Bob Dylan's Fans Called Him a Traitor. 51 Years Later, He Returns to the Scene of the Crime.

Bob Dylan comes full-circle with a return to Forest Hills Stadium.

Daniel Kramer

When Bob Dylan walks on the stage at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens tonight, 51 years since he strapped on an electric guitar and played his first full concert in the wake of his career-defining performance at the Newport Folk Festival, he will be no less the contrarian he was in 1965. Then, at 24, he shocked the audience with songs from his yet-to-be-released Highway 61 Revisited. Unlike his contemporaries that tour the globe on greatest-hits victory laps, tonight the 75-year-old legend will more than likely play a set of songs drawn primarily from his 21st Century output, and the two or three songs that he does play from his venerable catalog will be almost unrecognizable to the vast majority of the audience.

As it was in 1965, so it is in 2016.


"On August 28,1965, a year and a day from the time I met him in Woodstock, Bob Dylan gave a concert at Forest Hills Stadium in New York City, where 14,000 people filled the stands to capacity," recalls photographer Daniel Kramer in his photo memoir of his days with Dylan, Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day. "It would culminate in what he had been doing with his music for the past half year—we were about to get the big bang."

In the 18 months leading up to the Forest Hills concert, Dylan had turned the music world upside-down. On the heels of 1963's folk/protest masterpiece The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in short order Dylan had released The Times They Are a-Changin' and Another Side of Bob Dylan, and he had "gone electric" in March 1965 on Bringing It All Back Home. A month before the Forest Hills concert, in a single week at the end of July, he'd released the groundbreaking hit single "Like a Rolling Stone" and had burned the folk movement to the ground with an electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was roundly jeered by the purist folkies in the audience—and where Pete Seeger, the godfather of the folk movement himself, had tried to cut Dylan's power with an axe.

While Dylan's legions of fans felt betrayed, Dylan was unbowed. If anything, he was emboldened.


Members of Dylan's backing band (including drummer Levon Helm and guitarist Robbie Roberston, who would join Dylan on his 1966 world tour and form The Band in the tour's wake) would later recall that Dylan warned them to expect a hostile crowd. Ignore them, he told his band, and play the music they'd come to play, undeterred.

"Bob understood what was going on," Kramer says of his memories of the night. "He told his band, and everyone backstage, that there might be some discontent, but that wasn't their affair—meaning his either—and that they were there to make their music, even if there was a negative response."

As the sun set in Queens, Dylan took the stage in the horseshoe-shaped stadium alone, armed only with his acoustic guitar and harmonicas, to wild, expectant applause. Rumors abounded, in those pre-Internet days, about what to expect in the aftermath of the Newport show, but this was what everyone had come to see: "The voice of a generation."

Dylan opened with the familiar "She Belongs to Me" from Bringing It All Back Home and "To Ramona" from Another Side of Bob Dylan before delivering a searing "Gates of Eden," already the granddaddy of protest songs, to rapturous applause, and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," both also from Bringing It All Back Home.

Daniel Kramer

So far, so good. But Dylan was moving too fast for his young audience, and he launched into "Desolation Row" from Highway 61 Revisited, which would not hit record store shelves for two more days. The audience was silent at first, but then started to laugh. The song, unknown and long (at almost 10 minutes), was a marathon, but it was received in its full, snarky intent. Later, audience members would go searching Dylan's records for "that funny song he played" in frustration.

But, as evidenced on bootlegs of the evening (released officially last year), Dylan had truly won the crowd over by this point, and returned to the familiar with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." It was a spectacular performance, and Dylan wrapped up the acoustic portion of the evening with a song that had already found a life outside of its creator: "Mr. Tambourine Man," which had been a huge hit for folk/rock pioneers The Byrds in the spring of 1965.

The star attraction returned and reminded his band, as Sean Wilentz recalled in his book Bob Dylan in America, to "play his songs calm and steady, come what may." The band was loud and powerful, delivering the then-unreleased "Tombstone Blues" with fire, before launching into a rocked-up version of the formerly acoustic "I Don't Believe You," followed by "From a Buick 6" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," both also from the forthcoming Highway 61 Revisited.

There were a few hoots and catcalls—not to mention shouts of "traitor," "scum bag," and even "where's Ringo?"—but the audience took it all in.

There were a few hoots and catcalls—not to mention shouts of "traitor," "scum bag," and even "where's Ringo?"—but the audience took it all in. Then Dylan launched into the song that caused such consternation at Newport: "Maggie's Farm." The audience cheered and jeered all at once as soon as they recognized the song. Some, strangely, threw fruit. Dylan and his band tore through the song, and barely took a breath before an electric take on the already-classic "It Ain't Me Babe." Several audience members rushed the stage, running the long distance from the stands and across the grass tennis court, before being tackled by New York's finest—though a few stage crashers broke through, one even knocking keyboardist Al Kooper from his stool. Order was restored, and things turned quiet during a long, sinister reading of the still-unreleased "Ballad of a Thin Man." Dylan extended the introduction to its breaking point and, except for the planes roaring overhead as they headed in and out of nearby La Guardia Airport, the audience was almost silent before Dylan wrapped things up with his latest hit single, the remarkable "Like a Rolling Stone."

"Can you imagine that he won the crowd over in such a short period of time?" Kramer, still stunned by the memory, asks. "There were 14,000 people there. They're not all going to fall in lock step. There are always going to be some people there who are going to have another idea. So they hoot? Okay, fine. But that's not the whole story. You can magnify that if you want to make a story. Writers, photographers, all the people who bring the 'truth' to the audience at large, have to find something to say, so that the story sells. There was some of that, but not enough to make a big deal out of it. The music was terrific, and stood on its own."

As "Like a Rolling Stone" reached its crescendo, the crowd cheered and sang along, just like they would if Dylan played it tonight. But he probably won't.

Daniel Kramer

If you haven't bought any of Dylan's new music in this century—and that includes his two recent albums of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra—you'll probably only know two of the songs he's likely to perform: "Tangled Up in Blue" from 1974's Blood on the Tracks and his 1960s classic "Blowin' in the Wind." But even that chestnut will be unrecognizable to the uninitiated.

Still, Dylan's shows of late have become near-theatrical must-sees, with two acts and readings of his recent output and well-chosen American Songbook standards, broken only by an intermission, creating a song cycle with an almost Shakespearean feel.

Reviews, of course, have been mixed. Those that are negative miss the point, much as did that audience member who felt betrayed and shouted "scum bag" at Forest Hills in 1965. They want the Dylan they remember—from 1963, 1965, 1974 or, hell, even 1997. They want Dylan to stand there with a guitar and a harmonica and sing the songs just like they remember them from the records growing up. But he's not going to do that. He didn't even do that in 1965, so why would he do that tonight?

No, Dylan is going to defy the audience's expectations, but he's going to put on one hell of a show in the process. He's going to do something a little bit different than last night, just like he did at the show before that. And he's going to do it exactly the way he wants to do it. It may not be what a majority of the audience wants, but that's surely no different than it was 51 years ago at Forest Hills. Just as he was an artist searching for something new and challenging then, why would we expect or want anything less from him today?

"Bob brought something that was special to music, and he made his point, and he's still respected for it," Daniel Kramer says. "And he's still around, doing the same thing. That's a remarkable thing."

It certainly is.

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