1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  On April 25, approximately 150 demonstrators held a sit-in at Dewey’s Restaurant for refusing service to people who the manager believed looked gay.2 On May 29, seven men and three women picketed the White House to call attention to the fact that gays were being denied civil rights and were blocked from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Numerous demonstrations followed throughout the summer, at sites including the Pentagon and the United Nations. ECHO’s July 4 protest at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall became a yearly event, the Annual Reminder for gay rights, until the Stonewall riots of 1969, at which point it was replaced by the annual Christopher Street Day celebration. But while the battle for gay equality had begun, legal protection was a long way off.

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  Warhol dubbed the outrageous characters who populated his films “superstars,” and one of the earliest prototypes was model and society girl Baby Jane Holzer, the Paris Hilton of her day.3 She appeared in Warhol’s films Batman Dracula, Soap Opera, and Couch. Tom Wolfe dubbed her “The Girl of the Year” in a famous profile for New York Magazine, in which Holzer opines, “The Beatles are getting fat. The Beatles—well, John Lennon’s still thin, but Paul McCartney is getting a big bottom. That’s all right, but I don’t particularly care for that. The Stones are thin. I mean, that’s why they’re beautiful, they’re so thin. Mick Jagger—wait’ll you see Mick.”4

  But Holzer receded in the spring. “It was getting very scary at the Factory. There were too many crazy people around who were stoned and using too many drugs. They had some laughing gas that everybody was sniffing. The whole thing freaked me out, and I figured it was becoming too faggy and sick and druggy.”5

  At some point between January and March, Warhol met Edie Sedgwick and became entranced by her beauty and vivacious personality. “He was probably in love with Edie,” future superstar Viva later theorized. “A sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so you had no time for any other man.”6

  Some Factory denizens pinpoint Tennessee Williams’s birthday party as the evening where Warhol befriended Sedgwick. If so, it was a fitting locale, as Sedgwick’s tale was as tragic as that of any of Williams’s doomed heroines. She was born in 1943 to an heiress mother and a rancher-sculptor father who struck oil. Sedgwick’s father had suffered three nervous breakdowns in his youth, and she later maintained that he made advances on her when she was seven. He was a ruthless womanizer, seducing the friends of his wife and children. Once, Sedgwick walked in on him cheating and tried to tell her mother, but he denied it and got a doctor to put Edie on tranquilizers. In boarding school, she developed anorexia and spent time in various psychiatric hospitals. Her beloved brother Francis hanged himself when she was twenty.7

  In 1964 Sedgwick moved to New York City to pursue modeling, living in her grandmother’s fourteen-room Park Avenue apartment until her trust fund kicked in and allowed her to get her own place. She developed a unique waiflike “look”: short hair, heavy black eyeliner, large chandelier earrings, long legs in black leotards, mini dresses, striped shirts, and leopard-skin coats.

  In December 1964, Bob Dylan’s right-hand man, Bobby Neuwirth, heard there was a wild beauty whom he and Dylan had to meet. They called Sedgwick, and she met them at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street, arriving in a limo. They had a great evening, walking together through the snow down Houston Street, laughing and looking at the church displays. Along with the humor, Neuwirth saw that Sedgwick had a “tremendous compassion” for those “who had seen the big sadness.”8 The same month she met Dylan and Neuwirth, another brother, Robert, was carried out of Harvard in a straitjacket and taken to Bellevue. When he got out, he crashed his Harley into a bus on New Year’s Eve. He died from the injuries on January 12.

  After meeting Warhol sometime in early 1965, Sedgwick started hanging out regularly at the Factory and had nonspeaking roles in his films Vinyl and Bitch. In April she appeared in Horse, which centered on cowboys in jockstraps on poppers (akin to laughing gas) playing strip poker with a horse in the room. A cue card instructed people to “Approach the Horse Sexually Everybody,” and the horse kicked one of the actors, Tosh Carillo, in the head.

  Warhol decided to make a film built around Sedgwick. In April’s Poor Little Rich Girl, she puts on makeup, smokes cigarettes, tries on outfits, and talks on the phone about how she blew through her inheritance in six months. The main drawing point of the film was that she was in her underwear, though the first reel was out of focus. Kitchen followed in June. Again, half the film is out of focus. She is in her lingerie and talks with other actors until one of them strangles her on the kitchen table.

  Critical consensus is that the high point of her oeuvre is Beauty No. 2, in which she reclines almost naked in skimpy underwear on a bed with a young man from the Factory named Gino Piserchio. For sixty-five minutes Piserchio gropes her legs and makes out with her, while, off camera, Sedgwick’s friend Chuck Wein asks her increasingly hostile and personal questions until she finally throws an ashtray at him. The film premiered at New York’s Cinematheque on July 17, and nine days later the New York Times ran the article “Edie Pops Up as Newest Star”:

  For the restless hedonists who purport to lead the new, fashionable society, novelty is the staff of life. Last fall, they raised up a new goddess after she had been suitably baptized in the pages of Vogue and christened her Baby Jane. Before six months were over, they were whispering the obsolescence of Baby Jane. Now on Page 91 of the Aug. 1 issue of Vogue, her successor can be found. The magazine … has a full-page photograph of Miss Edith Minturn Sedgwick, 22, doing an arabesque in her living room. Vogue labels her a Youthquaker.9

  In November, Life ran a fashion spread on her, proclaiming, “The cropped-mop girl with the eloquent legs is doing more for black tights than anybody since Hamlet.”

  Initially, Sedgwick’s folks had disapproved of her modeling. Then, when they got wind that she was being groped in freaky art films in her underwear, they pleaded with her to go back to modeling. But by now, Sedgwick and Warhol were the “it couple” of New York, her hair dyed silver to match his, both wearing boat-necked, striped T-shirts, jetting to his exhibit in Paris. In October, they appeared on The Merv Griffin Show to the strains of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Sedgwick wore her scandalous tights. The gum-chewing Warhol refused to speak, instead whispering to Sedgwick his responses to Merv’s questions.

  That month they attended an exhibit of his in Philadelphia, and screaming kids mobbed the scene requesting autographs. (Warhol let Sedgwick sign his name.) The paintings had to be taken off the walls to protect them from being damaged. Warhol was delighted—an art opening with no art. The couple took refuge at the top of a stairwell. To make their getaway, they had to cross the roof to the fire escape next door. It was the closest the art world got to Beatlemania.

  Warhol announced he had abandoned painting because films were “easier”—which, considering he didn’t even focus the camera half the time, was definitely true. His new dream was to go to Hollywood, and he believed Sedgwick could be his ticket. He began to think his film team should start developing coherent narratives for her.

  Rumor had it that Sedgwick had also served as the muse for the song Dylan released three days after Beauty No. 2’s premiere, a song Rolling Stone would later rank as the greatest rock song of all time.

  11

  Masterpiece Highs and the Boos of Newport

  Dylan shatters the rules of pop music with “Like a Rolling Stone,” released July 20; outrages the Newport Folk Festival by going electric on July 25; and records Highway 61 Revisited from July 29 to August 4.

  Bob Dylan’s early singles covered the civil rights movement. Then “Subterranean Homesick Blues” turned darkly comic and grappled with whether to live in the straight world or the counterculture. Then came the cautionary “Like a Rolling Stone,” the story of “Miss Lonely” who used to have it made. She used to attend the finest school, wore the finest clothes, casually gave and received gifts. She toss
ed the bums change and laughed about them. She partied too much, ignoring her friends’ warnings that she was heading for trouble.

  In Dylan’s song, Miss Lonely goes out with a diplomat who takes everything from her that he can steal, like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In the Hollywood film, a Brazilian diplomat strings Golightly along as his mistress before abandoning her. The struggling writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard) yells at Golightly that she needs to wake up and accept his true love. “You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself.”1 She finally grows up, and they kiss in the rain. At last, she’s found a home in Peppard’s arms.

  But “Like a Rolling Stone” sounds like Dylan made his appeal to Miss Lonely and she still spurned him, so he takes gleeful vengeance in spelling out what awaits her as soon as her looks and money run out. She ends up broke and homeless, pawning her diamond ring and making deals with “mystery tramps” with vacuum eyes and “Napoleon in rags.”

  The deals could be drug deals—or the kind made by the real-life inspiration for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s book. Capote said she “was not precisely a call girl. She had no job but accompanied expense-account men to the best restaurants and night clubs with the understanding that her escort was obligated to give her some sort of gift, perhaps jewelry or a check … If she felt like it, she might take her escort home for the night.”2 If Dylan’s Miss Lonely has any reservations about making such deals, she soon realizes she doesn’t even have a reputation to lose anymore, because she’s fallen so far she’s been forgotten.

  Since the song’s release, many have speculated that it was inspired by Sedgwick, who shared some of Hepburn/Golightly’s poise and slender glamour. Sedgwick had gone to fine boarding schools like the character, she did blow her inheritance (on limos), and she would die from drug addiction. Films such as Factory Girl and I’m Not There suggest that Dylan had an affair with her. The latter film portrays Sedgwick as a heartbroken mess because Dylan ignores her after hooking up with her. She finds comfort in the arms of his friend-assistant, the Bobby Neuwirth character, a “betrayal” that antagonizes Dylan. Whether that is true, in real life she did become Neuwirth’s girlfriend at some point during the year, until her addiction to barbiturates became too much for him to handle and, in 1967, he broke up with her. Dylan scholar Greil Marcus said, “I heard a lecture by Thomas Crow, an art historian, about ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ being about Edie Sedgwick within Andy Warhol’s circle, as something that Dylan saw from the outside, not being personally involved with either of them, but as something he saw and was scared by and saw disaster looming and wrote a song as a warning, and it was compelling.”3

  Others have postulated that Dylan’s muse for the song might have been Marianne Faithfull. She was the queen of British folk-pop when Dylan came to England for his May tour. The Daily Mail had run a story about her headlined, “Miss Lonely Sobs into the Pops” when she recorded Jagger and Richards’s “As Tears Go By.”4 In her memoir, Faithfull recounts Dylan’s attempts to seduce her in his hotel suite between sessions of ignoring her while banging away furiously on his typewriter. “The Out-tuning and Seduction Machine,” she called him. She was told he was working on an epic poem about her (the memoir doesn’t specify if Dylan or his entourage told her), but when he hit on her, she declined because she was pregnant and engaged to be married the next week. He “turned into Rumpelstiltskin,” tore up the papers he was writing, and threw her out.5 Sadly, Faithfull was also derailed for a number of years due to heroin addiction, homeless before getting her life back together for her late ’70s comeback.

  Others speculate that Dylan was writing about himself and his alienation from the folk music world. He was bored to death but feared that if he left the safety of his genre for pop and flopped he could end up homeless himself. He told Playboy, “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation … It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you … But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all. I mean it was something that I myself could dig.”6

  Regardless of who inspired the song, Dylan wrote “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do … After writing that I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play.”7

  In 2004 he told music journalist Robert Hilburn, “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”8

  The documentary of Dylan’s spring tour, Don’t Look Back, captures Dylan singing “Lost Highway” with Joan Baez in his hotel room. Written by Leon Payne and made famous by country icon Hank Williams in 1949, the song starts with the singer calling himself a lost rolling stone, paying the cost for a life of sin. In 1950, blues master Muddy Waters released “Rollin’ Stone,” after which the British band named themselves.

  When Dylan’s song was first announced but before anyone had heard it, many assumed that it was about the band, since to record the album Bringing It All Back Home Dylan had formed a group that sounded very much like the Stones.

  On June 15, nine days after “Satisfaction” was released, Dylan went into the studio and recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.” He brought back the same pianist, bassist, drummer, and Bruce “Mr. Tambourine Man” Langhorne from his previous album, plus blues guitar wunderkind Michael Bloomfield.

  A key part of his sound actually found him unexpectedly. Brill Building songwriter–session musician Al Kooper (“This Diamond Ring”) was a friend of producer Tom Wilson, so Wilson allowed Kooper to visit Dylan’s session to watch. But Kooper sneaked into the empty organ seat.

  “Man, what are you doin’ out there?” Wilson asked. He knew that Kooper didn’t even play organ. But then Wilson was distracted, and didn’t get around to telling Kooper to move, so Kooper stayed.

  Bobby Gregg struck his snare, the band kicked in, and Kooper listened for the other musicians’ chords for half a moment before playing them himself.

  Afterward, everyone gathered to listen to the playback. When the song entered the second verse, Dylan told Wilson to turn the organ up.

  “Hey, man, that cat’s not an organ player,” Wilson said.

  “Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.”9

  Dylan then almost let the song die when he refused to cut the six-minute, thirteen-second track in half for the single. Columbia’s sales and marketing department considered it a cancelled release.

  But Shaun Considine, Columbia’s coordinator of new releases, sneaked out with an acetate of the song and asked the deejay at the über-hip New York nightclub Arthur to play it. The huge crowd response prompted two of New York’s top deejays to call the label asking for the new Dylan single.10 The song was released on July 20 and shot to No. 2—breaking the barrier of how long pop singles could be.

  Bruce Springsteen recalled, “The first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind … Dylan was—he was a revolutionary, man; the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.”11

  Not only did the song break the length barrier, but the willful innocence of Top 40 was forever pierced by lyrics stranger and more suggestive than had been heard on pop radio before. But even though the words were dark, there was joy in Dylan’s weather-beaten voice, the joy of being all his heroes at once—Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, the Animals, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones—the joy of smashing out of the industry’s little boxes, beyond folk, beyond rock, beyond country, beyond blues, to a space where
you could be all of them at the same time. The subliminal message was that the accepted rules weren’t necessary; you could have complete artistic control and a Top 5 hit. You were bound only by the limits of your imagination. The song’s wide-open possibility spoke to everyone from fellow musicians to young people living on their own for the first time. Others took it as their theme as they began “dropping out” of society in myriad ways. Some women heard their own mixed emotions as they considered alternatives to being a housewife (college, divorce, career), giving up the protection of parents or husband to stand alone. It was the sound of an old country (traditional, stable, repressive) giving way to something frightening and free.

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  Folk singer emeritus Pete Seeger and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman were two of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and two of the men most responsible for the folk revival of the early 1960s. The Kingston Trio’s cover of Seeger’s antiwar “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” reached the Top 20 in 1962, the same year the folk group that Grossman had assembled, Peter, Paul and Mary, got to the Top 10 with “If I Had a Hammer.” In 1963, Dylan joined Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez onstage at Newport to sing his own civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and became the darling of the scene.

  At Newport ’64, Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers (Seeger’s old group) introduced Dylan with “And here he is … Take him, you know him, he’s yours.” In his memoirs, Dylan wrote that his internal reaction was “What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.”12

  On the evening of July 25, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the person that’s going to come up now has a limited amount of time. His name is Bob Dylan.”13