As of Christmas Day, 2024, millions of people worldwide have found a renewed interest in the early career of Bob Dylan due to the success of “A Complete Unknown,” the biopic starring Timothée Chalamet as the young folk balladeer who enraged folkie purists by “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The story I will tell picks up a year later and is well-known to many hard-core Dylan aficionados, but for those not privy to the facts, here we go.
1966 was a tumultuous year for Bob Dylan. It began with the birth of his first child and ended in seclusion to recover from a serious motorcycle accident in late July. In between, he began and completed the recording sessions for his monumental record, “Blonde on Blonde” (released in June of 1966), and embarked on an epic tour of North America, Oceania, and Europe. He maintained his pivot towards electric music with the albums “Bringing It All Back Home” (April 1965) and “Highway 61 Revisited” (August 1965). His tour, which ran from February through May, was physically and mentally exhausting and filled with increasingly hostile crowds, especially in England, who decried his change in musical direction.
A bootleg of one of these shows circulated amongst fans for decades before being officially released in 1998. This show was and still is known as the “Royal Albert Hall” concert due to mislabeling different tour recordings. While Dylan did close the tour with two shows at the Royal Albert Hall, the released recording is from a show in Manchester on May 17th. The tour followed the format of two sets with a break in between – the first a solo acoustic set and the second an electric set. For the electric portion, Dylan was joined by 80% of what would eventually become The Band—then known as the Hawks—along with drummer Mickey Jones (who replaced Levon Helm).
The recording reveals the Manchester crowd shifting from politely reverential to indulgent to belligerent to vocally displeased throughout the course of the evening. The applause at the end of each song in the acoustic set sounds almost exactly the same but becomes increasingly subdued after each song in the electric set, while the crowd becomes increasingly restless. Dylan himself responds combatively, muttering, “These are still protest songs,” after some sarcastic clapping. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is met with a few catcalls, as is “One Too Many Mornings.” It all comes to a head after “Ballad of A Thin Man” when a fan screams, “Judas!” Dylan’s response is to sneer, “I don’t beLEEEEEVE you…you’re a LIAAAAAR” before turning to his band and saying audibly, “Play it fuckin’ loud!” as they launch into a swaggering, expansive, roomy version of “Like a Rolling Stone” that feels like a giant middle finger to the haters. The anger in the room, vitriolic on the crowd’s part and arguably justified for Dylan, is palpable.
The entire recording is a remarkable document of an inflection point in the career of one of the most important and influential pop musicians. In hindsight, it’s difficult to believe that fans could get this worked up by a shift in musical direction. Taylor Swift never had fans shout “Judas!” after she switched lanes from country pop to just plain pop. It’s easy now to dismiss the crowd as Luddites, but in the moment, their sense of betrayal was real, and their dynamic with Dylan is what makes the recording so remarkable.
If you want the full concert experience, sadly, you’ll need to find a copy of the CD release (and then something to play it on), as the songs available on streaming services cut out much of the crowd noise. Even without the heckling, the recording is, well, electric. Robbie Robertson’s Telecaster shoots like lightning, and Garth Hudson’s organs soar through the clouds. It’s a must-have for Bob Dylan fans and an enduring piece of musical history. And yes, to follow Dylan’s directive, play it loud.
