FEATURE:
“Judas!”
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in 1965 with the Fender Telecaster owned by legendary guitarist Robbie Robertson (Dylan played this extensively as he ‘went electric’ in 1965)
Dylan Goes Electric
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ON 24th May…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 17th May, 1966 (the night an audience member shouted “Judas!”)/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin
the legendary Bob Dylan turns eighty. It is a big moment for the music world. We get to celebrate a songwriting genius who has inspired so many through the decades. I thought it would be interesting to go back fifty-five years to 17th May, 1966. During a tour of the U.K., at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, an audience member shouted “Judas!” - unhappy that the songwriter was seemingly abandoning his Folk roots. We wouldn’t get anything like that today is an acoustic artist like Laura Marling suddenly went electric! People wouldn’t have any issue – in fact, that sort of evolution and range is commonplace. For an artist who, perhaps, made his name as an acoustic artist who had built a fanbase on it, there would have been many who took a while to accept that, by 1966, Dylan was changing as an artist. In June 1966, Dylan put out Blonde on Blonde. There were songs in albums prior to that there used electric guitar (1965’s Highway 61 Revisited used one for sure), though it was becoming more common by 1966. One cannot say that, even as Dylan was going electric, it was the majority of his sound. This being said, Dylan’s hostile audience member in Newcastle was not the first time Dylan faced backlash. In 1965, as this article explains, Dylan went electric - and those at the Newport Folk Festival were not all on the same page:
“When Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival on the night of July 25, 1965, he had a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar around his neck. Three of his five backup musicians also took up electric instruments. Minutes into the first song, “Maggie’s Farm,” roughly a third of the 17,000 people in the audience began to boo. The media covered the rude reaction the next day.
Mr. Dylan couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. In the months ahead, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter was transformed from folk’s boy wonder into the poet equivalent of Elvis Presley. His newly released single “Like a Rolling Stone” would reach No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart, while the album on which it appeared, “Highway 61 Revisited,” would climb to No. 3. For rock musicians, Mr. Dylan’s uncompromising lyrics and stripped-down delivery were a creative wake-up call.
By year’s end, the Beatles responded with “Rubber Soul,” and Mr. Dylan’s influence went viral. After 1965, the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed and dozens of other ’60s rock musicians found the courage to write songs that reflected their own perspectives and aesthetics. By plugging in, Mr. Dylan had put a pin in pop and started rock’s singer-songwriter revolution.
Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss was about at Newport. In recent years, folk fans and artists who were there have insisted, almost out of embarrassment, that the boos were in response to the sound system’s high volume and distortion, not Mr. Dylan’s electric band. But in truth, the outrage was more complicated and deeply rooted in folk’s anti-materialism, the music’s orthodoxy, and a snooty belief that pop-rock of the early ’60s was mindless.
As evidenced in the 2005 documentary “No Direction Home,” Mr. Dylan was shaken when he left the Newport stage after cutting his set short after three songs. But months later, he shrugged off the reaction, telling a print interviewer, “I think there’s always a little boo in all of us.” Nevertheless, for many in the Newport audience, Mr. Dylan “going electric” was an act of betrayal by a misguided schemer trying to pass himself off as a British invader”.
A week before Dylan’s twenty-fifth birthday, in Newcastle, he had to face this unexpected year from an audience member. I think it is a fascinating incident that carries this significance. The fact that the audience member called Dylan by the name of a traitor from The Bible gives it extra sting and weight – like it was a betrayal of the highest order!
Five years ago, the BBC looked back on the incident. We get to learn about the man who shouted at Dylan that night on 17th May, 1966:
“Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan was at the centre of a storm, with arguments raging on both sides of the Atlantic about whether his decision to play electric sets meant he had sold out his folk roots.
The controversy began at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in the US, where he was booed when he played electric and it came to a head, unexpectedly, towards the end of his 1966 world tour at a concert in Manchester on 17 May.
Frustrated by what he was hearing, one man decided to vent his fury as the sound ebbed before Dylan's final song of the set with a heckle that has become one of the most famous in musical history.
He shouted a single word - "Judas".
Musician and author Dr CP Lee was in the crowd that night and has since written a book about the world tour
He says it has been "reckoned to be one of the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century, on a par with the riot at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in Paris”.
At the time, he was a 16-year-old schoolboy, eager to see Dylan after missing his concert in the city the year before.
He says from the start, the gig had a distinct atmosphere and - with no pun intended - it was "electric".
"That night, standing outside, there were people arguing, lots of speculation and quite a sense of an impending event.
PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin
"We'd read in 1965 about booing at Newport and the impression we got was that Dylan had come back on with an acoustic guitar and everything was alright.
"The side door opened and in we went. We could see amplifiers and a drum kit on the stage and people were going 'oh no'.
"Some of us had read Melody Maker that week, which said there had been booing in Dublin and people wondered what Dylan was going to do."
'Bewildered, shell-shocked'
Mark Makin, who "by chance" took the only known photographs of the show, remembers the sense of "trepidation" but adds that it "wasn't as if people didn't know what was about to happen".
"We had all read that this was going to be electric. They were all just hopeful that it might not."
The gig had two halves: the first saw Dylan taking the stage alone and acoustic, while in the second, he played with the backing of his band, The Hawks.
Makin, who was in the fourth row with his school friends, says the audience was "delighted" with the acoustic set.
"Everybody was whisper quiet. These days, everyone roars with the recognition of the first line. It never happened then. You didn't dare miss a second of it.
"I suppose there was an expectation that he might not [play electric], he just might carry on - because we had such a good first half, he might just do more of the same."
Makin points to a problem with the sound as the reason for the abuse Dylan received, an issue which it has also been claimed was behind the discord in Newport too.
"I think the problem was the Free Trade Hall's total lack of musicality - it was a square-sided building and when the sound was projected from a PA like that, it hit the wall at the back and came straight back at you with an echo and a reverb.
"All you could hear was this mush of sound. I think that was what hurt people.
"It wasn't that we didn't expect him to be electric, but if if he had just come in at three quarters of the decibels, it might have worked."
It is not known whether it was the electric set or the sound quality that vexed the famous heckler - in fact, as Lee explains, it is not even known for certain who shouted.
"Andy Kershaw and myself made a documentary for BBC Radio 1 in 1999 and were contacted by a guy who had emigrated to Canada called Keith Butler, who said 'yes, I shouted Judas'.
"But there was always an element of doubt. He had shouted something but I think he was confused about whether he had shouted that.
"After the broadcast, we got a call from a very irate person who said 'my husband shouted Judas and here he is now'.
"He was called John Cordwell. Andy and I met John and he had a lot of people who were with him who said 'yes, he shouted it out and we all applauded and thought he was great for having done it”.
There have been articles and investigations that go back to 1966 and ask why that incident happened. Whilst it was one man who shouted “Judas!”, it was clear other audience members ion Manchester were displeased with what their hero was doing and how he was undergoing this shift. I think that, in the same way The Beatles became more experimental and changed their sound by 1966, Dylan was growing as an artist and did not want to be limited. Since 1966, he has pushed his music even further but not completely abandoned that early acoustic sound. Fifty-five since a pretty memorable and big event in Dylan’s career, I wanted to look back on it. I wonder how Dylan reacts to it now and whether it impacted him in any way. I suppose artists get heckled from time to time, though Dylan was probably not expecting any trouble when he toured the U.K. in 1966 - though he had faced animosity in the U.S. the year previous. If there were some who were unhappy with Dylan’s sonic evolution in 1965/1966, there are many who were embracing what he was doing. Listen to his incredible albums since 1965 and…
PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin
FEW others could have any complaints!