Results for “dylan” 143 found
Dylan Matthews interviews Anne Krueger
MATTHEWS: What was the debate about import substitution like at this point, in the late 1950s/early 1960s?
KRUEGER: The whole profession believed in import substitution. Almost without question. Even Gottfried Haberler, in his lectures in 1959, said that, of course, infant industry substitution by the developing countries was acceptable. Go back and look at the Cairo lectures. It’s in there.
MATTHEWS: Would you say that was how you were thinking about import substitution at the time?
KRUEGER: It didn’t quite ring true. More than that, just seeing how import substitution was working made me skeptical. Lawyers who do trade law are more pro free trade than economists, because they know how badly protection works. A distorted economy is terrible. Not just a little bad—import substitution probably cut growth rates in half of what they could have been.
Here is the entire dialogue.
Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate!
I had heard the rumors for years, but I didn’t think it actually would happen. My takes on a few Dylan albums:
FreeWheelin’ Bob Dylan: One of his most listenable and underrated albums, the same is true for Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Bringing It All Back Home: The album I fell in love with as a kid. Some of it is overwrought but mostly still amazing, perhaps his highest peaks.
Highway 61 Revisited: Half of it is wonderful, but it contains excess and some so-so judgment.
Blonde on Blonde: Many see this as Dylan’s peak, but I don’t listen to it much. Somehow the sound is a little harsh for my taste.
The Basement Tapes: The most overrated, too much murky slush and slosh.
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, vol.II: The perfect medley.
Blood on the Tracks: Maybe the most consistent and listenable album, though it’s not pathbreaking in the way that the mid-sixties work was.
Time Out of Mind: An amazing “late career” work.
Dylan’s memoir is excellent, and his most underrated contribution outside of creating music is the CDs he edited for satellite radio, many hours of Dylan selecting and playing classics from early American musical history, blues, country, mixed styles, perhaps the single best look at the early evolution of American popular music. Many hours of listening pleasure. Bob Dylan Radio Hour. And the Martin Scorsese four-hour bio-documentary on Dylan is one of the better movies ever made, No Direction Home it is called.
If I recall correctly, three of the Conversations with Tyler turned to the topic of Bob Dylan. Camille Paglia loves the song “Desolation Row,” Cass Sunstein is a big fan, especially of some of the early period work, and Ezra Klein feels he is overrated, I guess that means especially overrated now.
Here are my earlier posts on Bob Dylan. Complain all you want, I say Bob Dylan is a better and more important artist than say Philip Roth. It’s not even close.
Congratulations to Bob Dylan, polymath!
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
Bob Dylan *Radio Hour*
Also known as German markets in everything, or alternatively why oh why can't we have a better U.S. copyright law?
Remember when Bob Dylan was DJ for those XM satellite radio shows, spinning a melange of blues, folk songs, vaudeville, gospel, and general bizarreness, with generally American themes, in the process proving himself one of the world's great musical infovres? Some of those shows are collected on CD, in Germany, vol. I, II, and III, four discs a box, twelve discs in total. The Amazon.de listings are here (they will ship to the US), or in German stores for about six dollars a disc, thank you Greece.
I own thousands of CDs, but these are among the very best and the song selection compares favorably to other collections of American music. The sound quality and transfers are first-rate.
Here is a Bach box, his major choral works and some of the major cantatas, MP3, and CD, 42 euros, 22 discs, John Eliot Gardiner conducting, these are some of the best recordings of the chosen pieces and even with shipping costs this is an extremely favorable purchase.
Have I mentioned there are many outrageous bargains in Berlin, not just my apartment?
For five or six euros, you can buy an excellent spaghetti bolognese, better than almost anything in WDC or Virginia. Apartments are cheaper, you don't need a car, mineral water and good bread is cheaper, gelato is cheaper, and in most social circles you're not expected to dress extraordinarily well. I'm not sure books are cheaper but they're not outrageously priced either, even many English-language editions. It's a strange feeling to come to Europe and have most things be cheaper, which still is not the case in Paris.
Here Angus recommends five CDs for Germany, good picks but the Dylan and the Bach round out some Alvin Curran and some gospel in my living room.
Dylan movie. Sort of.
The new Dylan biopic, starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw – all as Bob Dylan – is starting to get some coverage. As a lifelong Dylan fan, I’m excited to see the movie. The film is currently doing the rounds of the film festivals, and is going into wider release slowly from September through March (depending on your country).
Early reports only whet my appetite:
- A slew of trailers (both official and unofficial) on YouTube [HT: Cass Sunstein]
- This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie: a beautifully-written essay in today’s NY Times magazine
- A wrap-up of other reviews, from filmmaker Todd Haynes
- Some extremely high variance early reviews.
An aside: From many hallway conversations, I can report that Dylan is a surprisingly popular artist among the econ gliterati.
Bob Dylan’s XM broadcasts, as DJ
Too good to be true. I wish to rebel against the Staffan Linder theorem; maybe I’ll have my head frozen after all. Note: the downloads are not quick.
What I’ve been reading
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. The best book on its topic, and one of the best books on Mexican history flat out. Everything is explained with remarkable clarity. By the way, the central government never really has controlled the entire country, or not for very long anyway.
Sean Mathews, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East. Anexcellent and original book, somewhere between a history and travel book. Views Greece as part of “the Middle East.” I found every page interesting.
Robert Polito, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. An informationally dense, rambling, and frequently insightful and obsessive book about the “late” career period of Bob Dylan. When does his “late” period start? 1990 perhaps? I remember thinking in 1990 that we were well into Dylan’s late career phase. But that was thirty-six years ago!
Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat. If you like her at all, you will be entranced by this one. With a radical ending, as you might expect.
Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis in Belief. A fun new book on Tennyson’s relations with the science of his time, and how he drifted away from religious belief.
Partha Dasgupta, On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us, is a popular summary of some of his thinking on valuing the environment and natural resources.
Davd Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. A good popular look at what the subtitle promises.
José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.
What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll. Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness. Here goes:
Cinema
Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Yi Yi, Artificial Intelligence, Her, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks. Incendies anyone?
Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):
Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps. Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute. As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization. So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.
Fiction
Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem. The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism. The Savage Detectives. Sonia and Sunny maybe?
Visual Arts
Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober. Late Hockney and Richter works. The best of Kara Walker. The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.
Jazz
There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity. One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators. Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side. Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald? I don’t think so.
Popular music (also a bad term)
The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. How about Sunn O)))? No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?
Television
The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Assorted
Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen. At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt. There is games and gaming. People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The new wing at MOMA. Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor. (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.) I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century. The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4. They are indeed things of beauty.
Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me. We are hardly a culture in decline.
My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Cass was in top form, and so we went on for almost two hours. In his Substack he described it as “The most fun interview I have ever done.” Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill’s liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises’ “cranky enthusiasm for freedom,” whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass’ next book about animal rights, and more.
I will reproduce the section Cass pulled for his own Substack:
COWEN: Now, we started with the topic of liberalism. How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.
The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.
His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. I heard it, actually, in concert a few years ago. It was a great performance. It wasn’t young, but it was a great performance. The audience went wild when he did “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was the final song. It was the encore. It wasn’t just because it was the greatest rock song ever written. It was because of how he did it. I thought, “What’s going on in this song? Why is everyone exhilarated?” The song, which he described when he wrote it as vomit, hatred directed at somewhere that was real — it wasn’t that, or it was a little bit that, but it was a song of liberty.
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” Everyone felt like they were flying. He makes that — “Like a Rolling Stone” — be a song of freedom. If you look at his angry songs — “Positively 4th Street” — there’s a freedom in being, of course, uninhibited, able to say things, but also a freedom of disconnection.
When he’s asked why did he change his name, I have an account of why he actually did. I think he gave it exactly once, but in his more characteristic way, he said, “This is America. You can change your name.” Then he said, “I was born. I didn’t think I was born with the right name. I could make it up. I could say that sounds more like I was.”
Making rootlessness not be a curse, but instead something that is . . . the word joy is too clichéd for Dylan. If you look at his love songs, like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” which isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s good. There’s a connection with the one he loved, who got away, but you can feel the sense of freedom.
COWEN: “Visions of Johanna”?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, completely. He’s torn. That has the great opening line. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks When you’re trying to be so quiet?” Did Yeats write better lines than that? Probably, but he was Yeats.
COWEN: Blood on the Tracks — a liberal album?
SUNSTEIN: Oh, yes.
COWEN: How would you express that?
SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m thinking “Buckets of Rain” is the closing song. Right before that, there’s a song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s it, which is, I think, one of his greatest songs. That’s a liberal song of freedom and separation, that she’s going, but he’s going to see her everywhere, and there’s smiling at impermanence. That is a big liberal theme — smiling at impermanence — because impermanence makes things not routine and also makes for freedom.
COWEN: “Idiot Wind” is the angry song of the batch, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, it’s pretty mad. He said about that song, “I don’t know why people like it. There’s so much sadness and distress in it.”
COWEN: Do you see your own liberalism or just yourself in the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: I think so.
COWEN: Reinventing yourself, not quite wanting to be pinned down, doing a lot of stuff.
SUNSTEIN: He likes, I think, abandoning and going on to something that’s very different. I wish I’d gone electric or had some equivalent of that. But doing something quite different — I do share a little bit with him. I like it when I think something I thought was wrong. I now am very enthusiastic about the Austrian economists and Hayek. I’ve always admired them, of course, but I didn’t feel that they were on my team. Now I feel I’ve gone to their team. I don’t feel ashamed that I was wrong before. I feel excited that I’m less wrong now.
Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well. Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
UAP okie-dokie
The real action starts at 0:54:
Here is the same video with under oath reactions from witness experts. Here are remarks from Dylan Borland.
My first students
To continue with some biography…
My first full-time teaching job was at UC Irvine in 1988, a school with very good undergraduate students, including in economics. I was fortunate enough to be assigned Honors Intermediate Micro for my very first class.
(My general view is that the second time I teach a given class is the best, but the very first time is the second best version of the class. After that, unless I have a break of years, some of the material starts to feel too familiar to me, and I explain it less well and with less enthusiasm.)
I used the Nicholson text, as it had been pre-assigned, but I wished it had more economic intuition.
In any case I had seventeen students, and sixteen of them were Asian or Asian-American. None of them were south Asian. That was UC Irvine in those days (and perhaps still now?).
All but perhaps one were very good students.
That first year in my first class I was lucky enough to teach Stephen Jen. Stephen, as you may know, later received a PhD from MIT, working with Paul Krugman. He is these days a famous and highly respected currency analyst (among other things), and you will see his name often in the Financial Times. He lives in London, and he and I had dinner but a few weeks ago.
Stephen at first was going to do electrical engineering, but it turned out economics was his true love. I encouraged him to apply to graduate school, and wrote a very positive letter for him to MIT. The rest is history, as they say.
I spent a good bit of time with Stephen outside of class, and even played basketball with him several times. The summer of 1988 I also stayed with his family in Taipei, during a long Asia trip that I will write about some other time.
Most recently, Stephen has been known for having an early and very good call that the USD is going to decline, as indeed it did.
My second year at UC Irvine I taught the same class again. I was lucky enough to have Jeffrey Ely in my class, and of course he did very well. Jeff ended up studying for an economics PhD at UC Berkeley.
These days Jeff is a very well-known game theorist at Northwestern, arguably the number one school for game theory. He took a more traditional academic path, whereas Stephen started at the IMF and then worked his way up through the world of finance.
Jeff for a while even had a presence in the blogosphere, and still you will find him on Twitter, though he has not posted in the last year. In game theory, Jeff is highly creative and he approaches all problems by thinking like an economist.
As a person, he was always a bit more “hippie” than was Stephen, and I recall him giving me a tape of the Bob Dylan song “Million Dollar Bash,” from The Basement Tapes.
At George Mason, my best undergraduates often have been Chinese, but in terms of professional impact those are my two most successful undergraduate students ever. Getting to know and teach them was one of the very best things about being at UC Irvine. My colleagues were great too, but that is the subject of another post.
Emergent Ventures winners, 43rd cohort
Jason Cameron, North York, Ontario, high school and incoming RBC, AI privacy.
Opemipo Odunta, Winnipeg, hydroponics.
Benjamin Arya, Harvard, California, Australia, longevity.
Aida Baradari, Harvard, audio privacy.
John Denny, Galway, to visit SF and NYC.
Zelda Poem, SF/France, artistic and cultural patronage programs for San Francisco.
Lauren Pearson, Toronto, genomic origins of focal epilepsy.
Charles Yang, WDC, digitize the Hyman Rickover archives.
Bethlehem Hadgu, NYC/Eritrea, “to make classical music beautiful again,” violist, her institution is Exalt, DC chamber music concert June 4.
Noah Rowlands, Cheltenham, general career support in AI and travel support.
Lily Ottinger, Taipei, to study the game theory of South Pacific international relations.
Jonathan Nankivell, London, to improve clinical trials in the UK.
Lucas Cremers and the David Network, NYC, to support the study, discussion, and use of AI in the conservative student community.
Robert Scowen, London, AI and general career support.
Dylan Paoletti, Bel Air, Maryland, high school, cancer cell suicide.
Lydia Laurenson, San Francisco, writing, Substack.
Lucas Kuziv, London, educate Ukrainian youth in AI and programming.
The most important decision of the Trump administration?
It is finally getting some publicity. Of course I am referring to the AI training deals with Saudi Arabia and UAE. Here is an overview NYT article, and here is one sentence:
One Trump administration official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that with the G42 deal, American policymakers were making a choice that could mean the most powerful A.I. training facility in 2029 would be in the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.
And:
But Trump officials worried that if the United States continued to limit the Emirates’ access to American technology, the Persian Gulf nation would try Chinese alternatives.
Of course Saudi and the UAE have plenty of energy, including oil, solar, and the ability to put up nuclear quickly. We can all agree that it might be better to put these data centers on US territory, but of course the NIMBYs will not let us build at the required speeds. Not doing these deals could mean ceding superintelligence capabilities to China first. Or letting other parties move in and take advantage of the abilities of the Gulf states to build out energy supplies quickly.
In any case, imagine that soon the world’s smartest and wisest philosopher will soon again be in Arabic lands.
We seem to be moving to a world where there will be four major AI powers — adding Saudi and UAE — rather than just two, namely the US and China. But if energy is what is scarce here, perhaps we were headed for additional AI powers anyway, and best for the US to be in on the deal?
Who really will have de facto final rights of control in these deals? Plug pulling abilities? What will the actual balance of power and influence look like? Exactly what role will the US private sector play? Will Saudi and the UAE then have to procure nuclear weapons to guard the highly valuable data centers? Will Saudi and the UAE simply become the most powerful and influential nations in the Middle East and perhaps somewhat beyond?
I don’t have the answers to those questions. If I were president I suppose I would be doing these deals, but it is very difficult to analyze all of the relevant factors. The variance of outcomes is large, and I have very little confidence in anyone’s judgments here, my own included.
Few people are shrieking about this, either positively or negatively, but it could be the series of decisions that settles our final opinion of the second Trump presidency.
Addendum: Dylan Patel, et.al. have more detail, and a defense of the deal.
Thursday assorted links
1. Do growth rates have to decline for aging societies?
2. Conversations with Tyler Boston meet-up.
3. ChinaTalk is expanding into Chinese AI issues.
4. Nate Silver on the zigzag of American politics.
5. Dwarkesh podcast with Adam Brown: “Bubble Universes, Black Holes, & AdS/CFT.”
6. UFO okie-dokie.
7. The politics of LLM content? Tweet storm. David Rozado’s Substack summary. Full report.
8. James Broughel on why people don’t like Dylan so much today. I agree with this descriptive point. But oddly my objection to a lot of music today is how bad it sounds (by my standards), not that the songs are not good.
9. Humanity’s last exam. Here are some of he questions, how well would you do? And NYT coverage. It seems o1 pro was not tested? (I tried the Kant question on o1 pro and it seemed to get it right.) As measured in the study, DeepSeek-R1 (!) does the best.
My Conversation with the excellent Joe Boyd
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world’s musical traditions connect and transform each other. His new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is seventeen years in the making, and is in Tyler’s words “the most substantive, complete, thorough, and well-informed book on world music ever written.” From producing Albanian folk recordings to discovering the hidden links between Mississippi Delta blues and Indian classical music, Boyd’s journey reveals how musical innovation often emerges when traditions collide.
He joins Tyler to discuss why Zulu music became politically charged in South Africa, what makes Albanian choral music distinct from Bulgarian polyphony, what it was like producing Toots and the Maytals, his role in the famous “Dueling Banjos” scene in Deliverance, his work with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, his experiences with Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, how he shaped R.E.M.’s sound on Fables of the Reconstruction, what really happened when Dylan went electric at Newport, how the Beatles integrated Indian music, what makes the Kinshasa guitar sound impossible to replicate, and how he maintains his collection of 6,000 vinyl LPs and 30,000 CDs, what he’ll do next, and more.
There are many, many segments of interest, here is the discussion of Dylan at Newport 1965:
COWEN: Now, as I’m sure you know, there’s a new Bob Dylan movie out called A Complete Unknown. The climactic scene in the movie is all about the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where “Dylan goes electric.” You were the sound producer there, right?
BOYD: No, I was a production manager. There’s a character in the film who is credited with playing the part of Joe Boyd, the sound engineer. I think the actor who’s supposed to be playing me is at the sound controls. I haven’t seen the picture yet. But I was the production manager.
I was very concerned with the sound because I had been to the ’63 Newport Festival, and I thought it was a fantastic event. It was a never-to-be-forgotten, seeing Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson through the fog coming in off Narragansett Bay and Dylan linking arms with Joni and Pete and singing “We Shall Overcome.” But the sound was terrible. All through this festival of ’63, I felt the sound was really crap. You’d have a bluegrass band with a guy playing the fiddle, and you couldn’t hear the fiddle!
The first thing I did when I got behind my desk in June of ’65 in New York at George Wayne’s office was call up Paul Rothchild, the great producer, the guy who produced The Doors and Janis Joplin and so many things. I said, “Hey, Paul, why don’t you come up to Newport and mix the sound?” He said, “Okay, can I have three kin passes?” Meaning for his family: places to stay, passes to every event. I said, “Deal. You got it.”
So, Paul and I together sound checked everybody. Every single artist that appeared at Newport was sound checked in the morning by me and Paul except for Dylan, who we sound checked in the evening, six o’clock, between the afternoon show and the evening show, because Dylan wouldn’t get up in the morning to be sound checked. The guy on the board, the guy whose hands were on those mixers was Paul Rothchild, not me. I’ve never been a sound engineer. I don’t have any technical qualification to be a sound engineer. Neither did Paul for that matter, but he was better at it than I was.
COWEN: The controversy at the time — was it really about Dylan playing electric? Was it just about the poor quality of the sound? Was it about Pete Seeger being upset? What actually happened at that time?
BOYD: I think the controversy — you could see it coming for a month, if not more. To me, you can see it. Have you seen that film, The Other Side of the Mirror?
COWEN: I don’t think so.
BOYD: It’s basically Murray Lerner who shot that film festival, which is about the Newport Festival, has all the footage from ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66. The Other Side of the Mirror is all the Dylan footage from ’63, ’64, and ’65, and it’s fascinating. In ’63, he’s the idealistic singing about a coal miner, and Pete, everybody looking at him like he’s Woody Guthrie.
Then in the ’64, he does a workshop, and Pete Seeger introduces him as the voice of a generation, and he gets up to the microphone, and he sings “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You look at Seeger, who looks puzzled, slightly shocked. What is this? This isn’t a protest song. This isn’t a song you could sing at the barricades. This isn’t a song that’s going to move the youth to revolution. What is this?
That is the beginning of what happened in ’65, is Dylan moving away in a different direction, and he’d already recorded half an album with an electric band in the studio. Just before, in the weeks leading up to the festival, we had The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” electric version, on the Top 40 radio. We had Dylan, “Like A Rolling Stone” with an electric band on the radio.
It was Top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all-acoustic music and very pure, traditional, or idealistic. Everybody — Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience — sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big-time something moving into this delicate little world.
I was totally on Dylan’s side. Paul Rothchild and I were like, “Yes.” But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger’s point, absolutely. I would contest — of course, I would, wouldn’t I — contest that the sound was awful. It was just very loud. Nobody had ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothchild pushed up the faders, but it had to be because it was the first moment of rock.
Nobody ever used the word “rock” before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn’t rock. This was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard. Mike Bloomfield — this was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. You didn’t have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. So, with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield’s guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar.
That escalation of volume is what shaped or defined the future of rock. It became really loud music. That was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. There was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren’t used to it, but it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But that night it wasn’t, and I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan.
Joe has an encyclopedic knowledge of so many areas of music, and I was honored to do this episode with him. Interesting throughout. Again I will recommend Joe’s new and extraordinarily thorough book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music.