镜子的另一面：纽波特民歌艺术节1963~1965

&quotBob Dylan going electric&quot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is one of those epochal moments in rock history that smingly everyone has heard about, but what few people sm to know is that it wasn&#39t some ephemeral event that we only know from word of mouth -- filmmaker Murray Lerner documented the performances at the Newport Festival for several years running, and The Other Side of the Mirror collects footage from the thr years Dylan appeared at the celebrated folk gathering, allowing us to s Dylan&#39s rise through the folk scene for ourselves. Watching Lerner&#39s documentary, what&#39s most remarkable is how much Dylan changed over the course of 36 months the young folkie performing at the afternoon &quotworkshop&quot at the side of Joan Baez in 1963 is at once nervy and hesitant, singing his wordy tunes while chopping away at his acoustic guitar and energizing the crowd without sming to know just what he&#39s doing. In 1964, Dylan all but owns Newport, and he clearly knows it he&#39s the talk of the Festival, with Baez and Johnny Cash singing his praises (and his songs), and his command of the stage is visibly stronger and more confident while his new material (including &quotMr. Tambourine Man&quot and &quotIt Ain&#39t Me, Babe&quot) ss him moving away from the &quotprotest songs&quot that first made his name. When the audience demands an encore after Dylan&#39s evening set (Odetta and Dave Van Ronk were scheduled to follow him), Peter Yarrow tries to kp the show moving along while Dylan beams at the crowd&#39s adulation, like the rock star he was quickly becoming. By the time the 1965 Newport Festival rolled around, Dylan&#39s epochal &quotLike a Rolling Stone&quot was starting to scale the singles charts, and the hardcore folk audience was clearly of two minds about his popular (and populist) suess. When Dylan, Fender Stratocaster in hand, performs &quotMaggie&#39s Farm&quot backed by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and the rhythm section from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the raucous but hard-driving number inspires a curious mixture of enthusiastic chring and equally emphatic booing, and while legend has it that the version of &quotLike a Rolling Stone&quot that followed was a shambles, the song cooks despite drummer Sam Lay&#39s difficulty in finding the groove, though if anything the division of the crowd&#39s loyalties is even stronger afterward. After these two numbers, Dylan and his band leave the stage, with Yarrow (once again serving as MC) citing technical problems (if Pete Sger really pulled the power on Dylan, as legend has it, there&#39s no sign of it here) Dylan returns to the stage with an acoustic six-string to sing &quotMr. Tambourine Man&quot and &quotIt&#39s All Over Now, Baby Blue&quot before vanishing into the night without comment. While much of the audience at Newport in 1965 wanted the &quotold&quot Dylan back, his strong, willful performances even on the acoustic stuff makes it obvious that the scrappy semi-amateur we saw at the beginning of the movie was gone forever, and the ovations suggest more than a few people wanted to s Dylan rock. Lerner&#39s film tells us a certain amount of what we already knows, but it gently debunks a few myths about Dylan during this pivotal moment in his carr, and his performances are committed and forceful throughout no matter how many times you&#39ve read about Dylan&#39s Newport shoot-out of 1965, sing it is a revelatory experience, and Lerner has assembled this archival material with intelligence and taste. This is must-s viewing for anyone interested in Dylan or the folk scene of the &#3960s.