Maggie's Farm - Newport Folk Festival 1965

Newport Folk Festival 1965

"Maggie's Farm" is well known for being at the center of the fervor that surrounded Dylan after his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; it was that set's performance of "Maggie's Farm," much faster and more aggressive than on the Bringing It All Back Home recording and featuring prominent lead electric guitar by Mike Bloomfield, that caused the most controversy. The festival's production manager Joe Boyd claimed that "that first note of 'Maggie's Farm' was the loudest thing anybody had ever heard." It is still unknown what exactly was the biggest source of the controversy, with accounts of the event differing from individual to individual. Though Dylan's move from acoustic folk to electric rock had been extremely controversial, many accounts suggest the problem was largely due to poor sound. Pete Seeger, who is often cited as one of the main opponents to Dylan at Newport 1965, claimed in 2005:

There are reports of me being anti-him going electric at the '65 Newport Folk festival, but that's wrong. I was the MC that night. He was singing 'Maggie's Farm' and you couldn't understand a word because the mic was distorting his voice. I ran to the mixing desk and said, 'Fix the sound, it's terrible!' The guy said 'No, this is what the young people want.' And I did say that if I had an axe I'd cut the cable! But I wanted to hear the words. I didn't mind him going electric.

Singer Eric Von Schmidt has a similar recollection of the event: "Whoever was controlling the mics messed it up. You couldn't hear Dylan. It looked like he was singing with the volume off."

Also, Al Kooper, Dylan's organist at the concert, claims:

The reason they booed is because he only played for 15 minutes and everybody else played for 45 minutes to an hour, and he was the headliner of the festival. The fact that he was playing electric...I don't know. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (who had played earlier) had played electric and the crowd didn't seem too incensed.

However, the style of the music features heavily in several accounts such as that of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman: "Backstage, Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you just didn't have amplified instruments."

The "Maggie's Farm" performance from Newport was featured and discussed extensively in the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home and released on its accompanying album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. Media reviews of the soundtrack were overwhelmingly positive towards the "Maggie's Farm" performance, yielding such descriptions as "blistering" and "remarkably tight, and downright spine-tingling. You can sense Dylan and the band feeding off their collective nervous energy."