Hah, Maryrrf, we certainly agree on at least ONE thing. As much as I generally like most of Joan's work, and as much as I really love everything by and about The Band, her rendition of that particular Robbie Robertson composition really makes my skin crawl. I'm not sure why; she just seems to misunderstand the song completely.

I believe that there's a very telling misreading of a few words of the lyric in there somewhere (a "mondegreen"), but I don't remember just what it is.

I won't name names, but Maryrrf was not the correspondant uppermost in my mind when I wrote my complaint about the "Dylan haters."

Actually, the prototypical anti-Bob whiner that I always think of first is a young British fellow (well, he was young back in '65 or whenever) who appears in "No Direction Home" and informs an interviewer, quite matter-of-factly and in a smugly authoritative tone, that "Bob Dylan was a bahstard" for daring to appear onstage to perform his own music. The same kid also had some highly ignorant and indignant things to say about The Band.

It's just beyond me why people paid good money to come out an boo at those concerts. If you really don't like someone's music, that's certainly your prerogative ~ but why not stay home, save your pennies, and avoid whatever it is that you find so unpleasant?

I was at Newport in 1965, and "Like a Rolling Stone" was already a widely-played commerical hit record that summer, all over the radio, well before the Folk Festival was underway. How could anyone have been shocked or surprised that Bob would dare "go electric"?

Of course, he could never have duplicated the studio sound of that groundbreaking record at an outdoor concert. It would be difficult enough even today to even approximate that kind of highly-produced sound in a festival setting, and with the crude audio technology of that era ~ fuggetaboutit! Plus which, Bob didn't have a working band at the time, he just put together a "pickup band" of himself, Al Kooper, and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Little wonder that the sound was a bit crude.