Column: Dylan's glorious career has been one of constant reinvention

The film addresses the controversy that Dylan caused when, having made his name as a folk singer, performing alone with just his acoustic guitar and harmonica for accompaniment, he decided to explore the possibilities of amplified music. He effectively founded ‘folk rock’.

I was only 16 when I witnessed this transition to electric, attending a concert he gave in Manchester as part of his UK tour in 1966. The first half of his performance having been sung gently in the folk mode, the second half was defiantly loud.

Many people in the audience heckled him, culminating in one desperately shouted word: ‘Judas!’ (The film transposes this moment to the Newport Folk Festival a year earlier.)

The members of the audience who were interviewed after that concert were unanimous: in abandoning folk protest music, he was a ‘traitor’ who had ‘sold out’. At this distance in time, it’s hard to understand the strength of feeling. But we have to remember that hitherto Dylan had been famous for composing ‘protest songs’.

That said, even as a protest singer, he had been constantly criticised. It was all very well producing powerful songs about social issues. Why didn’t he engage in political action?

Why didn’t he do something, like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez?

The answer is simple. He had clearly done something. He had engaged in what we might call ‘symbolic action’. He had written and performed songs that raised important issues, inspiring listeners to take them seriously and, where possible, campaign for the appropriate causes.

He had made people think about civil rights (‘Oxford Town’ and ‘Pawn in Their Game’), poverty (‘Hollis Brown’, ‘North Country Blues’), warfare (‘Masters of War’, ‘With God on Our Side’), and he had even warned of a possible man-made apocalypse (‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’).

So what happened when he went electric? The quality of his music was not lessened; in fact, it was frequently enhanced. Nor was the quality of his lyrics diminished. Listen to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’.

As for the rest of his career, he has continued to re-invent himself, always capable of surprising us. He puts this well on his last album, with a song title derived from America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman: ‘I Contain Multitudes’. He has, in short, remained unknown.

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