On the morning of July 25th, 1965, Bob Dylan was the most beloved Folk artist on the planet. Twelve hours later, he would become the most hated.

Ever since Dylan made his debut at the Newport Music Festival back in 1962, he was well on his way to becoming the next Woody Guthrie. The problem was that Dylan didn’t want to be Guthrie. Dylan wanted to be Dylan.

On the evening of July 25th, 1965, Dylan took the stage at Newport Music Festival dressed in all black. In his hands he held not an acoustic guitar but a Fender Stratocaster. He tuned his electric guitar as a quintet of back-up musicians formed around him like knights tending to a fallen king. The tension in the audience was palpable. What was Dylan up to?

Suddenly, the band warred into a visceral Chicago boogie before Dylan growled the opening line to Maggie’s Farm making known his reinvention into rock-and-roll, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!”

An infuriated crowd let out cries of hate as Dylan tore away at his electric guitar. It’s rumored that at one point, Pete Seeger attempted to cut Dylan’s sound chords with an axe! As if to rub salt in the wounded Folkies, Dylan snarled the chorus to Like a Rolling Stone, “How does it feel?”

The evening Dylan went electric, he was booed off the stage after playing just a couple of songs. He lost friends. He lost confidence. He lost thousands and thousands of fans. But, looking back decades later, many would say it was the moment when Bob Dylan truly became Bob Dylan.

When an artist finds success in something, the easy thing to do is to keep doing that something. However, if you continue to do what’s comfortable, you will go from being an artist to a caricature of the artist you once were.

This is why reinvention is so important.

With this in mind, tomorrow morning I will be unveiling a project I’ve been keeping under wraps for some time.

By Cole Schafer

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