Nowadays with cell phones, it’s easy to relive practically any moment. Camera phones are ubiquitous at any moment of relative importance, from birthdays and graduations to concerts to a good meal. But there was a time when everyone didn’t have a professional camera and video recorder in their pocket, and people had to instead live in the present moment and savor the memory for later. That’s what makes some newly uploaded, colorized footage of Bob Dylan at Newport Folk Festival in 1963 so special.
Music festivals were a lot different back in the early ’60s, as you can see in the clip of Dylan playing “North Country Blues”. For one, everyone is wearing button-down dress shirts with not even a pair of blue jeans in sight. A raptured audience stands in reverent silence as the bony 22-year-old festival headliner sings about iron ore mines. Though Dylan was cagey, if not deliberately deceitful, about his origins when suddenly skyrocketed to fame, the song could have been a clue back to his roots in Minnesota, the country’s largest iron ore producer.
As if this footage wasn’t impressive enough, Doc Watson is among the rapt audience sitting right behind Dylan. The bluegrass forefather hardly moves a muscle in the time he’s onscreen, as intent a listener as a musician could ever ask for. Dylan and Watson would cross paths again, with Bob covering “Lone Pilgrim” on 1993’s World Gone Wrong. Though “Lone Pilgrim” is a traditional folk song dating back to the early 1800s, Dylan acknowledged in the World Gone Wrong liner notes that he heard it on “an old Doc Watson record.” A few years later in 1997, according to local urban legend and Dylan’s own onstage comments, the North Carolina native Watson attended a Bob Dylan show in Asheville.
This appearance was Dylan’s first of three consecutive turns headlining Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1965. In his 2007 documentary The Other Side of the Mirror (where much of the footage was released in full for the first time), director Murray Lerner presents the trio of appearances as a portrait of Dylan’s unprecedented rise to often-undesired fame. The threepeat came to a controversial end in 1965 when Dylan plugged in and went electric at Newport Folk, permanently altering the course of rock music history.
“Over the course of three Newport gigs, Dylan becomes more conscious of his power,” Lerner said. “His charisma is startling. With electricity and radio, he did what Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound never achieved. He reached a mass audience with poetry.”
Check out colorized footage of Bob Dylan at Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and black-and-white footage of Joan Baez sitting in that same day.
Bob Dylan — “North Country Blues” — Newport Folk Festival — 7/27/63
[Video: Toca o disco]
Bob Dylan, Joan Baez — “With God On Our Side” — Newport Folk Festival — 7/27/63
[Video: Levi Weiss]