Festival Culture: Joe Boyd, Ashley Capps & Robert Gordon

At Big Ears 2026, legendary producer Joe Boyd sat down with Big Ears & Bonnaroo founder Ashley Capps and filmmaker Robert Gordon for a conversation around festival culture, prompted by Gordon’s documentary Newport and the Great Folk Dream, which centers on the night Bob Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965.  Boyd, who was production manager at Newport that summer at age 22, offers a firsthand account of the moment he calls the birth of a genre. He recalls the fracture that follows.  Their conversation doubles as a tribute to Newport Jazz & Folk and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest founder George Wein, who is responsible for the American music festival itself, a template for all others that would follow.  Gordon connects his own festival education directly to Wein’s curatorial legacy, while Capps traces his path from hearing music on records from Newport in his childhood home to founding numerous festivals. Meanwhile, Boyd closes the loop, observing that the intimacy of Big Ears feels, to him, like a full circle moment, hearkening back to the spirit of what Newport felt like back in those early days.