It was the entertainment coup of the decade: the most celebrated American performer of the 60s brought back to the stage in a small island off the English coast after he’d spent three years living as a recluse.
Printer turned promoter Ray Foulk had set up the first IOW festival to raise money for a local swimming pool. Attempting to get Dylan to headline the sequel seemed outlandish. But, unbeknown to Foulk, a scheduled three-day festival in his Woodstock backyard made it imperative that the increasingly besieged yet stir-crazy Bob find an escape route.
The delightful tale told here, including the presence at the festival of three Beatles (bringing smokeables for the bard) and the very English community togetherness that makes it happen has all the elements of a rock’n’roll Ealing comedy.
Incident- and anecdote-filled (Tom Paxton’s memory of John Lennon’s interface with an angry fan is particularly revealing), the book elegantly captures a watershed moment in Dylan’s career and also in rock history./o:p
