I read Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric! recently, the book that the film A Complete Unknown is largely based on. Wald is a veteran of the folk scene himself, an author and teacher. The book builds up to Bob Dylan's pivotal appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric band and the moment they crashed into Maggie's farm and then Like A Rolling Stone. Wald acknowledges their are multiple accounts and perspectives of what happened next- the boos, the shock, the applause, the disappointment, the reactions of Pete Seeger and his axe, whether the booing was in reaction to Dylan's electric guitar and band or to the poor sound quality and overloaded live mix... all this and more.
Wald goes back to the start though and looks at the American folk movement and the split in it that became crystallized by Dylan's arrival, the split between the purists who thought that folk music should only be the songs of the traditional American communities and working people of the previous decades/ century and the modernists who were happy with topical songs. The notion of seeking commercial success also split the folk scene, the view that anything gimmicky was abhorrent and a sell out versus chart success bringing new people to folk music who might then appreciate the 'real folk music'.
Reading all of this you realise of course that this story and schism has split every music scene ever since. As the reader follows Wald through the stories of Seeger and Dylan between 1961 and 1965 you also realise this- that in Wald's view, Dylan didn't go electric, Dylan was always electric.
Wald's storytelling is first rate and his description of the various Newport Folk Festivals and their line ups is superb. I'd never really known much about the Mimi and Richard Farina and was sent to YouTube several times looking for their music. Richard Farina was a folk singer, songwriter, poet and novelist. His only published book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, is a 60s counterculture cult classic. He met Mimi Baez, the seventeen year old sister of Joan in 1962. She was already an accomplished singer and guitarist. They married and became a performing couple, Mimi and Richard Farina, appearing at Newport and recording two mid- 60s folk albums, 1965's Celebrations For A Grey day and 1966's Reflections In A Crystal Wind, both on Vanguard Records. Richard was killed in a motorbike accident in April 1966, on the day of Mimi's twenty- first birthday. I've become a little obsessed with some of their songs since reading the book although neither album seems easy to get hold of on vinyl this side of the Atlantic. Here's a song, one from each album. The first was written about three white college students murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on their way to a peace march in 1964. The second is the title track from their second and final album.
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