Elijah Wald: Dylan Goes Electric!

Hit-and-miss account of Bob Dylan’s Judas years.

By
( )
published

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Elijah Wald is the author of fascinating biographies on Dave Van Ronk, Josh White and Robert Johnson and an expert on the US folk revival of the 50s and early 60s.

Here, employing intense detail, he chronicles the journey of that scene’s ultimate icon, Bob Dylan, from blues-loving Minnesota teenager to his game-changing 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance. Here, Dylan went electric with Paul Butterfield’s blues band, and in so doing, violently divided his own audience. Wald clearly describes the scenes in which Dylan developed his muse, giving attention to other players (guitarist Mike Bloomfield is especially well drawn), and details a folk scene riven with contradictions. He is a hugely intelligent writer unafraid of slaying sacred cows. A problem is that Dylan’s emergence has been told many times before, so much is familiar here. One for the Dylan obsessives.

Ed Mitchell
Ed Mitchell
Writer

Ed Mitchell was the Editor of The Blues Magazine from 2012-16, and a contributor to Classic Rock and Louder. He died in October 2022, aged 52. A one-time Reviews Editor on Total Guitar magazine from 2003, his guitar-modding column, Ed’s Shed, appeared in print on both sides of the Atlantic (in both Total Guitar and Guitar World magazines), and he wrote stories for Classic Rock and Guitarist. Between them, the websites Louder, MusicRadar and Guitar World host over 400 of his articles – among them interviews with Billy Gibbons, Paul Weller, Brian Setzer, profiles on Roy Buchanan, Duane Allman and Peter Green, a joint interview with Jimmy Page and Jack White, and dozens of guitar reviews – and that’s just the ones that made it online.