The Spark
On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival carrying a Fender Stratocaster. Behind him stood Al Kooper on organ and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They launched into “Maggie’s Farm” at a volume that was, by 1965 standards, the loudest thing anyone in that audience had ever heard. The crowd’s roar contained, as sound mixer Joe Boyd recalled, boos and shouts of delight and derision and outrage all at once. Backstage, Pete Seeger argued to cut the power while Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman blocked him. Dylan played three electric songs, returned with an acoustic guitar, performed “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and left. He had released “Like a Rolling Stone” five days earlier.
That moment crystallized something already in motion. The Animals had taken “The House of the Rising Sun” to number one in August 1964, running an ancient folk melody through electric organ and guitar. Dylan heard it and, by his own admission, it influenced his decision to plug in. Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965, split down the middle: one side electric, one side acoustic. The purists felt betrayed. The rest of the world leaned in.
Jingle-Jangle Morning
In Los Angeles, a former folk circuit player named Jim McGuinn (he later changed his first name to Roger) had seen the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and fixated on George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12-string. He bought a Rickenbacker 360/12 and, with producer Terry Melcher at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, recorded Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” on January 20, 1965. Only McGuinn from the Byrds played on the session; Melcher hired the Wrecking Crew for the backing track. McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark sang over the top.
The guitar sound that emerged defined folk rock’s first wave. McGuinn ran his Rickenbacker through Fairchild compressors and Pultec limiters, piggy-backing one into another to wring maximum sustain from an instrument naturally prone to short decay. The result was a shimmering, bell-like chime the press called “jingle-jangle,” borrowing Dylan’s own lyric. The single hit number one in June 1965, and the term “folk rock” entered the music press that same month.
Meanwhile, at Columbia’s Studio A in New York, producer Tom Wilson committed an act of creative sabotage. Simon and Garfunkel’s acoustic “The Sound of Silence” had flopped in 1964. On June 15, 1965, fresh from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, Wilson overdubbed electric guitar, bass, and drums onto the original acoustic track without telling either Simon or Garfunkel. The tempo on the original was uneven; engineer Roy Halee masked the problem with heavy echo. Paul Simon was horrified when he heard it. The single went to number one.
Across the Atlantic
British folk rock was a fundamentally different project from its American counterpart. Fairport Convention formed in 1967 with guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, bassist Ashley Hutchings, and drummer Shaun Frater. Early on, they played Dylan and Joni Mitchell covers, earning comparisons to Jefferson Airplane. Then Sandy Denny joined in 1968, replacing vocalist Judy Dyble, and steered the band toward traditional British song. For “A Sailor’s Life” on 1969’s Unhalfbricking, the group hired fiddle player Dave Swarbrick. Several minutes of Thompson and Swarbrick improvising over a centuries-old seafaring ballad produced something new: British traditional music played with the energy of a rock band.
On May 12, 1969, the band’s van crashed on the M1 motorway returning from a gig in Birmingham. Drummer Martin Lamble, nineteen, was killed, along with Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The surviving members retreated to a rented house in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire. With Dave Mattacks on drums and Swarbrick now a full member, they recorded Liege & Lief: six traditional tracks and three originals. It reached number 17 on the UK chart and is now considered the founding document of British folk rock.
The influence scattered immediately. Ashley Hutchings left to form Steeleye Span in 1969 with Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. Sandy Denny formed Fotheringay, then went solo. In 1971, she became the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record, duetting with Robert Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” for Led Zeppelin IV. She died in 1978 at thirty-one from a brain haemorrhage following a fall.
Open Tunings and Laurel Canyon
Joni Mitchell played only two of her songs in standard tuning. By her own count, she used more than fifty alternate tunings, sometimes finding them by tuning her guitar to match birdsong or the ambient pitch of a landscape. Her tuning for “A Case of You” (E-A-D-A-A-E) emulated a dulcimer; she ran open E with a capo on the fourth fret for “The Circle Game.” The chords she found, consonances and dissonances gently playing against each other, moved closer to Debussy than to anything in the folk tradition. She devised her own notation system, where Open D was written as D75435, each digit representing the interval between adjacent strings.
In Laurel Canyon, supergroups assembled from the wreckage of other bands. David Crosby had been fired from the Byrds in late 1967. Stephen Stills’s Buffalo Springfield dissolved in early 1968. Graham Nash left the Hollies that December. At a dinner party in July 1968, Nash asked Stills and Crosby to sing Stills’s “You Don’t Have to Cry.” They played it twice; Nash learned the lyrics, improvised a third harmony, and the vocal chemistry was undeniable. Their self-titled debut spent 107 weeks on the Billboard chart. Neil Young joined for touring, and Deja Vu (1970) topped the charts, with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar for “Teach Your Children.”
The Quiet One
Nick Drake recorded Five Leaves Left between 1968 and 1969 at Sound Techniques in London, produced by Joe Boyd. Richard Thompson played guitar; Danny Thompson of Pentangle played bass. Robert Kirby, a friend from Cambridge, arranged the strings. Drake tracked live, singing and playing alongside the string section with no overdubs. The album sold poorly. Bryter Layter sold poorly. Pink Moon, recorded in two night sessions with just voice and guitar, sold poorly. He died in 1974 at twenty-six. It took fifteen years for the world to catch up.
Richard Thompson, after leaving Fairport Convention, recorded a series of albums with his wife Linda. His hybrid-picking technique, bass notes struck with a plectrum and melody lines plucked with bare fingers, drew on bagpipe drones, Irish reels, and Bakersfield country twang. Shoot Out the Lights (1982), their final album together, was recorded as their marriage collapsed; they then toured the record, playing songs about heartbreak and betrayal to audiences who knew it was all real.
Essential Listening
- The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)
- Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
- Simon & Garfunkel – Sounds of Silence (1966)
- Fairport Convention – Liege & Lief (1969)
- Joni Mitchell – Blue (1971)
- Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left (1969)
- Crosby, Stills & Nash – Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)
- Richard & Linda Thompson – Shoot Out the Lights (1982)
- Sandy Denny – The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971)
- Steeleye Span – Below the Salt (1972)
- Neil Young – Harvest (1972)
- Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)