In Chronicles Volume One, Bob Dylan is narrating his participation in a party given by an Ava Gardner look-alike called Camilla Adam. The party was for the folk singer Cisco Houston who was terminally ill at the time. He recalls seen Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out!. Silber took part on the backlash against Dylan, when he played an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
"Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out! was there, too. In a few years'time he would castigate me publicly in his magazine for turning my back on the folk community. It was an angry letter. I liked Irwin, but I couldn't relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew, a piece of music that didn't follow the rules of modern jazz, which had been on the verge of breaking into the popular marketplace, until Miles's record came along and killed its chances. Miles was put down by the jazz community. I couldn't imagine Miles being too upset. Latin artists were breaking rules, too. Artists like Joào Gilberto, Roberto Menescal and Carlos Lyra were breaking away from the drum infested samba stuff and creating a new form of Brazilian music with melodic changes. They were calling it bossa nova. As for me, what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before. Silber scolded me in his letter for doing this, as if he alone and a few others had the keys to the real world. I knew what I was doing, though, and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody."