Frank Kogan

Edd, it's great to hear from you, and these comments of yours are terrific. What I hope to do someday is paste them, and some of my own ideas, into a post of its own, adding my own thoughts about "Maggie's Farm." (I notice that in the Newport performance Dylan and the Butterfield Band backup drop the brief chord changes in bars 14 and 15 to turn the song almost into a one-chord groove — I assume this was owing to the personnel and performance being very ad hoc.)

In case it wasn't clear (though I'm guessing it was), I don't think "rockism" and "rockist" are usable terms; I certainly don't think they can be rescued from the vacuous, ponderous usage of the modern-day antirockists; the only reason I was using those words, in the post above and in the two Las Vegas Weekly pieces I linked, was to try to get at what was going on with the antirockists, what germs of potentially being interesting are in them, were they to drop the words and choose to be less vacuous and ponderous (and what was interesting about less ponderous predecessors like Pete Wylie and ilk).

Obv. one can call the people booing Dylan at Newport "rockists," and Jerome Arnold for not listening to the radio. (Btw, I'm not listening to radio all that much this month, or streaming a lot that's modern.) But one can equally call Dylan "rockist" for not wanting to work on Maggie's farm, or — in "Like A Rolling Stone" — for presenting pimps and whores and derelicts as more real than diplomats and limousines and princesses. But a better way of thinking about Newport 1965 is that we have a whole bunch of competing romanticisms, every one (and everyone) with good reasons, and I'm kind of on everyone's side in this fight, the booers and the (pop)rockers and the flailing blues/post-blues guitarist. And I think I'd be on the various sides of their modern-day equivalents, in K-pop or EDM or wherever.