Dylan” character but had never heard him sing. Hughie assured me that Dylan was “the business”, “a protest singer” with a voice once heard never forgotten. Dylan was a major poet, too. Dylan had once been a soldier in the American army, Hughie attested (incorrectly), and the horrors of war had turned him into “a crusader for peace”. His protest songs “pointed the finger” at something that was wrong in society: an injustice, a failing, a cruelty. And he had a voice made for protesting, rough, “a bit uncivilised”; he’s no “Donny Osmond, that’s for sure”. (uproxx.com)
Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.
Dylan loved to mess with authority figures. Famed music producer John Hammond, who worked on his eponymous first album (which was met with a yawn and dubbed Hammond’s Folly), signed this 20-year-old wisp of a man from Minnesota after he was told that Dylan was an orphan. Who told him this? Why Dylan, of course, who was considered a minor at the time and needed his parents’ co-signature. He hadn’t spoken to his mom and dad in some time, so his way around this was to invent a tale about being an orphan with only one living relative, a blackjack-dealing uncle who lived in Las Vegas. Either things were simpler then, or people were a lot dumber.
Newport Folk Festival 
1965 was a year of massive cultural change, but you wouldn’t know it at the Newport Folk Festival, where the likes of Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Gordon Lightfoot gently swayed an audience of peace-loving hippies. It was Dylan’s third appearance at the festival, and the crowd expected to hear the same acoustic material he played the first two times. Your “With God on Your Side,” your “We Shall Overcome” cover. Instead, they got Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, with the iconic Mike Bloomfield on guitar, charging their way through “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” all for the first time ever. The audience booed, and that blowhard Seeger infamously declared, “If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now.” No one there deserved the legendary performance Dylan was giving them, and he didn’t return to Newport for 37 years.
The Time Interview
Dylan was at his most wise-jackass in 1965, when Dont Look Backdocumentarian D.A. Pennebaker filmed him responding to Time reporter Horace Judson with visible (and likely drugged out) irritation. Choice quotes include, when asked about his songs, “I just write them. I don’t write them for any reason. There’s no great message. If you wanna tell other people that, go ahead and tell them. But I’m not gonna have to answer to it,” and, “I don’t need Time magazine.” This was a time when rock stars were supposed to be good boys and girls to the press. To tell a journalist to shove off was career suicide. Until Dylan did it, then it became en vogue.
“Play f*cking loud”
Speaking of hostility: during his 1966 world tour with the Hawks (later renamed the Band), Dylan played two sets: the first was all acoustic, from the personal “To Ramona” to the apocalyptic “Desolation Row,” while the second was electric. The only thing louder than “Tell Me Mama” was the crowd jeering Dylan, criticizing him for selling out. During a show in Edinburgh, his so-called “fans” attempted to drown out the music by loudly playing harmonicas. On May 17, 1966, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, someone called him “Judas!” To which Dylan replied, “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar,” before telling the Hawks to “play f*cking loud.” They did.
