Yes, Bob Dylan's New York still exists – if you know where to look

But the anger in the folk community was palpable far beyond the disapproval of the Newport Festival crowd.

Scottish troubadour and folk purist Ewan MacColl (the father of Kirsty MacColl) decried Dylan’s rock direction as music for “outraged teenagers”, writing in folk magazine Sing Out! that “only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel”.

Dylan’s response was no less scathing. Recorded on July 29 1965, four days after the Newport debacle, and released as a stand-alone single in the September, Positively 4th Street was furious. Although its lyrics were typically oblique, and allowed their target a merciful anonymity, it appeared to take aim at the folk scene on the titular avenue which now screamed of a betrayal of principles.

“You say you lost your faith, but that’s not where it’s at,” he snarls, in the second verse. “You had no faith to lose, and you know it.” Sharpened by spite, the barbs found their marks. New York music critic Dave Marsh described the track as “an icy hipster bitch session”. Down at the Folklore Centre, meanwhile, Izzy Young took it personally. “At least 500 people came into my place and asked if it was about me,” he would later recall.

“I don’t know if it was, but it was unfair. There is such a thing as the Village. Dylan comes in and takes from us, uses my resources, then he leaves, and gets bitter. He writes a bitter song. He’s the one who left.” Indeed he was. But his footsteps still echo in Greenwich Village. And so does his music.

Staying there

The Marlton Hotel, on the edge of the district at 5 West 8th Street (001 212 321 0100; marltonhotel.com), offers rooms from £227. A seven-night break, flying from Heathrow on April 7, costs from £1,895 a head, via Last Minute (020 3386 8411; lastminute.com).

Further information

searchlightpictures.com/a-complete-unknown; nyctourism.com; visittheusa.co.uk