Judas! Tee

ORDERS OPEN: 1/16/25
ORDERS CLOSE: 1/19/25
TO PRINT: 1/20/25

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Over 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 Bob Dylan's electric world tour. 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. 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'."

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." Lee remembers people in the intermission "breathing a sigh of relief and I heard somebody say 'oh, he's seen sense. He's not going to use the band, he's realised he's wrong'."

Little did they know what was to come. Returning for the second half, Lee says drummer Mickey Jones "blasted into Tell Me, Momma [and] it was the loudest thing I'd ever heard". He says that at the end of that first number, "people were bewildered, shell-shocked even", but shortly after, the protests began. "Throughout the second half, people started slow hand-clapping. Groups of people were standing up, facing the stage accusingly and then walking out. There were random shouts here, there and everywhere."

And then there was a shout from the circle - "Judas". Lee says the heckle stung Dylan "to the quick". He lets the guy have it. You can really see that he has rankled Dylan. "The look on his face... he turned around and said 'I don't believe you'. It was an incredibly antagonistic moment." Lee says Dylan then stepped away from the microphone, swore as he told the band to "play it loud" and they "lurched into Like A Rolling Stone, which was this giant juggernaut".

Makin saw what happened in that second half differently. "When he came on, he'd got a smirk on his face, because he knew what was going to happen. He'd had this elsewhere in the months prior to this and he had it completely under control and was not going to be dissuaded by anybody. He piled in with Tell Me, Momma, and it hit like a freight train, because it was a real rocker and screamer. People sat there stunned."