Bob Dylan played what people wanted to hear. True or false.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/855-dylan-goes-electric-newpo...
"In 1965 Dylan was only 24 years old, but he had already gone through a lot of changes and been criticized and attacked for each of them. His first performances as a teenage rock'n'roller were met with laughter and jeers. When he turned to folk music, the high school girlfriend who had shared his early passions was troubled, asking why he'd given up "the hard blues stuff." When he turned from singing traditional folk songs to writing his own material, old supporters accused him of becoming "melodramatic and maudlin"-one, stumbling across a typescript of "The Times They Are a-Changin", demanded, "What is this shit?" When he turned from sharp topical lyrics to introspective poetic explorations, followers who had hailed him as the voice of a generation lamented that he was abandoning his true path and "wasting our precious time." When he added an electric band, he was booed around the world by anguished devotees, one famously shouting "Judas!""
https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/robbie-robertson...
"We got booed all over North America, Australia, Europe, and people were saying this isn't working and we kept on and Bob didn't budge. We got to a place where we would listen to these tapes and say, "You know what? They're wrong. And we're right." Eight years later, we do a tour, the [1974] Dylan/Band tour, we play the same way, same intensity and everybody says, "Wow, that was amazing." The world came around - we didn't change a note.
The obvious thing we learned - that everybody learned - was there was a new way of songwriting. There was a much more colourful, descriptive, humorous, outrageous thrill ride of wordplay. We hadn't seen this before - this was breaking some big rules. I remember saying to Bob one time, "Maybe there's too many verses in this" (laughs), and he said, "There probably are, but that's what I was thinking about when I wrote it." His spirit was on fire, and he was knocking down the boundaries that had been built up around music. It excited me to be part of this revolution."
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/11/arts/music-when-dylan-s-g...
"BUT Dylan was too smart and too stubborn to let hidebound listeners prevent him from making the best music of his career.
The hecklers were wrong about the music, as most of them would probably admit now."
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-goes-electric-newp...
"The New York Times' Robert Shelton, whose 1961 review of a Dylan concert is considered to have launched Dylan's career, wrote, "The young audience's displeasure was manifested at the end of most of the numbers, by booing and shouts of `we want the old Dylan.' The young star plowed valiantly on, with the sort of coolness he has rarely displayed on stage."
Calling the crowd "rude," "immature" and "noisy young boors," [Dylan] couldn't help note the positive reaction given to "Like a Rolling Stone," which by now was a hit. "Evidently the hostility extends only toward things with which they aren't familiar," he sneered.
[Hostility toward things with which they arent't familiar. Like HN commenters' hostility toward array languages.]
This song-and-dance with his audience continued over the course of the next year."
http://www.goldminemag.com:80/article/bob-dylan-gets-religio...
"The show opened with as excitedly noisy a crowd as Dylan had ever faced, 2,300 souls jammed in, and all with their own loudly exclaimed wish list of favorite Dylan songs and expectations. Fourteen years earlier, you could imagine the 1965 Newport Folk Festival buzzing with similar anticipation and excitement ... and reacting with similar bemusement as the show took shape. Only it was not the sacrilegious explosion of electricity that left the audience reeling in its seats.
As he led the band through a 19-song set, Dylan did not play a single song that predated his religious conversion. Even the encore was uncharted territory. "Blessed Is The Name Of The Lord" and "Pressing On" were both new songs, and though the former rocked and the latter soothed, the crowd was in no mood to be impressed.
Afterwards, Dylan congratulated himself on not playing a single song he'd ever performed onstage in the past, and when the subject of his fans' expectations was broached, he simply shrugged. "Oh, yeah, that's right. They want the old stuff."
Pittsburgh's KDKA TV station even filmed the fans' exodus, with one disgruntled ticket-holder snapping to the cameraman, "He stinks. He's the worst. He's bad. It's a waste."
Dylan's audience was furious. Shocked. Cheated. It was Newport all over again, or maybe the Manchester Free Trade Hall, later on in that so-controversial 1965 tour, when the bootlegger's tape was suddenly interrupted by a bellow of "Judas!""