I've been listening to Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1965 this week.
Famous for the debut of his electric material in a live setting.
The electric set features Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, who played on Highway 61 Revisited, plus a rhythm section from the Butterfield Blues Band and the excellent Barry Goldberg on piano. It's not the finest version of many of the songs, probably a bit under-rehearsed, but I thought it sounded fairly well received by the crowd, of course now all you hear about is the controversy it caused but they did OK by my ears.
However, for me it's the acoustic encore that has proved most captivating. Both 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' are for me the best versions he ever did. He asks the crowd for an E harmonica and takes one from the audience and just blasts into it. It's just fabulous. The songs are new, not the road-worn versions of the 1966 tour, and he's in excellent voice. It's like he has a point to prove, saying 'Well I'm the fucking best at these acoustic folk song things, but see you later, I've got more to do...'
I still can't work out just why his harmonica playing is so captivating - the abrasiveness just send me into a trance.
Once I had a broken speaker on my record player and was listening to Highway 61 Revisited on a stereo LP, with one speaker out I was pretty much just getting harmonica on one side, it was great. He's obviously not like the great blues players, or even anywhere near as melodic as fellow folkies like John Sebastian (who played dynamite harp on the Fred Neil records) or Neil Young (very melodic, strange but nowhere near as harsh as Bob) - but it's just really engrossing for me.
