I think Judas was short for traitor, and Dylan was seen as a traitor to his folk roots by many. I recently saw Scorsese's docu on Dylan "No Direction Home," which I highly recommend. The film basically supports the traitor thesis. And I must confess that while the excerpts from the acoustic Dylan left me with goosebumps, the later electric stuff was hackneyed by comparison.
Joanna
Carrol Cox wrote:
>-------- Original Message --------
>Subject: [bluegreenearth] Fan Who Called Dylan 'Judas' Breaks 33 Years
>OfSilence
>Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:04:43 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Tim Barton <tim_decenter at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: bluegreenearth at yahoogroups.com
>To: _BlueGreenEarth Forum <bluegreenearth at yahoogroups.com>
>
>Fan Who Called Dylan 'Judas'
>Breaks 33 Years Of Silence
>http://www.sonicnet.com/news/archive/story.jhtml?id=512709&pid=505848
>Staff Writer Chris Nelson reports
>
>Fan Who Called Dylan 'Judas' Breaks 33 Years Of Silence
>http://www.sonicnet.com/news/archive/story.jhtml?id=512709&pid=505848
>Staff Writer Chris Nelson reports
>
>For Keith Butler, it was a single anguished cry he wished he'd never
>made. For the world of rock music, it was a defining moment that has
>become the stuff of legend.
>
>Almost 33 years ago in Manchester, England, Butler's anonymous shout of
>"Judas" opened a major chapter in rock 'n' roll history. Now, an asthma
>attack and a trip to the local coffee shop has closed it.
>
>In the process, the world is getting to know Butler, a shy ex-Briton
>who, truth be told, would rather remain unknown. But he thought he
>should set the record straight about May 17, 1966. That's the night
>Butler stood up in Manchester's Free Trade Hall and lambasted Bob Dylan
>with a single word heard round the world: "Judas!"
>
>"The 'Judas!' shout, that's something that I hadn't talked about barely
>at all," he said. "It was embarrassing. It wasn't something you felt
>particularly proud of. That had been buried away."
>
>That infamous shout and Dylan's contemptuous response -- "You're a
>liar!" -- are cited by many authorities as the watershed moment in
>Dylan's career. The exchange could be heard on bootleg recordings for
>years before the show was released officially last year on Bob Dylan:
>Live 1966. Dylan's reply served as a declaration that the onetime folk
>singer's controversial foray into electric rock music was the right
>thing to do, and that history would bear him out.
>
>Butler had been one of the non-believers.
>
>"We were just really disappointed," he said recently. "That wasn't the
>Bob Dylan we'd been used to listening to. The Dylan we were used to was
>[the folk singer of 1963's] The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."
>
>Beginning with Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Dylan released a trio
>of albums grounded heavily in electric instruments. When he first
>brought the sound to American audiences at the Newport Folk Festival in
>1965, he was booed. When he took the tour worldwide, his audiences went
>from being unhappy to labeling him a traitor to the folk movement.
>
>But the man who crystallized those feelings by shouting "Judas" remained
>anonymous until last year, long after the moment had been written into
>history. He still might have been unknown had he not been struck with a
>bout with asthma the day before Live 1966 was released in October. On
>that night, Butler, now 52 and living in Toronto, woke from an asthma
>attack and decided to take a walk to get some fresh air. He ended up in
>a coffee shop, where he picked up the Toronto Sun from the counter and
>spotted an article that inspired him to find out more about that night
>in 1966. The story, by Associated Press writer Scott Bauer, described
>the impending release of Live 1966, as well as C.P. Lee's book about the
>concert, "Like the Night," and a rarely seen documentary on Dylan's '66
>tour called "Eat the Document."
>
>"So I'm on my own, in the middle of the night, in a coffee shop," Butler
>recalled. "And at the bottom of the article, it said, 'On "Eat the
>Document" can be seen some footage of people leaving the theater.
>
>'One of them says, "Any bloody pop group can do this rubbish." ' And I
>recognized the words -- it was staggering. It was an incredible shock
>... from 30 years ago and 3,000 miles away, I was reading what I
>recognized as my own words."
>
>In his book, Lee describes the entire concert as a "psychodrama," and
>anyone who has heard the verbal skirmish between Butler and Dylan will
>recognize it as the climax of that drama.
>
>Dylan began the show with an acoustic set, playing songs such as "It's
>All Over Now, Baby Blue"
>(RealAudio excerpt). When he brought out the raucous, electric Hawks
>(soon to change their name to the Band) for the second set, the crowd
>turned on him. At several points, many of the 2,000 concert-goers
>clapped slowly and defiantly to show their displeasure and shake Dylan
>from his game.
>
>Finally, during a period of silence after "Ballad of a Thin Man," Butler
>shouted his invective.
>
>"Judas!" he cried.
>
>"I don't believe you," the singer spat back. "You're a liar!" (RealAudio
>excerpt of exchange) Then the band crashed into the set closing "Like A
>Rolling Stone" (RealAudio excerpt), with Dylan commanding them to "Play
>f---ing loud!"
>
>Dylan's venom sent the mortified Butler scampering out of the hall
>before "Like a Rolling Stone" got under way.
>
>"Can you imagine what it's like as a 20-year-old kid?" Butler asked.
>"You were just crushed. I was totally embarrassed when he shouted back.
>I was there with another guy, and that's when we decided to leave."
>
>While Butler tried to forget about the incident, the exchange sent
>shockwaves through the world of music and came to symbolize the point at
>which rock entered a new era, opening the doors to a more artful form of
>musical expression.
>
>"It elicit[ed] from Dylan not just an angry response but a response
>that, in its own way, is pure music," said Greil Marcus, author of
>"Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes." (Marcus' "Days Between
>Stations" column appears monthly in Addicted To Noise.) "The way he
>says, 'I don't believe you,' is the essence of shock and disgust and
>disbelief, but all contained within a kind of cool, which he then
>immediately loses."
>
>While Lee said the performance stood, on its own, as a great event, the
>shout catapults that night into something more meaningful, going so far
>as to call the event "Brechtian," referring to experimental German
>playwright Bertolt Brecht.
>
>"Without the shout, that album [Live 1966] would be that much less
>important," said Lee, who has been haunted by the performance ever since
>he witnessed it live as a 16-year-old kid.
>
>"Nobody could have scripted it better," he added. "If he shouted,
>'Judas!' three numbers before, it wouldn't have had the same impact.
>Just before the last number, it's astonishing."
>
>While the rest of the music world studied the event and analyzed its
>significance through the years, Butler said that he tried to forget the
>exchange. He now has two kids and a corporate job.
>
>But in 1966, he was just a young man with a lot of ideals and little
>money. While he'd saved enough for a guitar -- so among other things, he
>could learn Dylan songs -- he never had the cash for Dylan records or a
>turntable to play them on.
>
>To be called out in public by a singer that powerful was humiliating, he
>explained.
>
>"My key memory was of the news crew," Butler said, referring to the
>filming of "Eat the Document." "Because that's the kind of story you
>tell over a beer. It's something different."
>
>But after reading about the album, Butler traveled to New York to see
>"Eat the Document"; then he read Lee's "Like the Night." It was the book
>that inspired him to step forward to tell his side of the story, in
>particular Lee's notion that the shout -- essentially branding the
>Jewish Dylan as Christ killer -- may have been laced with anti-Semitism.
>
>"To shout 'Judas' at a Jew in 1966 was an act of mind-boggling stupidity
>and senselessness," Lee writes.
>
>Late last year, Butler flew to England at his own expense for a BBC
>Radio One documentary about the concert. Interviews with him and his
>companion at the concert, Chris Cuttance, along with comparisons of
>Butler in person with footage of him in "Eat the Document" and accounts
>from other concert-goers at the show all convinced both the BBC and Lee
>that Butler was the infamous shouter.
>
>It was on the steps of the Free Trade Hall that Butler and Lee finally
>met, just before filming of the BBC documentary began. Later the two
>went out for a drink. "He said, 'I just want people to know that I
>wasn't an anti-Semite,' " Lee recalled.
>
>Mickey Jones, who played drums with the Hawks on that tour, said that
>after listening to the BBC program, he's convinced Butler is the
>infamous shouter, although he didn't hear the exchange during the
>concert. He remembered laughing as he listened to tapes of the
>performance afterward.
>
>"It was just a gig," said Jones, 57, who in the '90s has focused on
>acting, with a recurring role on TV's "Home Improvement." "I don't think
>anybody feels like they are creating history when they do something. We
>certainly didn't. It was a gig, we were having fun. We knew that we were
>giving them good music, even though we got booed everywhere we went."
>
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