Strike another match, go start anew

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival

(1963)

This is not a documentary about Bob Dylan being booed at Newport in 1965 for going electric. It is a documentary about the lovefest Dylan enjoyed at the festival in 1963, '64, and '65 (mostly). But tell you what--when he finishes that aggressively electrified "Maggie's Farm," even though you know what's coming, it's a shock. And I wonder how many people were booing Dylan--especially given that when they're asked whether they'd like him to come back out for another song, specifically an acoustic one, there's as much love as there was for the babyfaced Minnesota boy two years earlier, alone with his guitar, or sometimes joined by Joan Baez. Frankly, I think most people were probably booing Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and it's easy to understand why. There's electric and there's electric, and Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's keyboard were taking the sound far away from anything that anybody might expect to hear at a folk festival--and far away from any recording Dylan was doing in the studio at the time (or, I think it might fairly be said, has done in the studio ever). In any case, for all the mythic notoriety of the event, all seems to have been forgiven quickly. And why not: damn, that guy could (and, I've heard, still can) entertain.