New Doc Reveals Inside Story

The Newport Folk Festival didn’t just predate generation-defining events like Woodstock and Monterey Pop — it laid the foundation for the youth-driven spectacles that followed, from Coachella to Lollapalooza. Between 1963 and 1966, the seaside gathering assembled an extraordinary roster that included Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger and — most famously — Bob Dylan.

It was here that the 24-year-old troubadour shocked the crowd on July 25, 1965 by plugging in his Fender Stratocaster and “going electric,” a move that scandalized folk purists but ultimately redefined rock ’n’ roll as a legitimate form of modern folk expression. That groundbreaking moment recently served as the emotional climax of A Complete Unknown, the hit film with Timothée Chalamet bringing Dylan to life onscreen.

Now, a new documentary from award-winning filmmakers Robert Gordon and Joe Lauro goes behind the scenes of this legendary set and revisits other highlights from throughout the festival’s formative years. Crafted from rare, never-before-seen archival footage and bolstered with new interviews with festival performers and organizers, Newport & The Great Folk Dream (which premiered Sept. 5 at the Venice International Film Festival) is both a pulse-pounding musical journey and a powerful meditation on the ability of art to spark change.

The acoustic guitar was more than the preferred instrument for the folk scene in the early ‘60s — it was a potent symbol. “[It] represented virtue,” festival production manager Joe Boyd explains in the documentary. “It represented sitting around the campfire and everyone can sing along. Once you get an electric guitar, it’ll be louder than everybody singing. The electric guitar became a symbol of this divided folk world.”  

The cracks in the musical community first appeared when the Beatles arrived on American shores in February 1964. The DIY folk-boom of the previous decade was well and truly over. Now teens were holing up in garages across America in an attempt to create their own versions of the Fab Four. 

The shift was clear to Newport Folk Festival founder George Wein. “In 1964, the country changed,” he says in an archival interview featured in the film. “There was a dichotomy with young people when the Beatles came along. The folk world resented the Beatles because of the sound. The folk world was an acoustic world.”

Even Bob Dylan, the crown prince of American folk, was captivated by the Beatles. During their 1964 U.S. tour, he famously visited them at a New York hotel — and introduced them to marijuana, sparking a creative evolution that would reshape their music.

Dylan, in turn, was transformed by their influence. He traded his denim-and-plaid folk singer uniform for Mod shirts and Chelsea boots, mirroring the style of the British acts then invading America. His lyrics, once steeped in political protest, began veering into surreal, layered poetry. “The folk music establishment thought Dylan was the guy who was going to lead folk music into a glorious future,” says Boyd. “And all of a sudden he sings ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ It’s not about politics or struggle. They could tell the times they were a-changin’.”

More troublingly to folk purists, Dylan borrowed the Beatles’ instrumentation as well as their clothing. Folk-rock hybrids like the Byrds and the Turtles had already scored hits by plugging Dylan’s songs into amplified arrangements. Soon he followed suit. In spring 1965, he released “Maggie’s Farm,” signaling his move toward a rock-driven sound. Just days before Newport, he doubled down with “Like a Rolling Stone” — a sprawling, five-minute epic that rejected the rules of what a pop song could be and ushered rock into a new era of possibility. 

By the time Dylan arrived at the festival site on July 25, battle lines were already being drawn between purists and progressives. “There was a lot of talk,” Boyd recalls. “People [were saying], ‘What’s Dylan gonna do.’ Dylan had a record in the charts that had drums and electric guitar on the record. And yet, he never performed that way.” One cameraman lamented not turning his lens towards the squabbling organizers. “I was on the board of Newport,” singer Judy Collins recalls. “They were hot under the collar and very very opinionated about what was folk music and what wasn’t folk music.” 

Tensions boiled over when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band took the stage. Festival organizer Alan Lomax bristled at their amplified sound and, in his introduction, couldn’t resist a jab — telling the crowd they were a group that “need[ed] all of this fancy hardware to play the blues.” The comment infuriated the band’s manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed Dylan. “That was a real chickens— introduction, Alan,” he snapped. The argument escalated into a physical brawl, with Lomax and Grossman wrestling on the ground in front of stunned festival staff and musicians.

In the wake of the Butterfield Blues Band’s incident, Dylan made a decision that would define the night — and make music history. Rather than perform with his usual accompanists, he asked three members of the Butterfield band (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay) to join him for his set. The choice was deliberate: Butterfield’s players were young, fiery, and unapologetically electric. They represented exactly the sound Dylan was leaning toward — raw, loud, and closer to rock ’n’ roll than the genteel acoustic folk the Newport crowd expected.

It was a risky move. Dylan had never performed live with electric instruments before, and Newport was the last place anyone expected him to start.

When Dylan hit the spotlight in a black leather jacket and strapped on an electric Stratocaster, it was clear he intended to shock the system. He launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” his first recorded foray into electric music. Folk icon Pete Seeger, the spiritual leader of the festival, was reportedly apoplectic. “I had to go back and hold Pete Seeger’s hand,” Wein says in the film. “He said, ‘Turn that sound down!’ I said, ‘Too late. Can’t do it.’ ” 

According to legend, Pete Seeger attempted to cut the electrical wiring with an axe — a story that has since proved apocryphal. Seeger himself clarified the incident years later in an apologetic 1990 postcard to Dylan: “I was furious at the distorted sound — no one could understand the words of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ — and dashed over to the people controlling the PA system. ‘No, this is the way they want it,’ they said. I shouted, ‘If I had an axe, I’d cut the cable,’ and I guess that’s what got quoted.”

In any event, the boos from the crowd are audible in the documentary footage. “There was some sanctimony about folk music,” singer Loudon Wainwright III, who attended the festival as a teenager, says in the film. “[It was] like, ‘This is precious and it should not be fooled with — and certainly not f—ed with. Well that night, Dylan f—ed with it.”

The fallout from Dylan’s electric gamble reverberated far beyond that July night. What some heard as betrayal soon came to be seen as a breakthrough — a bold reimagining of folk tradition that helped birth an entirely new musical language. “Newport helped me hear the old music and make it relevant for the time that I was living in,” musician Taj Mahal, who first appeared at the festival in 1964, recalls in Newport & The Great Folk Dream.

Joan Baez, who had long stood beside Dylan as the voice of conscience in the movement, put it more simply: “The counterculture became part of culture.” And even Pete Seeger, once cast as the villain of the “axe” legend, later came to embrace the moment’s wider meaning. “If you think of it, ‘Is all of this folk music?’ Yeah! This country is full of all kinds of different folks. That’s the wonderful thing about this country — so many different kinds of folks.”