DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC

On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onto the Newport Folk Festival stage with an electric guitar and detonated the uneasy truce between folk tradition and rock & roll. But another strange figure from the Cambridge folk world was there too: Mel Lyman, the harmonica player from Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, who answered the turmoil with his extraordinary solo rendition of “Rock of Ages.”

One moment pointed toward amplification, youth culture and the coming rock revolution; the other toward something darker and more inward that would eventually lead Lyman from the folk clubs of Cambridge to the Fort Hill Community in Roxbury. Two men came out of the same folk universe and headed toward radically different Americas. Boston Babylon follows both roads.