""The phrase "when Dylan went electric" once carried as much weight in pop culture history as "the fall of the Berlin Wall" carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many a serious Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. They also seemed equally consequential.""
""The death of rock and roll in the 50s is often told through the lens of tragedy, but there was also anger, disgust, and mass disaffection. The Payola scandal had an impact, as did Elvis joining the army and Little Richard's return to religion. Rock and roll was broken, tamed, and turned into commercial fodder. Simply put, it wasn't cool at all, man, and even the Beatles couldn't save it singlehandedly.""
Bob Dylan's 1965 electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, backed by Mike Bloomfield and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, marked a pivotal cultural shift in the 1960s. The shift paralleled other epochal moments and changed perceptions of folk and rock audiences. Rock and roll's decline in the 1950s involved scandal, military service by icons, and religious turnarounds that commercialized and tamed the form. The Beatles reinvigorated popular music, but Dylan's embrace of electric blues redirected American youth culture and bridged disparate subcultural worlds. Dylan's blues influence altered trajectories for musicians and reshaped the era's musical landscape.
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