Bob Dylan Fans Were ‘Definitely Booing’ at Famous Newport Gig

One of the key professionals involved in the 1965 Newport Folk Festival has set the record straight regarding Bob Dylan’s famous set.

Joe Boyd was behind the sound board at the festival, tasked with making sure Dylan and his fellow performers sounded their best. During a recent appearance on the Bob Lefsetz podcast, Boyd recalled when Dylan went electric.

“At the end of ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ I was standing in the little press enclosure right in front of the stage,” the music veteran remembered, “and you heard this waft of sound that was absolutely a mixture [of cheers and boos].”

Whether Dylan was booed at the event has been a topic of debate among music fans for decades. Some believe the rocker was chastised by the crowd for his artistic choice, while others have argued the story was heavily exaggerated to further Dylan’s mythology. The moment is such a major part of music history that it serves as a pivotal plot point in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.

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“Some people were definitely booing,” Boyd confirmed. “Some people were cheering, and at the end, after the three songs, the only three songs he had rehearsed with the band, and he left the stage — ‘more’ and ‘boo’ they’re a very similar sound, and you had that wave of sound. You can hear it on the recordings. I don’t think there’s any real debate about it.”

Dylan Going Electric Was a ‘World Shaking Moment’

“The whole event was a schismatic event, and everybody knew it beforehand, the whole weekend before Sunday night,” Boyd continued. “If you just overheard conversations passing, it was like, ‘What about Dylan? What do you think he’s gonna do? Would he dare? No, he wouldn’t dare, would he?’ That was a kind of talk that was going around, not just backstage, but among the audience. People were intrigued.”

According to Boyd, the excitement around Dylan’s performance was so palpable that everyone knew it would go down in history. “It was one of those moments that was not just a world shaking moment in retrospect,” he explained. “It was at the time. We knew that things would never be the same.”