Timothée Chalamet has been spotted the past few months filming a Bob Dylan biopic surprisingly based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties (2015), an unexpectedly scholarly source for a film that will cover Dylan’s emergence from 1961-65. Wald provides two hundred pages before the reader even arrives at the Newport Folk Festival of July 1965 with its booing and kvetching. There are then seventy-eight pages on the 1965 Rhode Island music festival before the book continues to a consideration of its aftermath. It is a serious examination of factions and tensions at the Newport Folk Festivals of the mid-Sixties; tensions revealing a psychological flaw in taste mongers who lack the creative means to express themselves.

 

The news reports of Chalamet’s appearance in the upcoming film, directed by Ford v Ferrari’s James Mangold, along with accompanying photos of a New Jersey street transformed to midtown Manhattan circa 1961 replete with late-Fifties model cars led me to rewatch Murray Lerner’s Festival (1967), which includes footage of Newport Folk Festivals from 1963-1966. Both the film and Wald’s book got me thinking that these kids in Greenwich Village and on college campuses across the country who were on the ground floor of the counterculture that grew into the Woodstock generation were largely…music nerds.

 

This was a generation about to take to the road or go to war in Vietnam, while buttoned up old folks and strait-laced contemporaries were back home. The promise of freedom was in being footloose: “Standing on the corner,” Lou Reed inflects in Velvet Underground’s 1969 song “Sweet Jane,” “Suitcase in my hand / Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest / And me, I’m in a rock & roll band.” Rock & roll, the backbeat, and life on the road awaited. The folk back home were corseted. But before apocalypse and inhibition ran wild, the music nerds were studying 78s, 45s, and LPs of ballads, barn dances, and blues, woodshedding on weekdays and meeting at Washington Square Park on Sundays in order to share tunes and listen to each other play.

 

Not every nerd keeps a pocket protector, wears coke bottle glasses, or sports an awkward combover. Yet all are consumed by a zealous enthusiasm – or passion – for an art form, hobby, or other specialty manifesting with such intensity that it contributes to the kind of hallmark social awkwardness sometimes on display in Festival or other films from the era that the new Chalamet picture covers.

 

Some quality of Dylan’s music brings out the nerd more than that of other musicians. Perhaps it is Dylan’s roots in the folk music revival – an intellectual movement described by Wald in his book – or the cerebral quality of his lyrics. Whatever it might be, when Dylan began touring with a drummer and amplifying instruments so that they would not be drowned out by the drummer, a segment of his audience let loose and booed.

 

In Eat the Document (1972), some fans who attended one of Dylan’s two May 1966 Royal Albert Hall concerts in London explained their dissatisfaction and justification for booing Dylan and his band:

 

“Terrible in the second half.”

 

“Terrible.”

 

“He’s a bit overamplified. We couldn’t hear him in the second half. The more he can do the better, ya know?”

 

“It was a bloody disgrace! He wants shooting! He’s a traitor.”

 

“He’s very good except I wish he’d left that group in America, and lot of other people do to.”

 

 “He shouldn’t have had the group.”

 

“With these seven people [sic] they made such a din, there were twenty minutes in the middle where you couldn’t hear one single word he was saying.”


“He might think that it’s gimmicky, but I think it was rubbish and I’m not going to another one of his.”

 

And what is perhaps peak nerd rage, this irate fan whose words were later immortalized in Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There (2007): “You know he’s always pretending that he was a person in the gutter, well if that’s how he walks in the gutter, I’d rather walk with my head up in the gutter rather than like he is crawling through the bloody gutter, just making a pile out of it. Yeah, he’s making a pile out of people and pretends he’s poor. You know. Yeah, that’s how I feel.”

 

The “pile” that Dylan is making is presumably the pile or money that his fan thinks he is making by commercializing and exploiting the proletariat roots of folk music.

 

To be fair, some of the attendees quoted had positive things to say about the show (“Absolutely fantastic” and “Yeah, it’s great, man” are a couple such comments), but the general tenor is negative. The comments erupt passionately, suggesting that they are birthed not only by a sense of betrayal (it was while on this tour in Manchester that one audience member famously denounced Dylan as “Judas”) but also by the audience's impotence. The folk music scene may have been marked early-on by Sundays at Washington Square Park and concerts on tiny coffee house stages where, as John Cohen remarks in No Direction Home (2005), “it was never clear that this was the audience and this was the singer because maybe half the audience if they had their druthers they'd be up on the stage singing as well," but by the time the performances hit concert halls and theaters, it was clear who was the performer and who was the audience. And the audience in a proscenium style theater can exercise little agency other than to applaud or boo.

 

Commensurate with the amplified size of Dylan’s stage was his transformation into pop idol. No doubt the Chalamet film will depict this. A couple of astute interviewees in Festival, presumably from the 1965 Newport Festival, point out precisely this transformation:

 

“People start to idolize these artists, you know, and once that happens [. . .] masses come over and they all just sit there like ‘It's Bob Dylan! it's really him!’ Everybody around here wants to be a bum and to be famous for it.”

 

Another fan identifies the point when Dylan becomes hip no longer: “When he gets to be, you know - ‘there he is - there's a man – God!’, who needs him anymore? He's accepted and he’s a part of your establishment and forget him.”

 

Festival reveals tension between the dilletantes of traditional music who disdained idolization and the fawning, starstruck fans of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

 

The creators themselves – those on the front lines, on stages and in print sharing their thoughts with the world – tend to develop sympathy for other creators. Not so much the nerds, who obsess and tend to be more strident in their loyalties because they lack the art to express more complicated feelings and – perish the thought – actual ideas.

 

Dylan’s growth into the musician that friend Dave Van Ronk would later describe as “the most talented of us” included a refutation of idolatry as his idols grew to become colleagues:


Woody Guthrie was my last idol

he was the last idol

because he was the first idol

I'd ever met

face t' face

that men are men

shatterin' even himself

as an idol

an' that men have reasons

for what they do

an' what they say

an' every action can be questioned [. . .]

the unseen idols create the fear

an' trample hope when busted

Woody never made me fear

and he didn't trample any hopes

for he just carried a book of Man

an' gave it t' me t' read awhile

an' from it I learned my greatest lesson

you ask "how does it feel t' be an idol?"

it'd be silly of me t' answer, wouldn't it . . .?


I hope that Chalamet’s performance in the new film will convincingly portray Dylan’s own progression from idolizer to colleague, even as he becomes an idol to others and asks them, “how does it feel?”


In the early Sixties, the Newport Folk Festival became the site where the seams between traditional musicians, folk music scholars, urbane collegiate musicians and music fans introduced to folk music on theater stages, and pop music fans frayed. The hostility that broke out the evening of July 25, 1965 when Dylan was booed for performing his new songs with a band – by all accounts an ear-splittingly loud band – created a divide between the fans of rock & roll who embraced Dylan’s sound and the fans of traditional music who experienced it as a crass concession to commercial tastes. The folk community and folk revival would never again be the same. Other bastions of purity – even Joan Baez – went on to record with bands with a backbeat. Soon what constituted “folk” metamorphosed from traditional music originating within indigenous communities, prison gangs, sailing crews, or work camps to include confessional lyrics sung by singers leaning toward acoustic arrangements.

 

The booing at Newport was largely from a zealous crowd consumed with its own definitions of how folk music should be represented. Yes, some were reacting to the painful volume of the sound system, but most were reacting to Dylan’s embrace of rhythm and blues. The gatekeepers were reacting to their gates having been thrown open by Dylan, a young man who Alan Lomax would a few days later describe in a letter with “That boy is really destructive” and about whom Pete Seeger would lament to his father the morning after the concert, “I thought he had so much promise.”

 

The gatekeepers were also reacting to their own impotence, their own inability to influence prevalent tastes and to express themselves. Lomax was an archivist and scholar, not an artist. Seeger was indubitably an artist but was helpless to control the folk movement, shape it to his imaginings, and prevent it from embracing rock. Certainly, he could not control “that boy” Dylan, who was determined to follow his muse into the jingle jangle morning of a new era. The audience was even more impotent; vocal demonstrations of pique seemed to many to be their sole outlet. They were nerds raging.

 

This year, 2024, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), a game synonymous with nerdom.

 

Just as the folk music nerds in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village channeled their enthusiasms into propulsive rhythms that brought guitar pickers and banjo pluckers together, the role-players channeled their interests in fantasy, science fiction, and gaming into collaborative stories. Music and storytelling, two of the most primeval arts; both born and nurtured around the heat, light, and protection of a tribe’s newly stolen fire.

 

I have often thought of role-playing games as vehicles through which the folk art of oral storytelling (orature) was reintroduced to a heavily commercialized mid-twentieth century American culture. Watching Festival and observing within it the same type of person that one can see hanging around hobby stores and role-playing conventions, I am even more convinced that though obsessions might migrate, personalities remain the same.


There are worlds of difference between ragtime picker, balladeer, and heartfelt wailer Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) (whose autobiography – posthumously finished by Elijah Wald – would go on to become the inspiration for Inside Llewyn Davis) and wargamer, game developer, and writer E. Gary Gygax (1938-2008), but also similarities. Both let their enthusiasms run wild within them. Both pursued their passions even when unemployed and living like paupers; what was diversion for many – music, gaming, storytelling – was crucial and inseparable from their way of life; they each found creative outlets for those passions.


Role-player Gary Gygax and Musician Dave Van Ronk in the 1960s. 


They became stewards of taste, so immersed in their fields that they knew what was authentic and what rang hollow. Both wore their knowledge like badges signifying credibility, but both were creators who knew the highs and lows of riding inspiration through whimsical and unexpected channels. Both respected others of their kind who were similarly navigating the challenges and difficulties of the creative life. After all, “Anyone who ever played a part,” “Sweet Jane” continues, “wouldn't turn around and hate it.”

 

The evanescent leavings of musicians are the harmony of the heavens and the rhythms of the earth, the “heavenly wine and roses” that whisper throughout “Sweet Jane.” The remnants that role-players leave behind are different: they are the myth-like stories that enchant and engross. Others may come along and refine their art, but it is the pioneers who first hew the image from the stone.

 

There are those who will obsess over details, strive to curate taste and guard the gate, but who do not create. Or if they create, they still, for whatever reason, keep themselves within the confines of categories, definitions, and genres that are reassuring and comfortable. It’s a big world out there. It’s easy to slip and fall into the mud when one strays outside the lines. When such people are professional, we call these clean freaks “scholars.” When they are amateurs: “nerds.”

 

Scholars and nerds develop a social hierarchy within their communities based on their knowledge of obscure quality artists, thinkers, and writers. They cultivate canons of taste. Good taste is a building block of art. As a building block, taste is recuperated into a creative preserve; without art, a sense of taste becomes a mere signifier for one’s hipness or knowledge, it can be used to belittle and debase others. The artist, though, goes deep and develops a means of communicating his or her good taste to others who do not yet know.

 

Few artists knew as deeply as Lonnie Johnson (1899-1970). Johnson’s storied career had him recording with Louis Armstrong as one of his “Hot Fives” in 1927, touring with Bessie Smith, and influencing Robert Johnson before achieving a celebrated solo career through the Sixties. He recorded “To Do This You Got to Know How” in 1926. Listen to it. Now. That is the sound of an artist transforming influences and good taste into something revelatory. Decades later, Johnson would teach Dylan a style of guitar playing “based on an odd- instead of even-number system” that would become so vital to Dylan in the 1980s that he devoted more than five pages of his memoir Chronicles: Volume One (2004) to learning it from Johnson. Johnson communicated a knowledge to Dylan that permitted him to transform his work: “For me, this style would be most advantageous, like a delicate design that would arrange the structure of whatever piece I was performing. The listener would recognize and feel the dynamics immediately.” Responding to the dynamics, what the audience would then do becomes a mystery. Some will generate their own outlets and creative channels; some will categorize and gatekeep, stoking a potential rage that might not erupt for years.

 

Others simply are not built to go deep: those uninterested in unearthing connections and sympathies. People content to play on the surface. Some remain like this because their passion is service, helping others; they function as social adhesive, binding people and groups together. Others who remain on the surface can stalk society like social vampires: taking what they want, sucking others dry, manipulating situations to get what they want…usually a result that flatters a blood-hungry ego.

 

And boy do they like to boo.


Or, as the Velvets describe them in “Sweet Jane,” “There’s even some evil mothers / Well, they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt.”

 

One of the laziest and nastiest uses of one’s time is to be one of those who stay on the surface, but who gatekeep and cultivate taste by throwing dirt. If you’re gonna be consumed with value judgments, at least delve deep and try to understand what a thing means.

 

In this fiftieth year of D&D, one might think that gamers, hobbyists, and storytellers would be celebrating this rarest of gaming phenomena: the birth of an entirely new gaming genre, the tabletop role-playing game. The role-playing game is described and marketed as a game, and it is, but the game system dissolves into an excuse for riotous storytelling. Further, it is democratized storytelling inviting everyone at the table to participate. Developing from the wargame (the most important of which, the Prussian Kriegsspiel, celebrates its bicentennial this year), the tabletop role-playing game surpasses the wargame in importance because it transcends being a mere game. The role-playing game provides rules that integrate children’s make-believe with orature while also enabling all players to contribute. Its appeal is global, but it is as intrinsically an American art form as jazz or bluegrass: it is democratic, improvisational, and it is of the moment. Classic storytelling tropes thrive within it, but it succeeds to the extent that those tropes seem to be utterly new for the players and also to the extent that the fictional environment fully engrosses them.

 

Online, where role-players congregate as much or perhaps more than other hobbyists, instead of cheering the fiftieth anniversary of a new gaming genre, most contributors gripe and complain about all manner of minutiae in what might best be described with brevity as “nerd rage.” The online complaining about D&D drove Youtuber Blaine Simple to recently lament, in “a love letter to the tabletop gaming community” that the community has become obsessed with airing “grievances” and role-players have “become so filled with negativity for D&D over the last two years that they spread it into any conversation about it” as most of their conversations are written “under a lens of malice as the entire community becomes more passive aggressive" ("Getting Over the D&D Community").


Much of the malice is directed at Wizards of the Coast, who purchased D&D in 1997, and who despite having perhaps one of the most lenient copyright policies – permitting other businesses and competitors to publish books using material intrinsic to D&D, contributing to an ecosystem wherein others not working for Wizards of the Coast are able to build careers around and profit from D&D – received the scorched-earth version of nerd rage when the company flirted (but did not follow through) with revising the open license that had facilitated this liberal treatment of its intellectual property for two decades.


Online, the dirt throwing of the tabletop role-playing community is protected by an anonymity even greater than the anonymity of Newport’s booing multitude; it is from behind aliases and fake names on forums and discussion groups and in the comments sections of articles, Youtube videos, and sundry.

 

It’s a real drag to read, of course, but it appears to be useful in activating humanity’s drama gene, stimulating anger from other responders – or bots – or whoever is operating behind these online aliases. Many have commented how the Google search algorithms merely exacerbate the problem, raising controversial clickbait to the surface through its ability to stir up these kinds of responses. Most online comments are very judgmental in nature, especially on X where everyone has an opinion. It strikes me as funny how, when a young Christian decades ago, I would hear from others how off-putting the (sometimes rightly pointed out and sometimes not-so-rightly) “judgy” quality of Christian discourse was. It was even sometimes described as hypocritical, with “Judge not” often being cited. Somehow, thirty years later, the children of these same accusers are quite happy to judge others, often – and this is my principal objection – without acknowledging the meaning or intended audience first.

 

As a friend of mine once said, “If you’re gonna read a letter, be sure to first check to whom it’s addressed.” Not every utterance applies to all; it’s worthwhile to first understand a thing before weighing in on its value.


It is natural for people to have opinions. In fact, quick split-second value-based decision-making is an important survival mechanism. An instinctive and sudden negative reaction to snakes or spiders can save a life otherwise at risk of being poisoned.


However, a quick rush to judgment can also create all manner of problems if one is interested in communicating with others. If, though, one’s interest is in establishing credibility with a particular group, then those with dog ears to hear will welcome the person to their pack.


“I hate it” or “it sucks” might help align one with a particular faction, but such comments do not contribute actual ideas to a conversation. At best, gut reactions like these can blow little details out of proportion or can obscure a correct understanding of the big picture. At worst, denunciations like these bully others with what Blaine Simple describes as “everything [being] now layered in aggression [as] fans belittled each other.” This is the worst of nerd rage: agitating mobs of “evil mothers” throwing dirt and shouting down ideas, all in an effort to either attack or protect whatever cultural hegemony is at stake. But these “boos” from the peanut gallery are idea-less opinions. They originate from people content to have such reactions represent themselves to others. It is a bit embarrassing for them, really. But such are the consequences of free will and uncensored discourse.


It can be challenging to try to understand what someone else has said or written and sometimes it takes some thought in order to figure out the intended audience. But these are important skills in the art of communication; they do require some social grace and tact…not usually the skills of the nerd.


Nevertheless, these skills can be learned. Principally, it takes heart and a desire to be kind. And, often, that comes about through walking a long, hard road with commensurate bumps and bruises. Cue the Velvets: “Anyone who ever had a heart / Wouldn’t turn around and break it.”


When it comes to the meaning of the role-playing game genre, what strikes me as most relevant in this the fiftieth anniversary of its birth, is its contribution to an awakening of collaborative, improvisational storytelling in America. While I was fortunate to meet the co-creators of D&D, Gygax and Dave Arneson (1947-2009), it was through befriending Erick Wujick (1951-2008) while on the campus of Wayne State University in the Nineties, that I became confirmed that role-playing games are more than games. I know this because Wujick pioneered a system for guiding improvisational play that removed the gaming staple of dice rolling from the role-playing game table: Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (1991), which was based on the novels of Roger Zelazny (1937-1995). Wujick’s emphasis was on traditional storytelling elements of characterization, conflict, dialogue, setting, and theme, but in the non-traditional mode of improvisation, a mode with which Americans have a gift.


Erick Wujick.

Photo licensed through Creative Commons and made available through CC BY-SA.


This gift, though, becomes imperiled in a culture that encourages a passive approach to entertainment. A culture that more frequently encourages youth to pay rather than play. In contrast to this, Wujick frequently spoke of how the typical role-player is not merely literate, but hyperliterate (Wujick documented his own copious reading habits in a bibliography that encompassed decades of his reading). The typical role-player is not passive but active. In theory, one would think that having an outlet for play would render them less susceptible to nerd rage.


But, as commercialization increasingly encroaches into the American psyche, as Americans increasingly assume that problems can be solved with a purchase, the focus of conversation becomes less about the innovations of role-playing itself and more about the corporate steward of a product: Wizards of the Coast (owned by Hasbro since 1999).


This was not my experience when I was introduced to tabletop role-playing. Rather, role-playing for me was a means to learn how to tell a story, to sharpen my organizational and social skills, to encourage me to read and pursue learning, and to fashion memories with friends, a couple of which – Josh Dever (1974-1992) and Wesley Simmons (1971-2009) – have themselves transitioned to memory. My parents may not have understood this, but they got it. Their son was participating in an art form that was so much more sophisticated than that of most adult modes of socializing. Hearing from others who were initially prevented by their parents from storytelling in this way, I am thankful that my parents exhibited the restraint to not get in the way.


Can a generation relate to role-playing in this way if it cannot even conceive of the hobby in non-commercial terms? This is a generation that can’t even relate to “sellout” being pejorative. In the Sixties, Dylan was booed for being a sellout (he wasn’t); today, Youtubers willingly shill wares for sponsors and refer to books or records as “products,” which embraces the language of commodification.


Artists may be forced to participate in the marketplace, but their creations provide the means by which they transform their awareness, knowledge, sensibility, and taste into expressions. The more an artist matures, the more he or she can communicate this knowledge to an increasingly larger audience. One sign of a person’s development and maturation is the diversity of his or her friends and acquaintances. If one is surrounded by clones of one’s self – clones in fashion, taste, and thought – it is likely that one is not too-long out of the womb. The person who knows is able to communicate with many other people, not with denunciations or malice, but with love.


The lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, understands this, even if many others in the tabletop role-playing community do not. Unflustered by the constant influx of what Simple has characterized as maliciousness, he proceeds forward leading his game design team in their efforts to publish D&D so that it has as few obstacles to entry as possible, hoping to facilitate that even more people have an opportunity to practice this form of art. After all, "Everyone has a story. And there's something to be learned from every experience," that great American populist Oprah Winfrey, reminds us. Crawford's work, built on the pioneer's labor of Gygax, Arneson, and other game designers, is about creating an organized way to facilitate the expression of those stories.


To persist with his work in the current cultural climate has required a longsuffering patience from Crawford, even as he retains his commitment to listen to the role-playing game community and incorporate their suggestions in his publications. Perhaps it should be no surprise that he is able to proceed unflustered, as he has experience and training in remaining centered: his transition to role-playing writer occurred subsequent to graduate-level studies in a theology that emphasizes compassion, patience, and discernment. Discernment especially is key to his work as he must be able to differentiate issues that are important from that which is mere background chatter. He understands that "To Do This You Got to Know How," even as his detractors boo his corporate employer and sometimes, by extension, slander his work without trying to first understand it. I do not know how many role-players are able to recognize his commitment and patience and appreciate him and the work of his collaborators now, but – like the folk music fans who embraced Dylan’s band over time – they will. 


Jeremy Crawford in 2019.

Photo by Anthony Bolante, Puget Sound Business Journal.


The worlds of music and tabletop role-playing may seem to be far apart, but they are closer than one might realize. Each are a manifestation of the creative spirit emerging. When it does, a sympathy with others develops that leads one to realize that "Anyone who ever played a part, wouldn't turn around and hate it." Go listen to "Sweet Jane," my favorite version is a live performance from November 25, 1969 in San Francisco, recorded before the lyrics were finished. In it, one can hear a sympathy with others, a quality that once discovered may provide an antidote to the impotence that manifests in the kind of nerd rage with which creators from Bob Dylan to Jeremy Crawford contend.


Coburg Hills News is one of the increasingly dwindling media sites that permits viewers to post comments to articles. As an avid supporter of democracy and the free flow of information, I think this is terrific, yet it is so often abused by those who frequent online forums who are not interested in communication. My hope is that CHN’s readers have the heart to communicate.


In the meantime, D&D is turning fifty and Timothée Chalamet is finishing up his film about a time when nerds recognized the threat of corrupting commercial interests on art. Their response was to boo, and the world moved on; “You know,” sing the Velvets, “those were different times.”