Bob Dylan: Forest Hills 1965

Word is that tonight’s Dylan concert at Forest Hill Stadium might be cancelled due to high winds and storms. There were high winds in ‘65, too, and big temperature drop; it was August, but you can hear people on the tape talking about sweaters. Anyway, I’m at the airport, and prepared this article anyway. Fitting that we’re going through this for a show where he first sang “Everybody is either making love or else expecting rain.”

Now and then, Dylan fans play “What’s your favorite tape?” If we’re talking about performance or audio quality, maybe Charlotte 78, Montreal 75, or the Glasgow soundboards from last year. But as for the tape I get the most out of, or that I think is of the most historic value, that’s Forest Hills 65.

The Forest Hills show in August, 1965, was Bob Dylan’s first full concert after the Newport Folk Festival, a few weeks. And while there are those who say the boos at Newport were due to the audio mix or something, by Forest Hills word had gotten around that if Dylan played electric, you were supposed to boo.

And unlike the Newport soundboard, which picks up very little audience sound (there are some overdubbed boos in the official releases), the Forest Hills tape was made by someone in the audience. As a musical experience, listening to it is rough. But the show here is the audience.

What you hear is a candid document of what it was like to be a music fan in New York in 1965. What did they really think of Murray the K? What did they think of Dylan’s new songs?

Of course, you only hear what’s going around the taper most of the time, and often when the crowd erupts mid-song, there’s no real clue on the tape what they’re reacting to. Contemporary accounts show that it was people charging the stage. I’d always thought it was the angry folk fans, but newspaper reviews from the time say it was the excited rock fans. The Village Voice wrote “The Rockers, in frenzied kamikaze squadrons of six and eight, leaped out of the stands after each rock song and raced for the stage. Some just wanted to touch their newfound, sunken-eyed idol, while others seemed to prefer playing Keystone Cops with pudgy stadium police, running zig-zag on the grass until captured in scenes reminiscent of the first Beatle movie.” (The Beatles had played nearby Shea Stadium just a couple of weeks before).

By all accounts there was tension; Peter Stone Brown, who attended, told me “Forest Hills was scary.” He actually pronounced the italics. And that comes through on the tapes. There are boos. Lots of boos. And some fights over people blocking other peoples’ view.

But it’s not ALL boos. And in the opening acoustic set, the tape gives us a chance to hear a recording of a stadium full of people hearing “Desolation Row” for the first time.

And that was the real revelation of the tape for me, the first time I heard it: people who hadn’t heard the apocalyptic album take of “Desolation Row,” cut just weeks before, didn’t KNOW it was a dark, moody song. Dylan played it like a comedy song, and they received it that way. The chuckles begin after “the beauty parlor is filled with sailors,” and build to heavy laughs at “the other is in his pants.”

The crowd laughs with delight throughout the song. And applauds after verse after verse. The first time I heard this tape, I was stunned. How did I not realize how funny this song was? Listening to the Forest Hills tape again, I’m more amazed that Dylan was able to make such a funny song seem so dark in the first place. But he’s found so many songs inside of that song over the years; last summer he was playing it like a Chuck Berry tune, motorvatin’ through the circus.

The biggest reaction, though, are the cheers after the line about being Einstein for being famous long ago for playing electric violin. The crowd seems to take that line as an apology, admitting that he’d learned his lesson after Newport. They were prepared to forgive and move on (even though this was hardly the “old Dylan;” “To Ramona,” just over a year old, was by far the oldest song in the acoustic set).

In his New York Times review, Shelton cited it specifically: “Among (the “folkish” songs) was a major new work, “Desolation Road’ (sic), a long work filled with the incongruities of black humor and macabre imagery... it can be best characterized as ‘a folk song of the absurd.’” (I’m reminded of William B. Egan’s thoughts on the nurse in Romeo and Juliet: “that mixture of refinement and vulgarity, both the elements of which Shakespeare makes the more forbidding by joining them together.”)

On the tape, the boos had begun before the show, when an announcer introduces “The fifth Beatle, Murray the K.” The DJ is booed like crazy as he takes the stages, and notes that he’s aware some people just want Bob to do folk music.

“What this man is saying is not rock, it’s not folk, it’s a new thing called ‘Dylan.’ …I would like to just say this, that there is a new swingin’ mood in this country, and I think Bob Dylan perhaps is the spearhead of that new mood. It’s a new expression, a new kind of tellin’ it like it is, and Mr. Dylan is definitely…what’s happenin’ baby!” The crowd erupts in fresh boos, but Murray persists. “It all is saying one thing, trying to be a honest, trying to express a feeling of a certain mood, and I say to you that the man that you are about to meet is probably the most talked-about musical figure in the country today.”

I’m not sure if people were groaning at the over-use of the phrase “tell it like it is” yet in 1965, or if that didn’t happen until a few years later. But even to me, two things stand out about Murray’s intro: It’s corny as hell, and it’s basically correct. It’s a new kind of thing called “Dylan.” A couple of weeks later Bob himself was asked what to call his new music, and said “I know my thing, now, I know what it is. It’s hard to describe. I don’t know what to call it because I’ve never heard it before.”

But the lines were drawn in the crowd. They may have come together to boo Murray the K, but the crowd was sharply divided. The Village Voice said “The factionalism within the teenage sub-culture seemed as fierce as that between the Social Democrats and Stalinists.... The confrontation was riotous. The Mods booed their former culture hero savagely after each of his amplified-rock melodies. They chanted ‘We want Dylan’ and shouted insults at him.”

All of this is evident on the tape. Before the second set starts, you can hear someone say “Electric guitar, eh? Electric guitar,” and there are some boos as soon as it starts.

But we mainly hear the crowd around the taper, which seems to be people who’ve heard that you’re supposed to boo, but actually don’t seem to mind it very much one way or the other. One can hear some people talking about trying to get a “We Want Joan Baez” chant going, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, it just seems like a fun way of jumping on the bandwagon. Most of the loudest reactions come to the stage-chargers. “It Ain’t Me Babe” is even a bit of a singalong.

The reaction to “Desolation Row” has been noted before and by others, but on a more recent listen, I was struck by how the people around the taper reacted much the same way to “Ballad of a Thin Man.” There’s a chuckle after “you see somebody naked and say ‘who is that man?’” There’s a chuckle after “..but you don’t know what it is” that sounds like someone saying “Yeah, that’s tellin’ it like it is.” By the second chorus they’re even singing along a bit.

The the Voice noted this: “They should have been listening to the lyrics - they were as poetic as ever.…the mods joined the rockers in wildly applauding Dylan’s second new song of the evening (no title announced) which he sang while playing the piano standing up.”

And then, of course, the closing “Like a Rolling Stone” is a big singalong that everyone seems to like.

There was a flurry of articles and interviews after the show, and it’s remarkable how similar they are to reporters reacting to people who are mad that Dylan’s current show isn’t just a greatest hits nostalgia fest where they can scroll on their phone and “vibe” all night.

Robert Shelton’s glowing review of the show in the New York Times said, “Nothing so dramatized the childishness of the audience’s reaction to folk rock than when it ceased to boo and started to sing along with the popular song, ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ Evidently the hostility extends only toward things with which they aren’t familiar… By the time they get to know his excellent new folk rock songs, such as ‘Tombstone Blues,’ maybe the noisy young boors who ruined an artistically strong concert may have grown up a bit.”

All the way in California, Ralph Gleason wrote, “On fan has already written me: ‘The audience did not come prepared for an unbalanced rock n roll band and they didn’t want it. Dylan has changed. He wore a suit, which I don’t mind but which ISN’T Dylan…. Bobby Dylan will no longer be getting $2 and $4 for MY ticket to his concert because I had enough screaming at the Beatles concert last year…I will be content simply to listen to his records.”

Gleason, noting that in a new song Dylan said “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is,” and added “What’s happening is that the merger of the arts, of poetry and popular music, is taking shape before our eyes in a way… that hasn’t happened before in our time…. Dylan is doing exactly what he wants to do, regardless of whether it is successful in financial terms. Just like the Beatles…They, like Dylan, do it the way they want, and to hell with anybody else’s preconceived ideas. More power to them.”

Newsday’s article, “Show Sold Out; But Did Dylan?” noted, “That his most fervent fans should resent Dylan’s unpredictability and experimentation is ironic. ..Dylan has changed styles several times - influencing the direction of musical tastes each time.”

The Toronto Star landed an interview with Bob:

“I haven’t changed. If you listen to early records and the recent ones, you can see the band really makes no difference.” Then why change? “To get rid of the boredom…When you get a certain power, so that you can do something, then you can just go on and do it. But it’s not very satisfying. You get mad at yourself. You have to do something else. You can’t keep on doing one thing - it bores me, it brings me down…”

And when they booed him at Forest Hills? “That was just another concert.”

Gordon Lightfoot, in the middle of recording a cover of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” himself, wrote an article and interview of his own worth for the Toronto Telegram that’s worth quoting in bulk:

I questioned him at length about the controversy over his new songbag… I asked questions that were about as subtle as a kick in the mouth and about as original as last year’s jokes.

“The stuff I used to write, well there’s about a dozen guys writing that stuff now. I can go back to that any time I feel like it. Right now I’d like to see someone try to imitate the things I’m doing. I’ll eventually write more things like ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ or ‘Girl From the North Country.’”

The fact of the matter is that Dylan doesn’t really have to care about what people think and probably never did to begin with. He’s already made enough money to last him indefinitely, so he’s in a position where he can and will do exactly as he pleases…. As the undisputed leader of the contemporary song movement he is now escaping into a new realm of creativity, and will probably continue to be the innovator for a long time to come….

He claims that he can still come up with many more songs of the earlier “message” type, but for the present his main interest is in playing with the English language in its most interesting combination of words, as is most evident in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” in its complete version of 10 or 12 verses, a masterpiece of imagery.

Dylan picked up a cookie from a plate on the table. “You see this cookie,” he said. “The cookie is brown. I can probably say the cookie is brown in 100 different ways.” I think he probably could if he tried hard enough. If someone asked him to write a song about the cupboard in the kitchen, or the telephone pole outside, he probably could.

The Star had asked Dylan about “Eve of Destruction” specifically. He’d said “There’s not much happening there. All the words on one level - it’s not very honest. But if anyone thinks there’s any thing happening there, I’m not about to tell them to stop listening.”

Anyway, tonight Dylan is playing Forest Hills Stadium again, for just the second time since 1965. I just couldn’t resist getting a ticket. As noted at the opening, word is that it’s gonna rain out, and I’ll forced for find a way to amuse myself in New York (and maybe use the refund to add a UK show). If now, I’ll be checking in tomorrow on Ray Padgett’s Flagging Down the EEs.