History / Going Electric with Dylan (1965–1966)

Going Electric with Dylan (1965–1966)

The American leg started in Austin, Texas, on September 24, 1965, and ran for six months, forty-some cities, the show split in two every single night. Dylan alone with an acoustic guitar for the first half. Dylan and the Hawks, plugged in and loud, for the second. Audiences who'd bought tickets expecting the songwriter of "Blowin' in the Wind" got something closer to a bar band cranked to eleven, and plenty of them said so, loudly, from their seats.

Levon Helm didn't last a month of it. He'd grown up watching crowds respond to music with actual joy, and getting booed nightly for playing well wore him down fast. By November he'd quit, told almost no one where he was going, and turned up not long after working an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The drummer's chair went through three occupants in his absence: Bobby Gregg first, in the studio that same November, then Sandy Konikoff for most of the American dates, then Mickey Jones once the tour crossed into Europe that spring.

Studio work in between shows went about as well as the live shows did, which is to say not very. Sessions in October and November produced exactly one usable track, a single called "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" that stalled at No. 58. By February 1966, with an album called Blonde on Blonde still barely started, producer Bob Johnston convinced Dylan to try Nashville instead of New York, and to bring in local session players. Only Robertson and organist Al Kooper made the trip. Robertson's guitar ended up all over the finished record, especially on "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," while the rest of the Hawks, who'd been playing these songs onstage every night, never set foot in the Nashville studio.

The European leg turned the hostility into theater. Fans who wanted the acoustic Dylan of a few years earlier walked out mid-set, slow-clapped through the electric songs, sometimes threw things. It reached some kind of peak on May 17, 1966, at Manchester's Free Trade Hall, moments before the closing number. A voice from the crowd shouted "Judas." Dylan paused, then said, "I don't believe you. You're a liar." He turned to the band. "Play it fucking loud," he told them, and they tore into "Like a Rolling Stone" as hard as they'd ever played it. The exchange got bootlegged for decades under the wrong venue name, mislabeled as a Royal Albert Hall recording, before Dylan finally authorized an official release in 1998 that set the record straight.

The tour wound down in London by the end of May, and by summer it was over, for reasons nobody has ever entirely agreed on. Dylan crashed a motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, on July 29. No ambulance came. He was never hospitalized. Whatever actually happened to his body, the accident gave him an exit from a schedule he later admitted he wanted out of, and he didn't tour again for almost eight years. The Hawks, suddenly unemployed, went back to the same bar and roadhouse circuit they'd left, taking whatever work came along, including a brief stretch backing the novelty act Tiny Tim. It wouldn't last. Within months, Dylan called them back to Woodstock, not to tour this time, but to sit in a basement and see what happened.