I had the chance to watch Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan film last night. One of the most interesting element is Dylan’s transition from folk and protest to what his aggrieved aggregation of surrogate moms, dads, aunts and uncles called RocknRoll. Acoustic versus electric. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were Dylan’s heroes, but when he said he wasn’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more, he meant every word.
Scorcese mentions in the interview after the show that he hadn’t heard Dylan prior to 1966, that growing up on the Lower East Side, he was pretty much a Top Forty guy until Like A Rolling Stone hit the airwaves. For AM deejays of the era, it was the beginning of the end. Stepping on Herman’s Hermits was one thing: cutting Dylan off in the middle for a commercial exposed them to a backlash so swift and complete most of them were out of work within twenty four months. Gone forever.
The cultural seeds were sprouting. In 1966 a citizen of these United States might pass through the musical triage of Jerry Vale and Jack Jones, Old Blue Eyes, Mitch Miller and his Orchestra, down the tranquil halls of Lawrence Welk before discovering Johnny in the basement mixing up the medicine. Balloons were popping, ideas fermenting. An entire generation of performers washed ashore in Vegas to become a colony stranded in sequined isolation, frozen in permanent self-parody, finger popping in fuschia tuxedos. Scorcese called it a time of innocence, but like Ophelia ‘neath the window, fans and music lovers had heard something they’d never heard before.