Revisiting Bob Dylan’s first electric concert in Minneapolis

Folk music hero Bob Dylan notoriously switched to electric rock in July 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, sending shockwaves through the music world. Four months later, he headed to Minneapolis for his first home-state concert since he’d become famous. How did it feel to the local media?

Dave Mona, a complete unknown rookie reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, volunteered to review the show. Fresh out of the University of Minnesota with a journalism degree, he was a general assignment reporter, writing obituaries and stories about the weather. A folk music follower and one of the newspaper’s few staffers under age 30, he’d already covered the Beatles in concert, where he couldn’t hear a note over the screaming fans. He figured that wouldn’t be a challenge at Dylan’s gig.

Sixty years later, sparked by the Dylan-goes-electric movie “A Complete Unknown” starring heartthrob Timothée Chalamet, curious Dylan fans are talking about Mona’s less-than-auspicious review.

“Don’t remind me of it,” Mona said this week with a hearty chuckle.

Mona went on to a long and distinguished career as a sportswriter, public relations executive and moderator of “The Sports Huddle” with Sid Hartman on WCCO Radio for four decades.

Mona’s review brought to mind Dylan’s seething song “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which was released three months before the concert. It’s about a journalist sent to write about Dylan in which the singer snarls: “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

In his review, Mona mentioned only one song by title, misidentifying “Desolation Row” as “Desolation Road.”

Of Dylan, he opined: “His voice has a harsh, guttural quality and he hit every note from the bottom up.

“In all fairness to Dylan, it was not his kind of setting [Minneapolis Auditorium with 9,000 people]. Someone said it would be akin to putting the symphony into a downstairs coffee house. Nevertheless the crowd loved it. Let the psychologists explain it.”

About every five years or so, Mona’s review — headline: “Rock ‘n’ Roller Dylan Gives City Program” — gets rediscovered on the internet, he said Monday. Reaction is evenly split between positive and negative, he pointed out.

All these years later, the 81-year-old reiterated his disappointment in the Duluth-born, Hibbing-raised Dylan’s performance.

“I thought there would be more byplay since he was essentially back home. And there was virtually none of it,” he said. “It was almost like he was singing in a room to himself. The audience could appreciate it, but there was just no rapport.

“I was hoping we’d learn more. ‘Here’s the background,’ ‘Here’s what I was thinking when I wrote this.’ It was just one song after another, no introduction and no conversation. No attempt to reach out to the audience. I probably could have done my homework and better understood more of what to expect.”

Mona wrote that the audience, not Dylan, was the real show.

“Gum-chewing teenagers in costumes straight out of the circus sideshows sat hypnotized as Dylan, who looks like a scarecrow with ratted hair, went through folk and rock and roll sections of the two-part jam.”

In an era when rock and folk concerts by traveling stars were maybe a once-a-month event in Minneapolis, Mona pointed out that the concert commenced 25 minutes after the announced time. For what it’s worth, these days, Dylan, now 83, is the most punctual performer in the concert business, even though others are most certainly not.

Mona appreciated Dylan’s lyrics as poetic and sophisticated. But he admits he didn’t do much to prepare for the concert. He didn’t know about the controversy of the acclaimed young folk music hero going electric at Newport, which becomes the climax of the new Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”

And the reporter didn’t bother to mention in the review that Dylan was from Minnesota.

“I’m stunned,” he said when told that. “I can’t imagine not saying the Twin Cities or Hibbing connection. I can’t imagine how the editors let that go by, or I didn’t include it.”

After covering concerts by the likes of the Animals, Paul Revere & the Raiders and Peter, Paul & Mary, Mona moved to the Tribune’s sports department in 1968.

He did see Dylan in concert one other time — as a fan — in 2006 at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. He still owns some Dylan albums, though VocalEssence, the longtime Twin Cities choral group, is more his jam these days. He mentions that seeing “A Complete Unknown” is on his to-do list.

But first, Mona plans to listen to his favorite Dylan song, 1975′s recorded-in-Minneapolis “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and then check out “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which he has never heard.