I haven't seen the movie yet, but I will. What bothers me, though, is that it repeats the lie that Pete Seeger was implacably opposed to anybody playing electric guitars at folk festivals. He had no such feelings- he didn't play electric instruments, but he'd been fine with electric blues bands led by electric guitarists, which had been playing at Newport and other folk festivals for years.
His sole issue was the murky quality of the sound system the festival was using, and the way the system when electric guitars and keyboards were added to it, were making Dylan's lyrics nearly unintelligible- which was a personal issue for Pete, because his father, Charles Seeger(the composer and academic who had helped found the academic discipline of "ethnomusicology") was in the audience, and had been losing his hearing for years.
Pete did TELL the sound board guy, when the guy told him Dylan WANTED the sound mix to be like that, that he felt like taking an axe and cutting the cables, but he would never have been unhinged enough to actually do that.
And Pete, as a reticent New England "Yankee" type, would never have tried to emotionally blackmail Dylan by saying that if he went electric, it would undermine Pete's "life work'.
Pete Seeger had his flaws- he SHOULD have broken with the Communist Party earlier than he did- though his lifetime radicalism remained justified and he was also fully justified in refusing to "Name names" to the House Committee on Un-American Activities"(HUAC), especially since doing so was pointless and involved destroying good, honorable people's lives for no reason- but he was never the "folk Nazi" the movie depicts him as, and since Dylan closely cooperated with the producers, it is disturbing that, even in his later years, he was invested in keeping one of the worse slanders anybody ever spread about Pete Seeger alive, at a time when Pete has been dead for over 30 years and cannot defend himself from the slander.
You could have set the record straight, once and for all, Bob- instead, you helped keep a despicable lie alive and you had no reason to do so.
