Remembering Bob Dylan’s Infamous ‘Judas’ Show
On May 16th, 1966, Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, arguably the best album of his career. The next day, he would be in Manchester, England, for a concert at the Free Trade Hall, the 11th date of the European leg of his world tour.
Dylan was in his lightning-rod phase, being seen as a turncoat by the folkie community aghast that he dared to rock out with an electric guitar. The primary objection, which came to a head in Manchester, was that plugged-in Dylan was less legit than acoustic Dylan, less likely to provide listeners with music that spoke to them and who they were, and less communally in stride with the problems of the age. This battle had been playing out since Dylan had hit England. Dylan would perform a set alone onstage, armed only with his acoustic guitar, and that would go down well. But then he’d come back out with his backup band the Hawks – later, of course, to become the Band – and it would be at that point, with the acrimony increasing throughout the electric set, that a donnybrook would play out each evening.
The more pissed Dylan and his musicians would get in response, the more mercurial, magisterial, untouchable the music became.
”It was not light, it was not folky,” said guitarist Robbie Robertson of the period in Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades. “It was very dynamic, very explosive and very violent.”
”It was like, as if, everything that we held dear had been betrayed,” says one fan in C.P. Lee’s Like the Night. “We made him and he betrayed the cause.”
According to Robertson, the shows were solely recorded because of a prevailing incredulity within the Dylan camp. “The only reason tapes of those shows exist today is because we wanted to know, ‘Are we crazy?'” he recalled. “We’d go back to the hotel room, listen to a tape of a show and think, ‘Shit, that’s not that bad. Why is everybody so upset?'”
But aggrieved they were, and Dylan doubled down in his genius, and went right back at them.
The tape from Manchester would remain unreleased for 32 years, until it finally made it to light as The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4, attesting that Blonde on Blonde may not have even been the best new Dylan music you might have heard in that particular week, 50 years ago. Let’s take a look at the blow-by-blow of this evening of rancor and genius.
First Set: Acoustic
“She Belongs to Me”
Part of the knock against Dylan was that he was now singing about himself in his electric rock songs, whereas folkie Dylan was more communal. It’s a weak argument. The instrumentation was different – but Dylan’s songwriting was going where it was going, and that was a matter of compositional art, not if anyone else was playing along with him. Everyone’s decently pleased here, though, as the acoustic set opens with a lilting number that has an aspect of English minstrel song about it. And the man is in impressive voice.
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