The 1969 show Bob Dylan called the end of an era: “Taken over”
Bob Dylan has lived his entire life going against the grain.
Even though he liked the idea of aligning himself with certain causes throughout his life, there were more than a few times when he felt like he had to dismantle everything he was doing and start again from scratch whenever making a new record. He never wanted to feel like someone had him completely figured out, and that sometimes meant going against the revolution that he started when he first picked up a guitar.
Because it’s not like everyone was fully in his corner when he decided to play electric guitar for the first time. The entire folk community was about communal versions of songs, and even if Dylan liked the idea of reaching a larger audience and following the lead of The Beatles and The Byrds, Highway 61 Revisited was the first time people realised it wasn’t a joke. He was a completely different artist now, and his audience either thought it was a brilliant idea or he was spitting on the legacy of his heroes like Woody Guthrie.
Dylan meant no disrespect when making some of his finest records, but he did start to understand where some of the naysayers were coming from. He was already being looked at as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, but there was never any room for him to fail if he lived his life like that. He didn’t want to be known as a god among men when he reached the top of the charts, and while his infamous motorcycle sidelined him for years, it was a good chance for him to have a soft reboot of his sound.
John Wesley Harding brought everything back to basics, and while he wasn’t the same revolutionary electric rocker anymore, that was fine by him. He didn’t need that side of his sound anymore, and judging by where the rest of the Summer of Love was going, he wasn’t particularly excited about what the rest of the world was doing when talking about their own style of revolution.
He could appreciate the bands at the centre of the movement, like the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, but when the first Woodstock Festival got underway, Dylan was more jaded than anything else. He had been through this kind of musical runaround before, and he wasn’t going to waste his time singing the same kind of protest songs that everyone was doing when they gathered in a random field in New York.
That part of his life was officially over, and he figured that the rock and roll that he knew and loved was dead and gone by the time that the festival started, saying, “If you were here around that time, you would know that the early sixties, up to maybe ’64, ’65, was really the fifties, the late fifties. They were still the fifties, still the same culture, in America anyway. And it was still going strong but fading away. By ’66, the new sixties probably started coming in somewhere along that time and had taken over by the end of the decade. Then, by the time of Woodstock, there were no more fifties.”
And while Dylan could gripe about that version of his era of rock and roll being gone, you have to admit that it was a version of rock he had a hand in creating. The order of the day was about music that meant something, and even if he was looking to make music that people could enjoy, that didn’t stop bands like Crosby, Stills, and Nash from following his lead and making tunes that had much more of an agenda than before.
Because, as much as people like to talk about rock and roll as a fun genre in the beginning, it wasn’t so much about making party music anymore. This was music that felt important to everyone who played it, and the rest of the world was going to realise just how important it was when it started to take over everything else.
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