ABSTRACT
Playing rock and roll at the Newport Folk Festival was not outrageous in 2002. After all, Dylan had already shocked Newport in 1965, and everything he was planning for his comeback after thirty-seven years would have certainly paled by comparison. It turned out that he had not planned anything special, or maybe considering Newport 2002 just another show in the long saga of his Never Ending Tour was itself something to be talked about. Yet, he was able to get the ghost of electricity back for a brief moment. It happened during the encores, when Dylan and his band ventured into the opening chords of Buddy Holly’s last great song, “Not Fade Away,” a song that is the epitome of pre-bubblegum rock and roll, a phase that ended symbolically when Holly died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959. Nearly forty years later, when Dylan received three Grammy awards for his acclaimed Time Out of Mind (1997), Holly was still a haunting presence:
I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him … and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was—I don’t know how or why—but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.
