British Invasion makes young folk musicians rethink their careers, eagerly buy electric instruments, and form rock bands. The nucleus of the Lovin’ Spoonful takes shape in New York City; the Byrds form in Los Angeles; British Invasion bands like the Animals and Searchers marry rock arrangements with folk songs; Dylan abandons topical songwriting for adventurous personal material.

Chapter 3: The Mr. Tambourine Men

In early 1965, the Byrds record Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man and become a Hollywood sensation on Sunset Strip; Dylan makes his first electric recordings for Bringing It All Back Home; the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Fugs form; folk singer-songwriters Richard Fariña and Fred Neil make their first electric recordings; Dylan tours England and meets Donovan; Dylan returns to the States to find the Byrds’ version of Mr. Tambourine Man soaring to #1.

Chapter 4: The Folk-Rock Boom

The Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man and debut album ignite the folk-rock boom; Sonny & Cher and the Turtles make commercial folk-rock-pop hits; Dylan records Like a Rolling Stone and starts touring with an electric band; the Lovin’ Spoonful, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Mamas & the Papas record their first hits; debate rages among fans and the media about mixing folk with rock; the Beatles explore folk-rock with Rubber Soul; the Byrds’ cover of Pete Seeger’s Turn! Turn! Turn! lands them another #1 hit at the end of 1965.

Chapter 5: Folk-Rock, Coast-to-Coast

Media debate over folk-rock and protest pop peaks in early 1966; scores of folk-rock singer-songwriters record enduring music in New York and Los Angeles; folk-rock sprouts in multiple directions; the Mamas & the Papas, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Simon & Garfunkel become superstars; new singer-songwriters like Tim Hardin and Janis Ian and a newly electrified Judy Collins emerge; the Elektra, Vanguard, and Verve labels all scamper to adapt from folk music to the new folk-rock sound; Love and Buffalo Springfield record their debut albums; the Byrds evolve folk-rock into psychedelia with Eight Miles High.

Chapter 6: Folk-Rockin’ Around the World

Folk-rock goes global as Donovan plugs in and becomes a Transatlantic superstar with Sunshine Superman; garage bands across America make folk-rock and folk-rock-influenced records in the mid-’60s; musicians ranging from British Invasion bands to celebrity pop singers to traditional folkies try recording folk-rock; overlooked groups like the Blue Things record great folk-rock far from Hollywood and Greenwich Village; ambitious folk-rock records like Eight Miles High and Society’s Child fight media censorship, as the establishment fights back; Dylan peaks in mid-1966 with Blonde on Blonde and a world tour with future members of the Band, but retreats after a motorcycle accident; folk-rock’s first golden age comes to a close, setting the stage for new offshoots that will help shape rock for the rest of the 1960s.

VOL. 2: Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock

Introduction

The Story So Far: Dramatis Personae

A guide to the characters in Eight Miles High who also played key roles in folk-rock’s earlier, mid-’60s evolution, as portrayed in this book’s predecessor, Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ’60s Folk-Rock Revolution.

Prologue: Fifth Dimension

The Byrds, folk-rock’s greatest group, push folk-rock’s boundaries in 1966 with the Eight Miles High single and the Fifth Dimension album. Their integration of Indian, jazz, and country influences on both original material and covers of traditional and contemporary folk-based songs helps set the stage for the experimentation and expansion that will characterize folk-rock throughout the rest of the 1960s.

Chapter 1: Folk-Rock to Acid Rock: The San Francisco Sound

Folk-rock seeps into the psychedelic age with the explosion of acid rock in San Francisco. The San Francisco sound is spearheaded by bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Country Joe & the Fish, and the Grateful Dead, all of whom boast ex-folkies in their lineups and draw upon folk and folk-rock for much of their inspiration.

Chapter 2: Forever Changes: Folk-Rock Psychedelicized, from Sunset Strip to Outer Space

In Los Angeles, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Love continue catapulting folk-rock into unimagined territory with psychedelic experimentation. Cult acts like Skip Spence, Dino Valenti, and the Holy Modal Rounders make warped acid folk records that wrap roots folk around bizarre, visionary lyrics and odd instrumentation, setting them far apart from traditional folk arrangements.

Chapter 3: Folk-Rock Grows Up: The Singer-Songwriters

The singer-songwriter movement is born, leading folk-rock into more laidback, introspective territory. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley, and Gordon Lightfoot emerge as important recording artists; Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and other veterans produce some of their best work; Judy Collins and Tom Rush continue to boost singer-songwriters as song interpreters; and Dion, John Stewart, and Bobby Darin catch up with the changing times.

Chapter 4: In Thyme: British Folk-Rock Finds Its Voice

British folk-rock begins to develop its own identity as the Pentangle takes inspiration from specifically British sources, adding rhythmic arrangements that draw from rock, folk, blues, jazz, and pop. Donovan is joined by the Incredible String Band and others in coloring psychedelia with a peculiarly Celtic folk flair. Fairport Convention and the Strawbs put a spin on the genre by merging West Coast-influenced harmonized folk-rock with a more British sensibility.

Chapter 5: The New Dylan and Country-Rock

Bob Dylan emerges from hibernation at the end of 1967 with his plaintive, countrified John Wesley Harding album. Psychedelia gives way to country-rock as Dylan, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, and others strip back to basics and emphasize their country roots. Others follow Dylan to record in Nashville, while Dylan himself delves even deeper into country on 1969’s Nashville Skyline.

Chapter 6: Folk-Rock Superstars and Supergroups

Veterans from Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds form Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, folk-rock’s first supergroup. Folk-rock superstars Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, and James Taylor see out the ’60s with sounds that stray further still from their folk roots. The record business gets slicker and more corporate as the singer-songwriter boom brings in more money, while the artists manage to balance commercialism with social consciousness and rebellion.

Chapter 7: Liege & Lief: A Truly British Folk-Rock

Enigmatic British singer-songwriters like Nick Drake, Roy Harper, and Al Stewart make their first important recordings, giving a new hue to the American-dominated singer-songwriter movement. Britain hosts the last major, and most traditionally based, branch of folk-rock to flower in the 1960s as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and others electrify specifically English traditional folk songs.

Chapter 8: Folk-Rock, from Newport to Woodstock

Folk and folk-rock audiences merge and metamorphose in the interim between the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (where Dylan was so stormily received) and the end of the 1960s, when massive crowds attend events such as Woodstock to see and hear folk-rock and hard rock performers mix freely.

Epilogue: Folk-Rock’s Legacy

A look at the enduring influence of 1960s folk-rock, from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, as the originators matured, died, or survived to preserve the form and help keep the folk-rock wheel turning.

Discography

Interviewees

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits

About the Author

Bonus Mini-Book: Liner Notes to the Ultimate Folk-Rock Box Set

JINGLE JANGLE MORNING PREFACE

When Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High were published in 2002 and 2003, I gave little thought to how the books might turn into something else about a decade later. Like the 1960s folk-rock musicians I documented in these volumes, I was far more concerned with the moment than how they might be viewed a decade later. Both Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High have stayed in print all that time. But, as the Byrds sang, to everything there is a season, and for publishing, the time has come to make my books available in the electronic format. Kind of like how the time had come for acoustic guitars to turn electric back in 1965, pushed by a new generation demanding communications keep up with the times that were a-changin’.

I never thought I’d eventually be teaching a 14-week course based on the books, either. But as of this writing, I’m planning to do so for the first time in fall 2013 at the College of Marin, where I’ve taught courses on rock history since 2011. And if it’s being offered there, and my folk-rock volumes might even be considered as textbooks for courses elsewhere, the changing times demand they be available as ebooks, especially for new generations of readers who might have never bought a vinyl record. Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High, for the record, are available as separate ebooks. For the special edition you’re reading that combines both volumes into one as Jingle Jangle Morning, however, I had something else in mind.

When I started to write a history of 1960s folk-rock in 2000, my plan was to write one book, not two. As I got immersed in the project, I realized the subject was richer and more complex than I had thought, even as someone who’d been an avid fan of the music for more than twenty years. New channels for explorations opened; interviews led to contacts for other interviews I hadn’t even intended to pursue; and research, even in those days when far less material was easily accessible via the Internet and public libraries, kept uncovering more sources to investigate. When I handed in my manuscript, it was tens of thousands of words longer than what the contract envisioned. Sometimes you get away with that, and I hoped for the best.

Sometimes things work out for the best, too, but usually not the way you imagine. Editor Richard Johnston told me, quite reasonably and sympathetically, that the book would have to be cut by quite a bit. It was too long, and certainly longer than what the publisher expected. I couldn’t figure out how I’d make such massive reductions without a huge sacrifice in quality and depth, and a sleepless night or two followed.

Then, to his enormous credit, he proposed an alternative. Would I want to split it into two books? One covering the first half of the story, the other the final one? A single volume with all the material was out of the question, for marketing and economic reasons as much as anything else. Two volumes might work. Plus, as I confirmed, to make the second half as big as the first, I’d have the opportunity to add more material, and interview a few more notables with whom I hadn’t yet been able to speak.

No, there wouldn’t be that much more money for me. Certainly the extra money wouldn’t match the extra percentage of work involved. But sometimes, odious cliché to the contrary, it really is not about the money. It’s about doing justice to history, and I could do a lot more of that in 600 pages than 300-400 pages. That’s why I wrote two books on 1960s folk-rock. The first, Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ‘60s Folk-Rock Revolution, covers the story through roughly mid-1966; the sequel, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, picks up right where Turn! Turn! Turn! leaves off, taking the tale to the end of the 1960s. It’s a decision I’ve never regretted.

All that appreciated, I always felt that Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High should have been one book, not two. It really is one story, and one that should not be read in separate parts. The main reason it wasn’t, as strange as it might sound to those outside the business, is that a 600-page volume was feared to take up so much shelf space that stores would be reluctant to stock it. For better or worse, now there aren’t so many of those stores left anyway. For better, I hope, the emergence of the ebook format has given me a chance to finally present Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High in one volume, as I originally intended. The title, Jingle Jangle Morning, is taken from the hit that launched folk-rock, Mr. Tambourine Man, performed by folk-rock’s most important group, the Byrds, and written by its most important composer, Bob Dylan. As a character proclaimed in François Truffaut’s film The Woman Next Door (I paraphrase from the original French), Sometimes life has more imagination than we do.

Still, just as the original folk-rockers maintained respect for the folk upon which their careers were first built, there’s no reason to destroy the foundation in the process. In this ebook edition, relatively little has changed from the print versions. I have, however, taken the opportunity to fix some minor typos, and make some small factual corrections and clarifications that have come to light since the first edition was published.

I’ve made some more substantial additions and updates to reflect source material that’s emerged since 2003. For example, a good deal of unreleased recordings and film footage of Bob Dylan from the mid-‘60s are now available, which made a few extra comments and adjustments necessary for sections in which he was spotlighted. It seemed appropriate to detail a previously undocumented May 1965 folk-rock session by Ian & Sylvia (produced by Byrds co-manager Jim Dickson). Odds and ends on archival box sets have shed new light on what Stephen Stills and David Crosby were up to between their departures from Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds and the formation of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. More information’s available on how songs from Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes were circulated by his publishers and reached other artists who covered some of his songs, particularly in Britain.

I’ve also acknowledged evidence arguing that Eight Miles High might not have suffered as much from being un-recommended for airplay (due to supposed drug references) in Bill Gavin’s Record Report as is usually assumed. Smaller embellishments are found here and there, like a fuller description of the edited version of the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun on its US single release, and confirmation of speculation that ESP Records was funded by owner Bernard Stollman’s mother. I could go on, but you have more than 500 pages of reading ahead of you to find more.

I’ve also incorporated some first-hand research done after the books were published. So this ebook has quotes from interviews I did with about a dozen figures I did not speak with for the print editions of Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High: David Biasotti of Maxfield Parrish; John Browne of Ph Phactor Jug Band; Colin Cameron (session guitarist/bassist with Diane Hildebrand); Rick Cunha of Hearts & Flowers; Chris Ducey of the Penny Arkade; Judy Dyble of Fairport Convention; David Meltzer of the Serpent Power and the duo of Tina & David Meltzer; Steve Noonan; Jean Ray, of the duo Jim & Jean; David Rea, guitarist with Ian & Sylvia; Rick Stanley of the Gentle Soul; Michael Stuart of Love; and Bob Swanson of Lamb. There are also additional quotes from people I interviewed for Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High, but conducted additional interviews with after the book was published: Judy Collins; Chris Darrow of Kaleidoscope; Donovan; manager/producer Arthur Gorson; Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane; Michael Ochs, manager of his brother Phil; Sylvia Tyson of Ian & Sylvia; and Steve Young.

There are other, less elaborate additions when warranted by bits and pieces of newly unearthed insights, sometimes from box sets and DVDs that came out during the last ten years. The discography now includes more than forty DVD/video recommendations, as well as mild updates of, and a few additions to, the CD listings to reflect post-2003 releases of interest. In all, this ebook is about 15,000 words longer than the combined total of the original print editions.

Jingle Jangle Morning does more than just combine the two books into one, however. I’ve also added a mini-book of sorts: the liner notes to an imaginary eight-CD box set companion to my folk-rock history. So as a bonus feature, you get to read, if not hear, my ideal soundtrack to what I wrote. For this isn’t just a list of the tracks I would select, but full liner notes that would accompany my folk-rock box. With several paragraphs of stories behind each song, it adds up to nearly 75,000 words, like the hardbound book that would come with the actual box set in an ideal world.

While the mini-book does repeat some information from Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High, it also leaves room for a lot of additional stories, background scenarios, trivia, footnotes, and such that didn’t make those volumes. And with advances in Internet technology that are threatening or at least transforming the traditional music (not to mention book publishing) industry, it’s far more possible to assemble the actual tracks to this box than it was ten years ago, if you’re so inclined. These quasi-liner notes, or mini-book, or whatever you wish to call it, are only available with this ebook edition combining Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High into one volume as Jingle Jangle Morning. I hope that helps makes your acquisition of this two-in-one version all the more worthwhile, whether you read the print editions or not.

But for all the updates and additions, the essential core of the books remains the same, and some other things haven’t changed since 2003 either. You can still contact me at the same email address, [e-mail], with comments about this book or any of my other volumes. Information about all of my work remains available at the same website, www.richieunterberger.com.

Richie Unterberger

July 2013

San Francisco, California

Turn! Turn! Turn!:

The ‘60s Folk-Rock Revolution

[Updated Ebook Edition]

By Richie Unterberger

FOREWORD

What makes a classic record? It’s one of life’s imponderables. There are lots of answers that seem to contain an element of truth, but no single satisfying definition that enables you to say, Yes, that is a classic, but that is merely good. I think it’s something to do with crossing cultural boundaries and surviving changing tastes and styles. If that’s right, then the folk-rock boom of the mid-‘60s had its fair share of classics.

Think about the Byrds’ version of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, to take just one example. It is not just a smash hit from the ‘60s, a quaint period piece, a golden oldie. It’s an era-defining record, definitely, but there is even more to it than that. There’s a sense in which it lives, so you feel compelled to talk about it in the present tense. The chime of Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar and the singers’ incandescent harmonies transcend the time and circumstances in which they were recorded and continue to exude a joyous vitality that retains the power to enthrall and inspire. I’ve been listening to it for 25 years and it still gets me every time I hear it.

There are other classic folk-rock records, and plenty of merely very good ones as well. This book tells you about most of them. It also tells you about the bandwagon-hoppers, opportunists, and people who just didn’t quite get what was happening—people common to all musical genres. The subplot of their lesser contributions only serves to clarify the achievements of the main players.

Turn! Turn! Turn! takes its title from a Pete Seeger song, the lyrics of which are based on a passage in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. That passage can be paraphrased in one statement: There is a time, a right time, for everything. That’s certainly true of the story of the emergence of folk-rock. With hindsight the musical and broader social forces that converged in its making have a look of inevitability about them, as if everything was conspiring to produce that one outcome at that point in history. It was the right time because rock music had reached a stage in its life when it needed to make decisive steps from youth into adulthood. Folk-rock was one of those steps. It was a step into greater lyrical depth, whether poetic and introspective or political and outward-looking. It was a step into new instrumental possibilities. It was a step into melody. In fact, it was more than a step—it was a giant leap.

Mark Brend

London, April 2002

Mark Brend is the author of American Troubadours: Groundbreaking Singer-Songwriters of the ‘60s.

INTRODUCTION

Folk+Rock+Protest=An Erupting New Sound. So blared the headline in Billboard magazine on August 21, 1965, trumpeting the onslaught of a new way of making music that was shaking the foundations of the industry to its core. The Byrds and Bob Dylan had started it, with huge hits that summer that married the lyrical content and integrity of folk music with the visceral power of rock. Many more such artists were on their way to the same destination, bearing messages that would change the world, from Simon & Garfunkel, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Mamas & the Papas to Buffalo Springfield, Donovan, and Jefferson Airplane. By the end of the 1960s, when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young carried the folk-rock flame forward into the next decade, it was so entrenched within popular music that hardly anyone was even bothering to call it folk-rock anymore. The erupting new sound had become, to a large extent, the sound of rock music and its generation of listeners.

As that Billboard headline signified, at the time the industry thought of folk-rock as a craze, one of many that periodically come and go, enabling the music business to keep marketing new performers and selling tons of records. By the end of 1966, the folk-rock craze, or boom, was over, its most talented performers permanently accepted as part of rock’s mainstream. Often they moved on to psychedelic rock or new experiments in sound, and even if they never forsook folk and folk-rock as a base, the mere mingling of folk and rock elements was no longer reason for excited commentary. It was now a cornerstone of rock, persisting to this day, and responsible to a great degree for a huge elevation in the overall lyrical intelligence of all rock music. In that sense, it never went away, and was one of the most successful crazes of all.

Yet as the initial folk-rock boom faded further and further into history, music historians became keener to dismiss it as a passing fad, an awkward hybrid, or a necessary, temporary phase that rock needed to pass through as it grew into an art form. Too often, it was simplified as something that Bob Dylan had invented almost single-handedly, even if it took the Byrds to popularize folk-rock with covers of Dylan songs. As it diversified, and as different critics brought infinitely different perspectives to the form in the following decades, folk-rock’s definition became so wide and flexible that at times the term seemed almost meaningless. To some, any singer-songwriter singing about personal concerns with a guitar style that owes anything to acoustic folk strumming is folk-rock. Others adamantly apply far narrower guidelines, echoing the very dogmatic mindset that the first folk-rockers were so eager to escape. It’s all served to blur folk-rock’s image and, in the eyes of some, diminish its importance.

But it was important, indeed about as important as any stylistic evolution of popular music in that most turbulent of decades, the 1960s. So much of what we take for granted in popular music today—lyrics (often, though certainly not always) with a personal and/or universal message, artistic hunger to break down barriers between different styles, performers who write and record their own material their own way, and the hope that music means more than record sales—all can be partially attributed to folk-rock. Less tangibly, much of the socially conscious progress set in motion by young people in the 1960s—anti-war activism, championship of civil rights, personal and sexual liberation, a questioning of authority, and a determination to enjoy life rather than merely get on with it—was fueled, directly or indirectly, by folk-rock. Folk-rock was particularly effective at spreading its messages because it marked one of those rare instances where social activism and mainstream commercial interests merged, each furthering the agenda of the other.

Though inextricably linked with the events of its era and the generation that produced it, the music of the original folk-rock epoch has proved to be as timeless as the traditional folk music that inspired many of its artists. You don’t need to have experienced the period firsthand to feel the sound’s impact just as deeply as anyone did in 1965 or 1966. There was the sense of musicians mixing forms to produce something greater than the sum of its parts, something that pushed them beyond what they thought was possible, something that neither folk nor rock could have created on its own. Even as a suburban 17-year-old in 1979, I could grasp this at once, if only intuitively, playing the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man over and over, 14 years after its release, long after the Byrds had disbanded, long after they had regular airplay. Mr. Tambourine Man was different from what was on the radio, for the most part, in the late’70s. This was Music With Meaning. If that seemed pretentious to those who thought of rock ’n’ roll as a party music that should never be taken too seriously, well, the gains certainly outweighed the losses. Folk-rock, by the Byrds and others I was discovering long after their heyday, was music to feed both the body and the mind.

It would take much longer to fully appreciate the mammoth seismic cultural and musical shifts that had made folk-rock possible, even after I’d acquired most of the greatest folk-rock records in my late teens and early twenties. Folk-rock did not start as a result of a bold, solitary act of courage by Bob Dylan, risking all by deciding to play his lyrically complex folk songs on an electric guitar. This is a myth—one I encountered, in print, yet a few more times while writing this book—perpetuated by pundits anxious to seize upon one particular figure, and one particular action, as an axis upon which history turns.

It is in no way undermining Dylan’s crucial contributions to point out that he was but one of hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians from his generation engaged in the same collective, largely unconscious simultaneous move from folk to rock in those heady days of 1964 and 1965. Some of those others, like the Byrds, have received due recognition for their own groundbreaking achievements. Yet many of those vital to this transformation never have been given the credit they deserve, because they did not make hit records, or sometimes did not even record.

So who invented folk-rock? In general, everyone; in particular, no one. The forces steering its birth were wild, unpredictable, inevitable, and beyond the control of any one individual or group of individuals.

Which was, naturally, what made it so exciting. It was a crazy-quilt of connective threads between musicians, styles, generations, politics, the record industry, and the mass media. It was envisioned by virtually no one in 1963, yet within two years—after unforeseen thunderbolts like the JFK assassination, the arrival of the Beatles in the United States, the British Invasion, and the Byrds drawing overflow crowds with their folk-based music played on loud electric guitars—folk-rock had overrun the Western world. It might not have been as loud and crude as rockabilly, the early Rolling Stones, or punk. But within the context of its own time, it was equally rebellious and controversial.

The 18 months or so from the beginning of 1965 to the summer of 1966 were an especially frenzied crucible of mad invention, a time when its performers and listeners were riding a wild horse, both hanging on for dear life and exhilarated beyond belief at its reckless speed and unexpected bucks and turns. By mid-1966, the Byrds, who recorded the first major folk-rock hit with Mr. Tambourine Man in January 1965, were already deeply into psychedelic rock; Bob Dylan, an acoustic folk singer when the Byrds covered his song, was an electric rock superstar, backed by what might have been the loudest band in the world. The en masse shift of an entire generation from mild, short-haired folk musicians to uninhibited, long-haired rockers within a year or two is almost unparalleled in its speed, decisive as a karate chop that literally split one generation from another. The more I found out about it—starting as a teenager in the 1970s, then wading through hundreds of records and books, and ultimately talking to some of the front-line messengers themselves—the more I was convinced that the story of the entire 1960s folk-rock movement was one that needed to be told.

The roots of folk-rock stretch back to before the birth of rock ’n’ roll, before the dawn of the recording era, even before the twentieth century, to the folk music that arose in the United States, often derived from the British Isles and African origins. The precise definition of folk-rock was the cause of much debate in 1965 and 1966, and continues to be today, among both fans and historians. To some, folk-rock is embodied by early Byrds hits like Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!: a folk song, or a folk-like song, played on electric instruments with an electric rhythm section, combining prominent features of both folk and rock. To others, it’s anything from the mid-’60s with an electric 12-string guitar, conscientious harmonies, and a bashing tambourine to help keep the rhythm, even if the song and lyrics are those of a conventional romantic pop tune.

To those using the broadest criteria, folk-rock is rock music that borrows strongly or even just noticeably from folk, whether in the vocal harmonies, guitar strums and picks, or song composition. To those using the narrowest of definitions, it’s a traditional folk song played with rock instrumentation. Just about the only thing that everyone who listens to early folk-rock can agree upon is that the Byrds and Bob Dylan were folk-rock. That is, at least some of the time, perhaps, or maybe.

So what was folk-rock when it started? All of the above, in my estimation, if to varying degrees. Mid-’60s folk-rock was a wide umbrella, enveloping the Mamas & the Papas and such strongly pop-informed, slickly produced groups at its poppiest edge; the avowedly underground, raw, subversively left-wing agitprop of the Fugs at its most radical extreme; young folk singer-songwriters like Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, and Ian & Sylvia who were barely starting to dip their toes into electric folk-rock, as if for fear of drowning if immersed too quickly; and the Byrds—the Beatles of folk-rock, if there was such a thing—in the center. There was room for artists who some would soon consider psychedelic, such as the early Jefferson Airplane. There was even room for groups who have been sometimes classified as garage bands (like the Leaves) or pure pop acts (like the Turtles).

I have covered it all in this book, and also given substantial space to artists who may never have been defined as folk-rockers, but were strongly influenced by folk-rock, like the Beatles, to use the most obvious example. I would rather err on the side of caution than be too exclusive. That’s particularly important to do, I feel, since one of folk-rock’s greatest accomplishments was its influence upon rock and pop as a whole—one of many things that distinguished it from the insular folk scene that produced many folk-rockers. The barriers between the hip and unhip, and between performers of apparently different genres, so rigidly codified by rock historians after the fact, were actually much more fluid at the time than has been commonly acknowledged.

Sometimes boundaries do need to be drawn, though. Acoustic folk performers of the 1960s, whether from the folk boom that preceded folk-rock or from the folk-rock era itself, are here noted mostly for how they impacted the course of folk-rock. As much as the history of 1960s folk-rock encompasses, it should not be misconstrued as half the history of ’60s folk music, and half the history of ’60s folk-rock music. Folk-rock was not the same as folk music; that was central to the whole point of its existence. This is a book about folk-rock itself, with one chapter laying out the roots of its genesis in folk music from 1960-63.

One truly major boundary needed to be drawn to keep this history from approaching the size of a telephone book. The original intention was to cover the whole of 1960s folk-rock, a movement that if anything got more diverse and interesting between mid-1966 and the end of the decade. Folk-rock was a flower whose tendrils infiltrated almost every facet of rock music in its first five years, and in fact largely shaped several of its offshoots. Psychedelia, the singer-songwriter movement, country-rock, the late-blooming heyday of British folk-rock, retroactively named mini-genres like acid folk, even the birth of the rock festival: all either were grounded in, or owed a great deal to, the original flush of folk-rock.

It was quite a challenge to fit all of folk-rock’s branches from the years 1964-69 into one volume. More than 100 interviews and a quarter of a million words later, it proved impossible to fit into one book, but not impossible to tell the entire story. This led me to Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, the sequel to this book, also published by Backbeat Books, in 2003. Eight Miles High follows the continued evolution of many folk-rock performers detailed in the book you’re holding—the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Judy Collins, Buffalo Springfield, and many others—as well as the entrance of such giants as Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, and Fairport Convention onto folk-rock’s main stage, and the prime of more cultish figures such as Tim Buckley, Skip Spence, and Nick Drake.

But Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ‘60s Folk-Rock Revolution is devoted to the story of the first groundbreaking generation of folk-rockers, and particularly to the years 1964 to 1966, in which folk-rock originated, flourished, and peaked. It covers not so much folk-rock’s maturity as its birth and first full-force impact, stopping in mid-1966, when a motorcycle accident precipitated Dylan’s withdrawal from the public eye for a year-and-a-half, leaving other folk-rock originators and newcomers to forge new directions all over the folk-rock map.

Like its sequel, this book gives much weight to the perspectives of those who were there, drawing upon firsthand interviews conducted mostly with musicians, but also with producers, record label executives, managers, club owners, and journalists. I spoke to key innovators like Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Judy Collins, and Donovan, and not only about their hit records, though they had plenty of those. I was also concerned with highlighting the lesser-known, and often overlooked, forces that shaped their unique contributions to the folk-rock mix. Toward that end, I sought out many behind-the-scenes figures (to the public, at any rate), such as Elektra Records president Jac Holzman, Byrds manager Jim Dickson, and Bob Dylan producer Bob Johnston. Budding singer-songwriters like Arlo Guthrie and Janis Ian, folk boom stars like Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, elder statespersons like Pete Seeger, even British Invasion pop stars like Manfred Mann: all had much to contribute.

Physical landmarks that had played such a forceful role in folk-rock were unavoidable as I traveled to New York, Los Angeles, London, and Liverpool during my research. Washington Square Park in New York City still teemed with activity on weekends and hot summer nights, including some of the kind of music that had launched the early-’60s folk boom when folkies gathered there to jam. In Los Angeles I stayed just a mile from the Troubadour, often driving past the still-open club where Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, and David Crosby had formed the nucleus of the Byrds. Overseas, Liverpool’s Mathew Street is still thronged with reminders of the group that more than any other incited folk musicians to go electric—even though the street’s original Cavern Club, where the Beatles played in the early ’60s, has been demolished. Back in San Francisco, where I live and work, I and thousands of others attended the summer 2001 memorial service for Mimi Fariña, where Judy Collins and Joan Baez sang, and early folk-rockers such as Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner dotted the crowd of mourners.

For some of the people I interviewed, particularly the musicians, the term folk-rock remains a source of not just hazy definition, but occasionally one of vexation. There was sometimes no surer way of getting someone’s back up—then and now—than to refer to him or her as a folk-rock musician. The term folk-rock itself, after all, almost certainly originated in the record industry, not among musicians, and was beyond a doubt popularized into a catchphrase by the media. Many of the innovators we think of as folk-rockers prefer to think of themselves simply as musicians, and not ones constrained by any labels. Often they insist that what they were doing was not a conscious blend of folk and rock, but simply an organic process that came naturally and should not be subjected to microscopic analysis.

In part that’s because, I believe, barely anyone thought this music would still be so popular 35 years later, or ever expected it to be the source of such intense critical scrutiny. Yet folk-rock has become as much of a bedrock of the popular music of the Western world as traditional folk music was back when most of the first folk-rockers were picking up their guitars. More time, in fact, separates the birth of folk-rock from the writing of this book than separated the first folk-rockers from the Depression-era folk recordings that gave them much of their early repertoire. Even as one too young to have heard folk-rock when it was first performed and recorded, that realization, as I spoke to many of the first-generation folk-rockers, was stunning, and a little sad. It was much sadder when I referred to Donovan in a free-lance piece on the Beatles and the Maharishi, only to be greeted with this earnest query from an editor: Donovan who?

After all that time, however, most of those pioneers are still alive, well, and performing. And their occasional reluctance to be categorized is understandable in light of the spirit that drove them to create folk-rock in the first place, sometimes risking ostracism from the socially progressive—yet often artistically stultifying—folk community in which they often first honed their craft. If the folk-rock revolution had any overriding messages, they were to disobey unwritten laws, be willing to crash barriers, and refuse to be pigeonholed into any one bag. That’s part of the reason there are so many interpretations of folk-rock, and why it’s impossible for any one musician or listener to define it. Folk-rock was a music of change, not tradition. A music that, as the Byrds sang in one of folk-rock’s biggest and greatest hits, continued to turn, turn, turn.

Richie Unterberger

March 2002

San Francisco, California

PROLOGUE

The Great Folk-Rock Clash: The 1965 Newport Folk Festival

It was billed as the Newport Folk Festival, and for the most part, folk music was what an estimated 75,000 people heard at the event over the course of several days in July 1965. What it’s remembered for, however, is a chaotic 25 minutes or so of—mostly—rock ’n’ roll that may be the most controversial performance in the history of twentieth-century popular music.

On the night of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport, Rhode Island to play electric rock music in front of a live audience for the first time since beginning his career as a recording artist. A mere three songs were presented before he went offstage, returning to sing a couple more alone, accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar and harmonica. One of the five songs from his set had just topped the charts, though as recorded by a different act. Another was on its way to stopping just short of the #1 position, and remains his biggest hit to this day.

Yet Dylan was booed. Or some people booed, while others cheered. Or some booed and some cheered, while others were totally baffled. Or no one could really hear what was going on anyway.

Considering that a complete tape of the performance survives, along with a partial film of the show, it is astonishing how many widely varying accounts of the performance have circulated since 1965. It is rock music’s equivalent to Rashomon, the classic Akira Kurosawa film in which four characters give different, often contradictory versions of the same murder. It is tempting to view Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as one in which the telling similarly varies, according to the musical and social tastes, values, and prejudices of the narrator. There are few other incidents that set the fusion—and conflict—of tradition and innovation, young and old, and art and commerce, in such bold relief.

The objective truth of what really occurred that night will never be possible to determine. What is certain is that it will endure as the defining symbol of the emergence of folk-rock—the hybrid of acoustic folk and amplified rock ’n’ roll that would do more than irrevocably alter the course of popular music. It would irrevocably alter the shape of twentieth-century culture and society as a whole.

The brouhaha over Dylan’s electric debut at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was as unexpected as it was volatile. Yet if only in hindsight, it brought to a head cross-currents, tensions, and alchemies that were years in the making.

Murray Lerner’s Festival film had footage from the 1963-66 Newport Folk Festivals, including some from Bob Dylan’s legendary electric rock set in 1965.

For most of the ten years since rock ’n ’roll had become massively popular among the world’s youth, it had traveled an almost entirely separate path from folk music. To roughly summarize the over-generalizations of the more vigilant champions of folk music, rock ’n’ roll was disposable, commercial trash, marketed to immature teenagers. Folk music, by contrast, represented the authentic expression of the people, attracting a sophisticated, literate audience as concerned with changing the world for the better as it was with being entertained.

Yet folk music and popular success were not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the first half of the 1960s had seen a folk boom that expanded its listenership by the millions. The boom did not only encompass the liberal intellectuals and college campuses that had comprised the core of the folk community for decades. By the early ’60s it was also crossing over to the pop charts in unprecedented fashion. At the same time, folk was a growing factor in progressive social activism, providing anthems for the mushrooming civil rights and antiwar movements.

Bob Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival were among the most potent symbols of the folk scene. Co-founded in the late ’50s by George Wein and Albert Grossman, the first Newport Folk Festival was held in the usually sedate seaside Rhode Island town in 1959. Held again in 1960, and put on hold for the next two years, it returned in full force in 1963, attracting growing numbers of folk fans and becoming the pre-eminent showcase of folk talent in the United States. Folk music’s biggest stars could usually be counted upon to appear, and live recordings of festival performances, issued on Vanguard Records, were crucial to boosting the careers of numerous newcomers and old-timers. And there was no bigger star in the world of folk music, and no more esteemed spokesperson for the folk movement, than Bob Dylan in the mid-’60s.

Since his arrival in Greenwich Village from Minnesota as an unknown 19-year-old in early 1961, the former Robert Zimmerman had blazed a meteoric trail through the folk world. Four years earlier he had been a Woody Guthrie wannabe. In 1965 he was perhaps the most idolized songwriter on the globe. He had established himself as the foremost protest and topical composer in the folk idiom with Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, With God on Our Side, and other biting commentaries on injustice and military madness. In the past year or two he had proved himself the master of more poetic and personal ruminations such as Chimes of Freedom, Gates of Eden, and Mr. Tambourine Man.

The Newport Folk Festival had been instrumental to his rise to folk superstardom, particularly in 1963. That was the year he had dueted with folk’s biggest record-seller, Joan Baez, on Blowin’ in the Wind; shared vocals with folk’s greatest living legend, Pete Seeger, on the satirical Dylan composition Playboys and Playgirls; and joined hands with Seeger, Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, and other folk figureheads for We Shall Overcome, the unofficial civil rights anthem of 1960s political activism. By that time, he and several other leading folk acts were managed by festival co-founder Albert Grossman. But by the summer of 1965, Dylan was not a folk singer anymore, at least not to anyone with an open ear.

To get a sense of why some felt Dylan was committing sacrilege at Newport that year, it’s necessary to understand that the festival was viewed by many not just as a series of performances, but as a mini-community unto itself. It was administered by the nonprofit Newport Folk Foundation, whose mission, according to Billboard, was supporting research and exposure of folk music, with artists paid only expenses. Its evening concerts presented the participating musicians with the highest profiles. But much of the daylight hours were given over to workshops—no less than 15 of them, in fact, on the day before Dylan’s set—on wide-ranging and sometimes esoteric facets of the folk tradition, including blues guitar, bluegrass banjo, ballad swapping, psaltery, and (as noted in The New York Times) Negro group singing and rhythm patterns. The barrier between artist and listener narrowed, giving those just learning their instrument a chance to play along with their heroes, and the artists an opportunity to swap tales with and mentor their followers.

In the days when rock festivals were unknown, folkfests also served as the largest mass gatherings of the burgeoning youth counterculture, Newport being the biggest. In the shots accompanying the credits to Murray Lerner’s Festival, a documentary comprised of footage from the 1963-66 Newport Folk Festivals, you’re greeted with a seemingly endless march of bohemian young adults trudging to the festival grounds. Add a few inches of hair, more flamboyant dress, and color, and it’s not hard to imagine many of the same men and women in the audience at Woodstock four years later.

Vanguard Records issued many albums of recordings made at the Newport Folk Festivals in the 1960s.

Bob Dylan was the biggest attraction on the bill of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, his slot scheduled for the closing set of performances on Sunday night. Intense debate over his stylistic focus and role in the folk community, however, had begun the year before with the release of his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. That record marked a shift in focus from songs of social commentary to songs about relationships and romance, and increasingly complex, sometimes abstract wordplay. On My Back Pages he seemed to wave farewell to his days as a protest singer. He devoted his appearances at Newport in July 1964, both at a workshop on topical ballads and in the main performance area, to this new breed of composition. And he played a newly written song called Mr. Tambourine Man, having already premiered it at London’s Royal Festival Hall on May 17.

Not all of his audience applauded his new direction. It had already been something of a matter of contention within folk circles as to whether topical songs should be emphasized at folk festivals at all. Topical ballads became the word for what Dylan did, explains Festival film director Murray Lerner. "Creating new folk songs, and using—changing—the words to old ones. It was part of my thesis in the film, that the tradition was changed to express something new. I imagine it’s happened throughout history. Of course, there was a lot of controversy about that.

There was definitely controversy within the administration of the festival about what should be presented, and what was folk music. There was a lot of late evening discussion about who should be on. And there was a lot of vehement opposition to anything that wasn’t pure folk music. And here was Dylan, having just helped establish the topical song as a major vehicle for folk performers, spinning wheels and changing gears even while the merits of topical ballads had yet to be fully accepted. In Broadside, which along with Sing Out! was the most influential folk music magazine in the United States, Paul Wolfe declared: His new songs, performed at Newport, surprised everyone, leaving the majority of the audience annoyed—some even disgusted, and in general scratching its collective head in disbelief.

A year later, the debate between folk purists—a word that would appear, over and over again, as folk-rock became the rage—and less tradition-bound musicians and listeners had accelerated beyond anyone’s expectations. Mr. Tambourine Man, a song that Dylan had played at the topical ballad workshop in 1964, had topped the American charts just a month before Newport ’65, in a fully electric rock ’n’ roll version by a bunch of ex-folkies called the Byrds. Dylan was becoming as much a pop star as a folk one, not just in the marketplace, but in demeanor and image as well. With his growing hair and mod clothes, he not only looked like a rocker, but was a rocker. One side of his last LP, Bringing It All Back Home, had been hard-driving rock ’n’ roll. That album was hovering just outside the Top Ten, and an electric single from the album, Subterranean Homesick Blues, had made the Top 40. And now Like a Rolling Stone, his hardest-rocking song yet, had just entered the Top 100, seemingly confirming that Dylan’s conversion to rock music was complete.

It was in this highly charged atmosphere that Dylan arrived at the Newport Folk Festival in July. Today, with 35 years’ hindsight, it may seem odd that Dylan was not necessarily expected to perform his latest hits, with similar instrumentation to that on the records, at such a major showcase. This was, however, a folk festival, not a rock one—rock festivals as such didn’t really exist yet—or even a pop one. The concert program listed an astonishing variety of folk performers, and not just acknowledged stars such as Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary, progressive folk artists Ian & Sylvia, emerging singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, and folk icons Odetta and Pete Seeger. There were country bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis; bluegrass masters Bill Monroe and the Charles River Valley Boys; elderly Appalachian musician Roscoe Holcomb; fiddler Eck Robertson, who had made his first record in 1922; more specialized ensembles presenting folk dance, work songs, and fife and drum corps; and even an entire Sunday morning concert of religious music.

Additionally, though Dylan had been recording with rock musicians for about six months, he had not performed live with a rock band since he was a teenager known as Bobby Zimmerman. He had not even formed a working group for such occasions, and had toured England in the spring as a solo acoustic act, even as Bringing It All Back Home and Subterranean Homesick Blues were ascending the charts there.

Program guide for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan had only an acoustic guitar with him when he participated in a songwriters’ workshop on Saturday, July 24, performing All I Really Want to Do—another song, incidentally, that was on the pop charts, via cover versions by both the Byrds and Cher. Captured on the Festival film, it was rewarded with an enthusiastic standing ovation. Never mind that it was a prominent example of the nontopical songs Dylan had recently written, and a folk-rock hit for Hollywood-based stars. The crowd certainly did not seem to be holding that against him. Which makes the more volatile reception of his performance the following night yet more intriguing.

Elsewhere on the festival grounds that Saturday, tensions between traditionalists and the new guard were already coming to a boil. Playing at the blues workshop was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose lead guitarist, Mike Bloomfield, had recently recorded with Dylan, playing on the Like a Rolling Stone single. Introducing them was Alan Lomax, probably the most esteemed American folklorist. Lomax had been recording folk and blues musicians in the field since the 1930s, and vigorously championing them and other folk musicians from Europe and the Caribbean via numerous channels, including radio broadcasts, Library of Congress collections, and album releases. Yet when presenting workshops, wrote Robert Shelton in The New York Times, he could be an articulate, illuminating, fluent, but sometimes maddeningly pedantic host-narrator.

The exact words that Lomax used to introduce the band cannot be tracked down, and form a sideplot mini-legend to Dylan’s ’65 Newport affair. Everyone who was at the Butterfield set seems to agree, however, that it did not present the young, integrated, electric Chicago blues band in the most flattering light. In Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom’s Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues, veteran Chicago blues musician Nick Gravenites paraphrases Lomax’s speech as: Well, they’ve got this band from Chicago. Some people feel that white people can’t play the blues, and some people feel they can—you make up your own mind. Here they are.

Albert Grossman, who was in the process of adding the Butterfield Blues Band to his artist roster, was not amused. Angry words were exchanged—again, the exact words have been lost to time, even to bystanders like occasional Dylan session guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who remembers helping to break up the ensuing fight, with assistance from singer-songwriter Richard Fariña. The two stocky, middle-aged men were rolling around like a couple of bears in the dust, according to Geoff Muldaur of the Grossman-managed Jim Kweskin Jug Band, as onlookers observed the brief struggle with disbelief.

Not that Lomax’s intro dampened Butterfield’s reception: He downplayed their legitimacy, and then they got up and tore the place to shreds, declares Muldaur, still rankled by the memory decades later. Legitimate, le-shmit-a-mate. Fuck you. Adds Murray Lerner, I thought the Butterfield Blues Band was going to be something else totally. And the minute they got on and started playing, I really got excited. Without any preparation, I jumped on the stage and photographed them quite intensely. I thought that electric music had this other quality of being hypnotic. [It was] a new way of experiencing music, and put you on its spell in a different way. It was a taste of the vanguard-vs.-old guard conflict that would play itself out on a much larger stage the following evening.

"Alan Lomax, who tended to be kind of outspoken, probably said something [that] Albert—who was very, very loyal to Bob [Dylan], extremely loyal to Bob—just didn’t cotton to, Langhorne speculates. Feelings were very strong. Because there were a lot of people who were very heavily invested in the traditional folk music. With the folk music revival, these were people who had been playing folk music for years and years and years in obscure venues, and suddenly they saw their time had come. They probably saw electrification and rock ’n’ rollation as total co-option."

It’s Dylan who’s gotten the lion’s share of retroactive attention for bringing rock to Newport, but the changes being wrought by folk-rock in the outside world were in fact already being heard before his Sunday night concert. The magazine Boston Broadside (a regional publication that was a separate entity from the New York-based folk periodical Broadside) had reported that the Newport Folk festival announced that they had relaxed the ban on amplified instruments for [Butterfield’s band] only, so that they might play at the Festival, but if such a ban was in effect, it was in the process of getting somewhat relaxed. In addition to the Butterfield Blues Band, there were also the Chambers Brothers, a gospel-folk crossover band using electric guitar and drums (excerpts from shows by both groups can be heard on Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues 1959-68). Filling in for an ill Josh White, the Chambers Brothers played Time Has Come Today, three years before it became a psychedelic rock hit. People jumped, and broke down fences, and ran and rushed the stage—it was incredible, remembered Joe Chambers in a 1994 Goldmine interview. Newport had never seen or heard anything like that. And after we finished, and the crowd finally settled down, the emcee came back up and said, ‘Whether you know it or not, that was rock ’n’ roll.’

Performing on the first evening was Donovan, already fending off charges of Dylan imitation in the wake of his first two hit singles, Catch the Wind and Colours. Although the Dylan-wannabe charges were unwarranted, further Dylan-Donovan parallels were generated when he sang at Newport with Joan Baez on Colours. Duets with Baez, at Newport and elsewhere, had been crucial to Dylan’s rise to stardom, and to some it must have seemed that Donovan was trying to follow the same path that Dylan had blazed as a folkie troubadour.

It was not widely known that the British singer, still in his late teens, had actually already performed, on television, with an electric rock group three months earlier, though his 1965 recordings were mostly in the acoustic folk style. He would not play electric rock at Newport, but put his own two cents into the rising debate in a discussion at the festival with revered British folklorist and folk singer A.L. Lloyd. As reported by The New York Times that weekend, Donovan and Mr. Lloyd differed about whether to keep folk and pop music separate. Donovan said he would like to see everything fused, but Mr. Lloyd said: ‘Much of pop commercial music reflects instability, despair and loneliness. I have the feeling our kids are attracted to folk song because it speaks of a more stable society than ours is today.’

Japanese sleeve for Donovan’s debut single Catch the Wind, released just a few months before his 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance.

Richard Fariña, who like Dylan had