section_path: Career/1965–1969: Going electric and motorcycle accident
section_name: 1965–1969: Going electric and motorcycle accident
paragraph_text: 1965–1969: Going electric and motorcycle accident
  
  Dylan's late March 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, was another leap, featuring his first recordings with electric instruments, under producer Tom Wilson's guidance. The first single, " Subterranean Homesick Blues ", owed much to Chuck Berry 's " Too Much Monkey Business ", its free-association lyrics described as harking back to the energy of beat poetry and as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. The song was provided with an early music video, which opened D. A. Pennebaker 's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 British tour, Dont Look Back. Instead of miming, Dylan illustrated the lyrics by throwing cue cards containing key words on the ground. Pennebaker said the sequence was Dylan's idea, and it has been imitated in music videos and advertisements.
  
  The second side of Bringing It All Back Home contained four long songs on which Dylan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. " Mr. Tambourine Man " became one of his best-known songs when The Byrds recorded an electric version, which reached number one in the US and UK. " It's All Over Now, Baby Blue " and " It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) " were two of Dylan's most important compositions.
  
  In 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since high school with a pickup group featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 he was met with cheering and booing and left the stage after three songs. One version has it that the boos were from folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. Murray Lerner, who filmed the performance, said: "I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric." An alternative account claims audience members were upset by poor sound and a short set.
  
  Dylan's performance provoked a hostile response from the folk music establishment. In the September issue of Sing Out!, Ewan MacColl wrote: "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time.... 'But what of Bobby Dylan?' scream the outraged teenagers.... Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel". On July 29, four days after Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording " Positively 4th Street ". The lyrics contained images of vengeance and paranoia, and have been interpreted as Dylan's put-down of former friends from the folk community he had known in clubs along West 4th Street.
  
  Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde
  
  In July 1965, Dylan's six-minute single " Like a Rolling Stone " peaked at number two in the US chart. In 2004 and in 2011, Rolling Stone listed it as number one on " The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time ". Bruce Springsteen recalled first hearing the song: "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." The song opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, named after the road that led from Dylan's Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans. The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar and Al Kooper's organ riffs. " Desolation Row ", backed by acoustic guitar and understated bass, offers the sole exception, with Dylan alluding to figures in Western culture in a song described by Andy Gill as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of celebrated characters". Poet Philip Larkin, who also reviewed jazz for The Daily Telegraph, wrote "I'm afraid I poached Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded."
  
  In support of the album, Dylan was booked for two US concerts with Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, former members of Ronnie Hawkins 's backing band the Hawks. On August 28 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience still annoyed by Dylan's electric sound, though their reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more favorable.
  
  From September 24, 1965, in Austin, Texas, Dylan toured the US and Canada for six months, backed by the five musicians from the Hawks who became known as the Band. While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences, their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston persuaded Dylan to record in Nashville in February 1966, and surrounded him with top-notch session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came from New York City to play on the sessions. The Nashville sessions produced the double album Blonde on Blonde (1966), featuring what Dylan called "that thin wild mercury sound". Kooper described it as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical worlds of Nashville and of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.
  
  On November 22, 1965, Dylan quietly married 25-year-old former model Sara Lownds. Some of Dylan's friends, including Ramblin' Jack Elliott, say that, immediately after the event, Dylan denied he was married. Writer Nora Ephron made the news public in the New York Post in February 1966 with the headline "Hush! Bob Dylan is wed".
  
  Dylan toured Australia and Europe in April and May 1966. Each show was split in two. Dylan performed solo during the first half, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. In the second, backed by the Hawks, he played electrically amplified music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slow clapped. The tour culminated in a raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England on May 17, 1966. A recording of this concert was released in 1998: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966. At the climax of the evening, a member of the audience, angered by Dylan's electric backing, shouted: " Judas !" to which Dylan responded, "I don't believe you... You're a liar!" Dylan turned to his band and said, "Play it fucking loud!"
  
  During his 1966 tour, Dylan was described as exhausted and acting "as if on a death trip". D. A. Pennebaker, the filmmaker accompanying the tour, described Dylan as "taking a lot of amphetamine and who-knows-what-else". In a 1969 interview with Jann Wenner, Dylan said, "I was on the road for almost five years. It wore me down. I was on drugs, a lot of things... just to keep going, you know?"
  
  On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle, a Triumph Tiger 100, near his home in Woodstock, New York. Dylan said he broke several vertebrae in his neck. The circumstances of the accident are unclear since no ambulance was called to the scene and Dylan was not hospitalized. Dylan's biographers have written that the crash offered him the chance to escape the pressures around him. Dylan concurred: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race." He made very few public appearances, and did not tour again for almost eight years.
  
  Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began to edit D. A. Pennebaker's film of his 1966 tour. A rough cut was shown to ABC Television, but they rejected it as incomprehensible to mainstream audiences. The film, titled Eat the Document on bootleg copies, has since been screened at a few film festivals. Secluded from public gaze, Dylan recorded over 100 songs during 1967 at his Woodstock home and in the basement of the Hawks' nearby house, " Big Pink ". These songs were initially offered as demos for other artists to record and were hits for Julie Driscoll, the Byrds, and Manfred Mann. The public heard these recordings when Great White Wonder, the first " bootleg recording ", appeared in West Coast shops in July 1969, containing Dylan material recorded in Minneapolis in 1961 and seven Basement Tapes songs. This record gave birth to a minor industry in the illicit release of recordings by Dylan and other major rock artists. Columbia released a Basement selection in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.
  
  In late 1967, Dylan returned to studio recording in Nashville, accompanied by Charlie McCoy on bass, Kenny Buttrey on drums and Pete Drake on steel guitar. The result was John Wesley Harding, a record of short songs thematically drawing on the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, was a departure from Dylan's previous work. It included " All Along the Watchtower ", famously covered by Jimi Hendrix. Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a memorial concert held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, where he was backed by the Band.
  
  Nashville Skyline (1969), featured Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash and the single " Lay Lady Lay ". Variety wrote, "Dylan is definitely doing something that can be called singing. Somehow he has managed to add an octave to his range." During one recording session, Dylan and Cash recorded a series of duets, but only their version of " Girl from the North Country " appeared on the album. The album influenced the nascent genre of country rock.
  
  In 1969, Dylan was asked to write songs for Scratch, Archibald MacLeish 's musical adaptation of " The Devil and Daniel Webster ". MacLeish initially praised Dylan's contributions, writing to him "Those songs of yours have been haunting me—and exciting me," but creative differences led to Dylan leaving the project. Some of the songs were later recorded by Dylan in a revised form. In May 1969, Dylan appeared on the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show where he sang a duet with Cash on "Girl from the North Country" and played solos of "Living the Blues" and " I Threw It All Away ". Dylan traveled to England to top the bill at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1969, after rejecting overtures to appear at the Woodstock Festival closer to home.
  
  Dylan's late March 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, was another leap, featuring his first recordings with electric instruments, under producer Tom Wilson's guidance. The first single, " Subterranean Homesick Blues ", owed much to Chuck Berry 's " Too Much Monkey Business ", its free-association lyrics described as harking back to the energy of beat poetry and as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. The song was provided with an early music video, which opened D. A. Pennebaker 's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 British tour, Dont Look Back. Instead of miming, Dylan illustrated the lyrics by throwing cue cards containing key words on the ground. Pennebaker said the sequence was Dylan's idea, and it has been imitated in music videos and advertisements.
  
  The second side of Bringing It All Back Home contained four long songs on which Dylan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. " Mr. Tambourine Man " became one of his best-known songs when The Byrds recorded an electric version, which reached number one in the US and UK. " It's All Over Now, Baby Blue " and " It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) " were two of Dylan's most important compositions.
  
  In 1965, headlining the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since high school with a pickup group featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Al Kooper on organ. Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 he was met with cheering and booing and left the stage after three songs. One version has it that the boos were from folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. Murray Lerner, who filmed the performance, said: "I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric." An alternative account claims audience members were upset by poor sound and a short set.
  
  Dylan's performance provoked a hostile response from the folk music establishment. In the September issue of Sing Out!, Ewan MacColl wrote: "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time.... 'But what of Bobby Dylan?' scream the outraged teenagers.... Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel". On July 29, four days after Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording " Positively 4th Street ". The lyrics contained images of vengeance and paranoia, and have been interpreted as Dylan's put-down of former friends from the folk community he had known in clubs along West 4th Street.
  
  Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde
  
  In July 1965, Dylan's six-minute single " Like a Rolling Stone " peaked at number two in the US chart. In 2004 and in 2011, Rolling Stone listed it as number one on " The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time ". Bruce Springsteen recalled first hearing the song: "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." The song opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, named after the road that led from Dylan's Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans. The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar and Al Kooper's organ riffs. " Desolation Row ", backed by acoustic guitar and understated bass, offers the sole exception, with Dylan alluding to figures in Western culture in a song described by Andy Gill as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of celebrated characters". Poet Philip Larkin, who also reviewed jazz for The Daily Telegraph, wrote "I'm afraid I poached Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded."
  
  In support of the album, Dylan was booked for two US concerts with Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, former members of Ronnie Hawkins 's backing band the Hawks. On August 28 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience still annoyed by Dylan's electric sound, though their reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more favorable.
  
  From September 24, 1965, in Austin, Texas, Dylan toured the US and Canada for six months, backed by the five musicians from the Hawks who became known as the Band. While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences, their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston persuaded Dylan to record in Nashville in February 1966, and surrounded him with top-notch session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came from New York City to play on the sessions. The Nashville sessions produced the double album Blonde on Blonde (1966), featuring what Dylan called "that thin wild mercury sound". Kooper described it as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical worlds of Nashville and of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.
  
  On November 22, 1965, Dylan quietly married 25-year-old former model Sara Lownds. Some of Dylan's friends, including Ramblin' Jack Elliott, say that, immediately after the event, Dylan denied he was married. Writer Nora Ephron made the news public in the New York Post in February 1966 with the headline "Hush! Bob Dylan is wed".
  
  Dylan toured Australia and Europe in April and May 1966. Each show was split in two. Dylan performed solo during the first half, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. In the second, backed by the Hawks, he played electrically amplified music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slow clapped. The tour culminated in a raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England on May 17, 1966. A recording of this concert was released in 1998: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966. At the climax of the evening, a member of the audience, angered by Dylan's electric backing, shouted: " Judas !" to which Dylan responded, "I don't believe you... You're a liar!" Dylan turned to his band and said, "Play it fucking loud!"
  
  During his 1966 tour, Dylan was described as exhausted and acting "as if on a death trip". D. A. Pennebaker, the filmmaker accompanying the tour, described Dylan as "taking a lot of amphetamine and who-knows-what-else". In a 1969 interview with Jann Wenner, Dylan said, "I was on the road for almost five years. It wore me down. I was on drugs, a lot of things... just to keep going, you know?"
  
  On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle, a Triumph Tiger 100, near his home in Woodstock, New York. Dylan said he broke several vertebrae in his neck. The circumstances of the accident are unclear since no ambulance was called to the scene and Dylan was not hospitalized. Dylan's biographers have written that the crash offered him the chance to escape the pressures around him. Dylan concurred: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race." He made very few public appearances, and did not tour again for almost eight years.
  
  Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began to edit D. A. Pennebaker's film of his 1966 tour. A rough cut was shown to ABC Television, but they rejected it as incomprehensible to mainstream audiences. The film, titled Eat the Document on bootleg copies, has since been screened at a few film festivals. Secluded from public gaze, Dylan recorded over 100 songs during 1967 at his Woodstock home and in the basement of the Hawks' nearby house, " Big Pink ". These songs were initially offered as demos for other artists to record and were hits for Julie Driscoll, the Byrds, and Manfred Mann. The public heard these recordings when Great White Wonder, the first " bootleg recording ", appeared in West Coast shops in July 1969, containing Dylan material recorded in Minneapolis in 1961 and seven Basement Tapes songs. This record gave birth to a minor industry in the illicit release of recordings by Dylan and other major rock artists. Columbia released a Basement selection in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.
  
  In late 1967, Dylan returned to studio recording in Nashville, accompanied by Charlie McCoy on bass, Kenny Buttrey on drums and Pete Drake on steel guitar. The result was John Wesley Harding, a record of short songs thematically drawing on the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, was a departure from Dylan's previous work. It included " All Along the Watchtower ", famously covered by Jimi Hendrix. Woody Guthrie died in October 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a memorial concert held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, where he was backed by the Band.
  
  Nashville Skyline (1969), featured Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash and the single " Lay Lady Lay ". Variety wrote, "Dylan is definitely doing something that can be called singing. Somehow he has managed to add an octave to his range." During one recording session, Dylan and Cash recorded a series of duets, but only their version of " Girl from the North Country " appeared on the album. The album influenced the nascent genre of country rock.
  
  In 1969, Dylan was asked to write songs for Scratch, Archibald MacLeish 's musical adaptation of " The Devil and Daniel Webster ". MacLeish initially praised Dylan's contributions, writing to him "Those songs of yours have been haunting me—and exciting me," but creative differences led to Dylan leaving the project. Some of the songs were later recorded by Dylan in a revised form. In May 1969, Dylan appeared on the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show where he sang a duet with Cash on "Girl from the North Country" and played solos of "Living the Blues" and " I Threw It All Away ". Dylan traveled to England to top the bill at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1969, after rejecting overtures to appear at the Woodstock Festival closer to home.