Jimi Hen­drix was a tough act to fol­low under the best of cir­cum­stances. But to fol­low him onstage after mid­night in front of a crowd of more than half a mil­lion peo­ple that had been set­ting fires and throw­ing bot­tles at the stage seemed like an impos­si­ble task for a poet with an acoustic gui­tar and a gen­tle band of back­ing musi­cians. Yet Leonard Cohen turned the volatile sit­u­a­tion at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val into one of the most mag­i­cal per­for­mances of his career.

A lit­tle piece of land four miles off the south­ern coast of Eng­land, the Isle of Wight was host to three great music fes­ti­vals from 1968 to 1970. The last of these was some­thing of a cross between Wood­stock and Alta­mont: flower pow­er with an under­cur­rent of men­ace. Like the Wood­stock fes­ti­val the year before, the 1970 Isle of Wight fes­ti­val was crashed by thou­sands of unpay­ing fans.

Head­lin­ers for the five-day fes­ti­val includ­ed Hen­drix, Miles Davis, the Who and the Doors. By the time Cohen appeared–near the very end of the rainy final night–the atmos­phere had become dan­ger­ous. Dur­ing the Hen­dix per­for­mance, some­one threw a flare onto the top of the stage and set it on fire. Jour­nal­ist Sylvie Sim­mons describes the scene in her new book, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

Ten­sion had been ris­ing at the fes­ti­val for days. The pro­mot­ers had expect­ed a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand peo­ple but half a mil­lion more turned up, many with no inten­tion of pay­ing. Even after the pro­mot­ers were forced to declare it a free fes­ti­val, ill will remained. Dur­ing a set by Kris Kristof­fer­son, bot­tles were thrown and he was booed off­stage. “They were boo­ing every­body,” says Kristof­fer­son. “Except Leonard Cohen.”

As Cohen and his pro­duc­er and key­board play­er Bob John­ston stood watch­ing the may­hem dur­ing Hen­drix’s per­for­mance, Cohen stayed calm. “Leonard was­n’t wor­ried,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “Hen­drix did­n’t care and nei­ther did we. Leonard was always com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they did­n’t have a piano or an organ–I don’t know, some­one had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage–so I could­n’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trail­er tak­ing a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ”

Accord­ing to most accounts it was a lit­tle after two o’clock in the morn­ing when Cohen took the stage. His back­up band, or “Army,” includ­ed John­ston on key­boards, Char­lie Daniels on fid­dle and bass, Ron Cor­nelius on lead gui­tar and Elkin “Bub­ba” Fowler on ban­jo and bass, along with back­up singers Cor­lynn Han­ney, Susan Mus­man­no and Don­na Wash­burn. Cohen had a glazed-over look in his eyes through­out the per­for­mance, the result of his tak­ing the seda­tive Man­drax. “He was calm because of the Man­drax,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “That’s what saved the show and saved the fes­ti­val. It was the mid­dle of the night, all those peo­ple had been sit­ting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hen­drix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days.”

The his­toric per­for­mance was cap­tured on film by Mur­ray Lern­er, who released it in 2009 as Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. The film (above) includes the fol­low­ing songs from the show:

1. Dia­monds in the Mine
2. Famous Blue Rain­coat
3. Bird on the Wire
4. One of us Can­not be Wrong
5. The Stranger Song
6. Tonight Will be Fine
7. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Good­bye
8. Sing Anoth­er Song Boys
9. Suzanne
10. The Par­ti­san
11. Seems So Long Ago, Nan­cy
12. So Long, Mar­i­anne (dur­ing clos­ing cred­its)

Per­haps the most mov­ing moment in the film comes at the begin­ning, when Cohen brings the mas­sive crowd togeth­er by ask­ing a favor: “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” Cohen says, “so I can see where you all are?” As Sim­mons puts it, “Leonard talked to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple he could not see as if they were sit­ting togeth­er in a small dark room.” Or as film­mak­er Lern­er lat­er said, “He mes­mer­ized them. And I got mes­mer­ized also.” Sum­ming up the con­cert and the film, Sim­mons writes: “It was a bril­liant per­for­mance. Lern­er’s cam­eras cap­tured Cohen’s com­mand­ing pres­ence, hyp­no­tist’s charm, and an inti­ma­cy that would seem unfea­si­ble in such a vast, inhos­pitable space.”

“You know him, he’s yours: Bob Dylan.” It’s hard to imag­ine a more iron­ic intro­duc­tion, but those were the words used by Ron­nie Gilbert of The Weavers to intro­duce Dylan at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. “What a crazy thing to say!” Dylan wrote in his mem­oir, Chron­i­cles. “Screw that. As far as I knew, I did­n’t belong to any­body then or now.” A year lat­er at New­port he made his point loud and clear. They did­n’t know him, and he was­n’t theirs.

On July 25, 1965 Dylan shocked the folk purists at New­port by plug­ging his Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er into an ampli­fi­er and join­ing gui­tarist Mike Bloom­field and oth­ers from the But­ter­field Blues Band in a blis­ter­ing ren­di­tion of “Mag­gie’s Farm,” a song often inter­pret­ed as Dylan’s protest song against the expec­ta­tion of singing protest songs. (The farm in the title is viewed as a pun on Silas McGee’s farm in Mis­sis­sip­pi, where Dylan made his famous appear­ance dur­ing a civ­il rights ral­ly.) Many in the audi­ence took it as a slap in the face. Boos rose up amid the cheer­ing, and the boo­ing con­tin­ued into Dylan’s next song, the now-clas­sic “Like a Rolling Stone.” Music writer Greil Mar­cus described the scene:

There was anger, there was fury, there was applause, there was stunned silence, but there was a great sense of betray­al. As if some­thing pre­cious and del­i­cate was being dashed to the ground and stomped. As if the del­i­cate flower of folk music, the price­less her­itage of impov­er­ished black farm­ers and des­ti­tute white min­ers, was being mocked by a dandy, with a gar­ish noisy elec­tric gui­tar, who was going to make huge amounts of mon­ey as a pop star by exploit­ing what he found from these poor peo­ple.

The con­tro­ver­sial “elec­tric” per­for­mance was the last of three Dylan appear­ances at the New­port fes­ti­val. His first time there was in 1963, when he was an obscure young singer, lit­tle known out­side of Green­wich Vil­lage. He appeared at the fes­ti­val as a guest of Joan Baez, who was far bet­ter known and had recent­ly appeared on the cov­er of Time mag­a­zine. Baez intro­duced Dylan to audi­ences around the coun­try and encour­aged him to write polit­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted folk songs. But by the 1964 fes­ti­val Dylan had already caught up to Baez, in terms of fame, and by 1965 he was break­ing free of Baez and her expec­ta­tions, and of folk music in gen­er­al.

Mur­ray Lern­er’s The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror: Bob Dylan Live at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val 1963–1965 (above) cap­tures Dylan’s evo­lu­tion over those three years. The footage was orig­i­nal­ly shot for Lern­er’s clas­sic 1967 doc­u­men­tary, Fes­ti­val!, and was even­tu­al­ly acquired by Dylan, whose man­ag­er agreed to let Lern­er assem­ble it into a film–but only after the release of Mar­tin Scors­ese’s No Direc­tion Home, which uses some of the mate­r­i­al. The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror was released in 2007. The doc­u­men­tary was shot on Kodak Plus‑X and Tri‑X film with a three-per­son crew. As Lern­er lat­er explained in an inter­view, his inten­tion was to let Dylan’s evolv­ing music speak for itself:

We decid­ed on no nar­ra­tion, no pun­dit inter­views, no inter­views with Dylan. noth­ing except the expe­ri­ence of see­ing him. That to me is excit­ing. Just the clear expe­ri­ence gives you every­thing you need. I felt that when screened the music of The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror, because he’s tout­ed metaphor­i­cal­ly as the mir­ror of his gen­er­a­tion, and I thought no, he’s beyond that. He always takes the gen­er­a­tion beyond that, and he’s like on the oth­er side of the mir­ror. But I also felt the won­drous qual­i­ty of his imag­i­na­tion took us like Alice to a new world on the oth­er side of the mir­ror.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s (In)Famous Elec­tric Gui­tar From the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val Dis­cov­ered?

The Times They Are a‑Changin’: 1964 Broad­cast Gives a Rare Glimpse of the Ear­ly Bob Dylan