Downtown and uptown avant-gardes fused in a single 1965 summer

Evidence

The same month, the Five Spot booked a gritty white blues band, Adrian and the Hatreds, led by gravel-voiced Adrian Guillery, for a three-week gig during which, just down the block, the Fugs began a two-month midnight residency at the Bridge. Up at Columbia’s Studio A, Bob Dylan—who would praise the Fugs as “very dimensional” during a rambling two-hour interview on Bob Fass’s WBAI late night show Radio Unnameable—made twenty takes of “Like a Rolling Stone,” extracted from a poem of rage written on his return from his British tour, and then recorded the rest of his first all-electric album Highway 61 Revisited. An unprecedented six-and-a-half minutes, “Like a Rolling Stone” was released as a single on July 20, five days before Dylan’s epochal appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 737

Categorization

• XREF: The geographic compression — Five Spot, the Bridge, Columbia’s Studio A all within blocks — is precisely the physical-proximity condition the reader wants to test against later claims of cultural stagnation.
• SEED: Angle: reconstruct one square mile of Manhattan in summer 1965 as a density map of simultaneous avant-garde production, then compare square-by-square scans of the same area today.