Dylan Goes Electric!: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture A Complete Unknown Paperback – June 14, 2016

Good in depth writing of what transpired at the Newport Folk Festival.

Thus serves as less a Dylan biography as it is more a history of folk music and the Newport folk festival as well as the transition of music and its fans from acoustic to electric. A generational rift that manifest as youth takes. the controls away from their elders. It happens again and again and will continue throughout time.

The movie "A Complete Unknown" differs a lot from this book, which it is supposedly based on. While Timothy and Monica do a great job imitating the voices and sounds of Dylan and Joan Baez and the sound is outstanding, Dylan comes off as too much of a hero in the movie. After all, he didn't have to bring his new electric sound forward at the Newport Folk Festival and humiliate his benefactor Pete Seeger who had been treated badly for many years by the government. And his electric performance was actually horrible even though it sounded great in the movie. Dylan turned a folk festival into a modern rock festival and all that entails, killing an event that Seeger and others had created and nurtured for years. He could have played his acoustic guitar one last time before going electric at his next event. The movie also indicates that Woody Guthrie, who Seeger visited regularly, approved of what Dylan did when he probably had no idea what happened. I think Baez understood Dylan perfectly. Her music seems to be out of fashion now which is a shame.

Fantastic book. I love Dylan, but this book is more than just a Dylan bio. I learned so much about the folk music movement of the early 60s.

Since "Dylan Goes Electric" by Elijah Wald is listed as the source material for the movie "A Complete Unknown", and since I enjoyed the movie more than any that I've seen in a long while, I had to read it. It is a readable and thorough history of the two folk music giants of the 60s, Pete Seeger and BobDylan. Although the narrative is sometimes shrouded in "too many words" and "too many details", it seems to give an accurate history of those men and those times. Having been in college during those tumultuous years, I walked back through memory lane and had those memories both validated and sometimes corrected.This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is definitely for the diehard Dylan fan. I recommend Wald's book for those folks.

I’ve read a lot of Dylan books over the years. There is a reason Dylan apparently has told people who see the new movie to read this one. It puts Dylan in context, both in terms of the music world and the times. The author acknowledges when certain myths no longer can be determined to be true. Wald focuses as much on the side players in the Dylan story as on Dylan, resulting in a revelatory story. Easy to read, and very engaging.

Good

Interesting to a point, but far too detailed for my taste. Also, the last two chapters are like groundhog's day, he just keeps saying the same thing over and over again. Ok, I heard you the first time, I know what you think the meaning of that night was, there is no need to restate it 30 times.