Era defin­ing. Voice of a gen­er­a­tion. Urban poet. Folk trou­ba­dour. No, not Justin Bieber; I’m refer­ring to Bob Dylan and in this post I’m look­ing at Dylan’s per­for­mance of Mr Tam­bourine Man at New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1964.

Dylan played the influ­en­tial and long-run­ning fes­ti­val for three con­sec­u­tive years from 1963 to 1965.

His first appear­ance in 1963 was as a guest of Joan Baez, and though lit­tle known out­side Green­wich Vil­lage, he was tak­en to heart by the folkies. That year saw the begin­nings of inter­na­tion­al suc­cess with Dylan’s break­through sec­ond album, The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, which he had com­plet­ed that May. Its com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion­al folk with a per­son­al and authen­tic edge and a social mes­sage, proved a hit with an ever-widen­ing demo­graph­ic of music fans.

Skip for­ward to 1965. His final year at New­port gave us the great Elec­tric Con­tro­ver­sy, when Dylan walked on stage clutch­ing a Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er gui­tar and backed by a full elec­tric band, shock­ing the folk purists in the audi­ence, and pro­vok­ing bewil­der­ment, con­ster­na­tion and an icon­ic place in musi­cal his­to­ry. Inci­den­tal­ly, that gui­tar sold at auc­tion a cou­ple of years back for just short of a mil­lion dol­lars!

But we return to the year of his sec­ond appear­ance at New­port, 1964, when the young Dylan was now estab­lished as a ful­ly-fledged “protest singer”, his ris­ing star in momen­tous upward tra­jec­to­ry and the new dar­ling of the fes­ti­val goers. Here, we watch some delight­ful­ly infor­mal and upfront footage of his ren­di­tion of Mr Tam­bourine Man, lis­tened to by a polite­ly enthralled audi­ence (and a bizarrely pok­er-faced guy, stage-left).

The song is gen­tle and dream-like, flow­ing repet­i­tive­ly through the same three major chords, so typ­i­cal of Dylan. Lyric-wise, it’s replete with anoth­er Dylan trait, the mul­ti­ple rhymes that some­how pull togeth­er coher­ent­ly despite what should be the increas­ing implau­si­bil­i­ty and dimin­ish­ing returns of string­ing so many rhymes togeth­er (take note, rap­pers of the world). What’s it about? Death, musi­cal inspi­ra­tion, drugs, weari­ness, doubts about the effi­ca­cy of the protest move­ment to change the world, a “tam­bourine man”…take your pick, or just let the music take you to a nice cor­ner of your mind! Here’s the boy from Duluth him­self, hav­ing been announced as the “boy who ran away from home sev­en­teen times and got brought back six­teen”…