Dylan Goes Electric! Interview with Elijah Wald — a complete unknown

Peter Stone Brown interviews author Elijah Wald, whose book would inspire Jay Cocks and James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown’

PSB: What made you want to take the subject on know that very few accounts of this were the same? 

EW: You know that was actually what got me fascinated. What happened was that I had just been, I had read Bruce Jackson. Bruce Jackson wrote a book called The Story Is True, about folklore and myths. And he treated the whole story of Dylan getting booed at Newport as a myth. And I ended up in an online list of music historians mentioning that, and a bunch of people said, “No, he did get booed.” And we went back and forth for a while and this happened to be in February a couple of years ago just as people were calling me for interviews about The Beatles’ arrival fifty years earlier. And it just hit me if I could sort out a version of the Dylan story that was interesting in time for the 50th anniversary, I could sell a book. And I’m a freelance writer, I like to sell books. So that was really the spur. And then, as I guess always happens, once I started researching it, I just got fascinated…