It is the Newport Folk Festival. 550,000 quiet, gentle men are crying at songs of social injustice sung by quiet, gentle men playing acoustic instruments with gentle amplification. Pete Seeger's dad turns up his hearing aid to its maximum volume so he can cry along.
Dylan comes onstage carrying an electric guitar. He is accompanied by more young men with electric instruments and a rock drummer. The band play fucking loud.
Pete Seeger's dad is getting distortion. He thinks capitalist aliens have landed and are taking over his mind. Dylan's voice sounds to him like Cadbury's Smash men imploring him to buy their capitalist reconstituted potato.
Gentle Pete turns into a raving avenger. He picks up the axe he uses for chopping his organic firewood and heads for the stage yelling, "I'm gonna cut the motherfucker's cables! Nobody's gonna brainwash my daddy!"
Of course there would've been a simpler solution. Pete's dad could've turned the volume of his hearing aid down to zero. And all those arseholes who later went to see Dylan knowing full well he was going to play rock music but just went along to boo him and call him a traitor when there were presumably real fans of Dylan who couldn't get tickets...
Well, I suppose they're all now in an old folkies' home, hearing aids turned up to 11, huddled round an old gramophone, crying tears of rage.
Rapid transit
4 days ago
You know, the same thing happened to me when I took my nan to see Motorhead. She couldn't understand the words to Ace Of Spades and, I tell yer, I saw red. I jumped up on stage and boxed Lemmy's ear.
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