3. On Sunday, July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onto the stage of a festival in Rhode Island with an electric guitar and stunned the music world. Which festival was it?
From Quiz The Ragged Clown at the Gates of Eden
Answer:
Newport Folk Festival
Dylan's decision to use electric instruments was said to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing on Saturday, July 24. With just a little practice before Dylan's Sunday time slot, Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played "Maggie's Farm", "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Phantom Engineer" which would show up on the "Highway 61 Revisited" album as "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". Besides applause there was considerable booing from the audience; the last 50-plus years have been spent speculating precisely why.
Most of the songs Dylan played that day were on the "Bringing It All Back Home" album which had been released in March of that year, encountering only mild complaints for the use of electric instruments. Perhaps when 11,000 people got together in Newport, the dissatisfaction was amplified (sorry). As one music critic noted: "Dylan electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other".