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”…
