In the winter of 2007 moviegoers were given a choice to see numerous impersonations of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a semi-experimental biopic or experience the living legend in concert at the Newport Folk Festival circa 1963. The former was Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There featuring several faux-Dylans portrayed by Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and others in a dramatic attempt to capture the many phases and contradictions in the musician’s life. The latter was Murray Lerner’s riveting time capsule, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965. The strange thing is that Lerner’s documentary featuring the real deal vanished after a brief theatrical run while Haynes’s film continues to enjoy wide exposure thanks to its release on DVD. I don’t know if this meant that the younger movie-going audience is more interested in popular actors playing Bob Dylan or that they have little interest in the sixties folk music scene that Dylan revitalized with his spectacular entry into it. 

While reactions to I’m Not There have been extremely mixed running the gamut from complete puzzlement by some Dylan fans to thumbs down declarations of “pretentious” and “self-indulgent” to rave reviews, one scene in particular stands out in its celebration of the Dylan myth which persists to this day – his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. Haynes uses this transitional moment in his career to show how

the songwriter/musician was a constantly evolving enigma, a chameleon-like artist/creator whose brilliance was often several steps ahead of his fans’ understanding and acceptance of it. The reality, of course, was that most of the festival attendees who were Dylan’s age or younger were completely in sync with his music and lyrics, a fact that is borne out by Lerner’s account of the Newport festivals.

The legend that still clings to Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport festival though is that his live electric set, accompanied by backup musicians Mike Bloomfield (electric guitar), Al Kooper (organ), Jerome Arnold (bass), Barry Goldberg (piano) and Sam Lay (Drums), was poorly received and he was booed off the stage, only to return to the stage alone, properly chastised, to finish with a short acoustic set. 

In I’m Not There, Haynes re-creates the mythic moment with Cate Blanchett doing a dead-on impersonation of Dylan in body movements and appearance, if not voice, and the reactions of the fans – mostly angry or sullen – are rendered in an amusingly stylized way. But in The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965, you are witness to the actual

performance and the real impact of Dylan’s electric set starting with an exhilarating, blood-pumping performance of “Maggie’s Farm.” To see this now, it’s hard to imagine anyone not being blown away by the sheer power of it or not recognize Dylan’s remarkable ability to re-imagine one of his songs from its original acoustic form and make it something so fresh and completely new.

As for the audience’s reaction, it is abuzz with excitement. You can feel it pouring off the screen and out of the speakers. There is thunderous applause, shouting, murmuring and yes, some booing in the ensuing fracas which has since been misinterpreted and exaggerated in most historic accounts of this performance, including Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), which used excerpts from Lerner’s documentary.

While there are many reasons given for the booing in numerous eyewitness accounts and books on the incident, it’s easy to dismiss the often heard reason of Newport festival attendees objecting to Dylan going electric. His first electric album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” had already been in release several months with the songs “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone” receiving constant play on the top forty AM stations. In fact, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival probably attracted more Dylan fans than anyone else because they wanted to hear him play those songs from his best-selling album. So why were people booing?

According to David Hajdu in his excellent biography of the folk scene, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, some of the boos were directed at the poor sound quality at Newport.  Music historian Sam Charters, who has studied private tapes of the event and archival recordings, flatly stated in Hajdu’s book, “They were no boos…and the complaints weren’t about the music – my God, Dylan was the hottest thing going. The sound system at Newport was not set up properly for electric instruments, so people were yelling out because all they could hear was noise.”

Discounting Charters’ statement though is musician Geoff Muldaur who was present at the concert and heard the booing. “I don’t believe people were booing because the music was revolutionary,” he said. “It was just that Dylan wasn’t very good at it. He had no idea how to play the electric guitar, and he had very second-rate musicians with him, and they hadn’t rehearsed enough.” Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper and other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band second-rate musicians? Sounds like a case of professional jealousy to me. 

Like the film Rashomon (1950), each person’s account of what happened is only THEIR perception of the truth. It has also been reported in several accounts of that day that Pete Seeger, a regular fixture at the Newport Folk Festival, threatened to grab an axe and chop the power chord during Dylan’s set because he was so upset by Dylan’s betrayal of the festival’s American roots music tradition. “Years later,” according to Hajdu’s book, “Pete Seeger would say he had indeed been furious, but only because the volume on the instruments was obscuring the socialist message of “Maggie’s Farm.” The “Seeger and the axe” story is one of many, however, that favor the negative and more dramatic audience response and has appeared in such well-regarded biographies as Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.

For every legend spinner like Marcus or filmmaker Haynes are their truth-telling counterparts such as former Newport Folk Festival director Bruce Jackson and documentarian Murray Lerner. Jackson, in fact, documents the recorded tape of the 37-minute performance including the introduction by Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) in his web site article, “The Myth of Newport ’65: It Wasn’t Bob Dylan They Were Booing.”

In Jackson’s account, the boos were in response to comments Peter Yarrow made, not Dylan’s music. Yarrow apparently mentioned more than once during breaks in Dylan’s electric set that the wunderkind would be doing encores with an acoustic guitar. After whipping the crowd into a frenzy with his electric cover of “Maggie’s Farm,” who wouldn’t boo that remark? Jackson and others have also stated that Dylan and his backup band left the stage after only three songs because that was all they had rehearsed, not because of a hostile audience reception.

Probably the most ironic thing about this maze of conflicting stories is that Dylan himself is convinced his electric set was a disaster. He once stated, “….they certainly booed, I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place. I don’t know who they were, though, and I’m certain whoever it was did it twice as loud as they normally would…I was kind of stunned.” Obviously, Dylan truly felt the booing was substantial because he would often refer to it during this embattled period in his life. Sometimes when fans would ask for autographs, he’d even say, “No, you booed.”  

For Dylan fans who haven’t seen either Haynes’ I’m Not There or Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965, I recommend them both though the Murray Lerner documentary is essential viewing. The Haynes film, on the other hand, is an original and audacious experiment that attempts to capture the Dylan mystique and his restless creative spirit over several decades using actual quotations from the man and transcripts of his media interviews. Not all of it worked for me and you may feel a stronger affinity for a certain phase of his career than others such as the period when he worked with director Sam Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Haynes’ treatment of that section – Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid – is so oblique and affected that it seems like it belongs in another Todd Haynes film. But Dylan’s soundtrack album for Peckinpah’s mutilated epic still remains one of the most richly evocative of all Western movie scores and you can hear new interpretations of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (by Antony and the Johnsons) and the “Billy” theme (by Los Lobos) on the soundtrack of I’m Not There.

Although some film bloggers and reviewers have stated that all of the footage featured in The Other Side of the Mirror has been previously seen in Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home or Lerner’s 1967 Oscar-nominated documentary Festival but that is not the case! Lerner’s Festival only featured Dylan performing “All I Really Want to Do” at his first Newport festival in 1963 – he looks like a little kid! – and “Maggie’s Farm” from the 1965 festival. The Scorsese documentary mostly referenced the latter festival as well.

The Other Side of the Mirror is probably the most intimate and beautifully photographed record of the young Dylan in performance that you’ll ever see – and it’s not marred by any voice-over narration so you are able to enjoy the songs in their entirety. You get to see candid footage of Dylan conducting song workshops, accompanying other musicians on stage before the situation was reversed and being studied intently on the sidelines by such fabled musicians as Judy Collins, Dock Boggs, and Clarence Ashley. And you get to see Dylan grow in confidence and maturity over a three year period of performance clips.

Best of all is the music with Dylan performing an early version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Talkin’ World War III,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and a tune Dylan rarely performed, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” which is better known as a cover song by groups such as Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.

Like Lerner, I am convinced that the majority of attendees at the 1965 Newport Folk festival embraced Dylan’s electric set and his movie certainly conveys the excitement of the moment. As the filmmaker once stated in an internet interview, “I think electric music gets into your body and enters into your nerves deeply, almost puts you into a trance…I’ve always felt this and that was the feeling I had when I watched Bob. And I was excited by it. I not only appreciated the changes. I loved it! I really was mesmerized and hypnotized by “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” on many levels. I was both in the pit and on the stage as I was filming it. I knew it was a gateway to a new culture…and I thought this was it….when Dylan went electric, it got into your bones.” 

Lerner, who died in September 2017 at age 90, is also known for the 1979 Oscar-winning Best Documentary, From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China as well as Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight (1991), Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (1996), Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue (2004), Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who (2007) and several other musician portraits.

I first published this article as a blog on TCM’s Movie Morlocks in 2007 (it was officially “retired” in 2016) but was surprised and honored to see this response to my post from Mr. Lerner himself in 2009: “As the filmmaker of OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR, I want to express my appreciation and thanks for the thoughtful and insightful review of my film. I just happened to read it tonight by chance on the internet. – Murray Lerner.”

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965 was released on DVD in March 2008 by Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings. The disc includes a liner notes insert and an interview with Murray Lerner. In April 2011 a blu-ray edition of the documentary was finally released.

Other links of interest:

https://variety.com/2017/music/news/documentary-filmmaker-murray-lerner-60s-70s-music-dead-new-york-1202546989/

https://codacollection.co/films/other-side-of-the-mirror-director-interview

http://www.writeonmusic.com/2009/10/isle-of-wight-film-director-talks.html