> 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.
I had almost the opposite reaction to the soundtrack--while the acoustic stuff was good, hearing the early electric stuff in these versions was mindblowing. I'd gotten a bit sick of that period of Dylan's writing, but these performances got my attention. Two things stood out in particular:
First, the Newport electric performance might've had poor sound (hard to judge if you aren't in the audience) but had a dynamite performance, so the revisionist accounts from backstage are a lot less credible.
Second, this performance of "Ballad of a Thin Man" (the first Dylan song I consciously heard) really did raise the question found in the liner notes: "What were these people complaining about?"
Perhaps anti-electric folkie sentiment was an early sign of the lowered standards of the arbiters working-class culture that's been alluded to on this list recently. If it wasn't simple and easy to understand, it wasn't okay--from that point of view, it wasn't Casanova but the audience that needed spoon-feeding. The audience, thank goodness, had other ideas.