Newport and the Great People's Dream is a rapturous documentary, elegant and transportive, full of prickly, lyrical black-and-white imagery and performances that have a timeless power. The film tells the story of the Newport Folk Festival during the pivotal years from 1963 to 1966, and when I say it “tells a story” I mean it has a surprisingly poignant and resonant plot at play that we haven't seen before. Murray Lerner's 1967 documentary The Festival covered the same years, but the film was more of a loose collage of folk, blues and country.
It turns out that Lerner, who died in 2017, shot 100 hours of footage in Newport, almost all of it stuck in storage; he had never been seen before. This is the footage that director Robert Gordon and his editor and producing partner Laura Jean Hocking used to create Newport and the Great People's Dream.
The film presents a much richer, broader and ingeniously structured vision of Newport than The Festival. This movie was good, but never more than good. The new film feels important, and I think it potentially has a large audience made up of all the people who have been passionate about American roots music for decades, as well as a new generation of folk-related fans who felt inspired by “A Complete Unknown.” I want to say: forget this annoying word. folk. This is a film for music lovers of all stripes.
Early in the documentary there are shots of Johnny Cash looking thin and hungry, and there is an oblique but deliberate reference to 1965. As soon as we hear this year, we understand what it means, because the whole mythology of Newport is centered on what happened then: the famous Sunday evening in which Bob Dylan went electric, changing the world of folk music and the world in general.
Newport and the People's Great Dream expands our vision of this moment in two ways. It represents such a wide and exquisitely curated range of music that was heard in Newport that it leaves us with a much deeper sense of who Dylan was. violation. At the same time, the festival found itself in a state of its own evolution. Real change began at the 1964 festival, the first to take place after the Beatles arrived in America (February 7, 1964) – and it was Beatlemania, far more than anything Bob Dylan did, that marked the beginning of the end of folk music as a mainstream populist form. Aside from Dylan, electric instruments are already scattered across the Newport stages as we see Howlin' Wolf, ax in hand, performing a furious blues number. And the spirit of the crowd developed along with it.
Newport's famous grand image is of all those lounge chairs stretching from the stage in neat rows, as if it were a very large wedding. But every year the festival became more and more free: children hung out, drank and came to party; at times women danced barefoot in their bras. What started out as quite civilized This event began to gradually transform into the roots of Woodstock. The 1965 festival features a performance by Mimi and Richard Fariña that is simply stunning. The song they perform is called “House Unamerican Blues Activity Dream” and it sounds very 1950s, but what a beat! It's like hearing a drugged-up version of Simon and Garfunkel's “Cecilia” and having the crowd rock out to it. Even Joan Baez it rocks right there on stage (Mimi, beaming like Margaret Qualley, was Joan's sister), and the message is: this is not your father's folk music… or even the folk music of 1963. This was a completely new thing.
The people's dream, as the film presents it, was for music from different genres to merge into a community of spiritual and political power. In fact, it was Pete Seeger's dream, fueled by his alliances with labor unions and African Americans, and why he was dragged in front of HUAC in 1955 (his refusal to name names there made him a hero). At the 1963 festival, Seeger, who was organizing the event, made the fateful decision to ask management to pay each performer the same amount of money: $50. Very radical and very popular.
The music at that year's festival embodies this burning idealism. The film's first full performance sees Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson perform “The Coo Coo Bird”, a vibrant house song that seems to rise from the ground. The Moving Star Hall Singers' rendition of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” is so primitive and ancient that it sounds like one of the field recordings collected by Alan Lomax (the legendary ethnomusicologist who co-curated the festival) that Moby used in “Play”. The New Lost City Ramblers perform a bluegrass number that the fiddler turns into a bouncy version of hillbilly rock 'n' roll, and the Freedom Singers nearly set “Woke Up This Morning” on fire.
In many ways, the 1963 Newport Folk Festival was preparation for the March on Washington, the landmark civil rights demonstration that would take place just a month later. The 1964 edition builds on this spirit, but the music is more seductively unruly and more personal. There are also quaver-voiced sopranos—Mary Travers and Joan Baez sing the civil rights anthem “Lonesome Valley,” Judy Collins sings the sublime “Carry It On.” But there's also the anarchic stomp of the Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers, the extraordinary young Buffy Sainte-Marie singing “Co'dine” (about her addiction), music from Egypt, Senegambia, Nova Scotia and his native Hawaii, and the ecstatic guitar energy of Jose Feliciano singing “Walk” Right In.”
The folk world thought of itself as a world of acoustic purity, but suddenly that idea became a horse and cart. It would have been nice if the film had allowed us to hear more about the arguments we're told went on behind the scenes – between Lomax and Seeger and the festival board members. But they were all, at some level, dedicated to assessing the purity of the people. And it must be one of the great ironies in the history of pop music that Dylan, when he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, defined the cutting edge of folk music, challenging the old world, but by the time you get to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, folk purists I had to adapt to how much times were changing. They are the ones who are stuck on the “old road.”
“Newport and the Great People's Dream” makes it clearer than ever that Dylan didn't show up and perform his groundbreaking electric set in a vacuum. Firstly, the Paul Butterfield blues band, which he had agreed to accompany him literally overnight (they had a quick rehearsal), was already on the program. Moreover, the entire energy of the festival flared up in a new way. If you still think Peter, Paul and Mary are weird, just listen to them perform “If I Had My Way.” The intensity is mesmerizing. Wielding electric guitars, the Chambers Brothers have an infectious funk. By the time Dylan comes in and plays “Maggie’s Farm,” the stage is literally set. Loudon Wainwright III sums it up perfectly: “There was a certain prudishness about folk music. Like, it's precious, and you can't fool around with it, and you certainly can't fuck with it. Well, Dylan screwed up with it that night.”
Folk music was never the same, but not because Bob Dylan played the electric set. This is because folk music was associated with community, activity, and a kind of radiant selflessness that allowed people to merge in holy mass. The counterculture of the '60s sometimes pretended to be that way (and sometimes it was), but that's not really what the '60s was about. In the 60s, people came to their senses, had sex and drugs, and sang songs of themselves to the point where they often couldn't see anything else. The 1960s stood on the fault line between a culture of peace and love and what would become a culture of narcissism.
As Dylan finishes his performance, we hear the crowd screaming. And yet, when watching Newport and the Great People's Dream, for some reason it seems that less more important than we have been led to believe. People booed because Dylan, the people's messiah, had failed them. But how could it be otherwise? The film uses the 1966 Newport Folk Festival as an epilogue, because by then the dream of what folk music was—a force that seemed capable of changing the world—had come to an end. Rock 'n' roll took over. Fame took over. And yet one legendary moment in Newport, a moment that only lasted For a moment everyone blamed Dylan's messenger. Newport and the Great People's Dream is a testament to the purity it helped end, but it is also a testament to the beauty that remains.
