From Uncut’s March 1999 issue (Take 22). We spoke to Keith Butler, the fan incensed by Dylan’s electrified performance at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. “The anger just welled-up inside me… I really flipped.”

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“Judas!”

Nearly 33 years ago, on May 17, 1966, a young man famously hurled this insult at Bob Dylan. The young man was sitting in the balcony of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Dylan was standing down-stage right, wielding a black Fender Strat. Behind him, was a band. Soon to become, as most of us know, THE Band.

Most of us also know that the moment has passed into legend. It’s a pivotal moment, which both fulfilled and defied expectations, audacious, impassioned, prescient, epochal… Dylan seized it, defined it.

“I don’t believe you,” he spat, chewing at his guitar. “You’re a liar!”

He cranked up the volume and, with a terse instruction, had the band crash into a stinging, sulphuric, sublime “Like A Rolling Stone“.

Despite what the rest of us know and knew, the infamous heckler himself had no idea of the effect he’d had. No idea that for millions this moment was impossibly epiphanic. No idea, even, of his own notoriety. He shouted his shout, got up and walked out. Never really thought about it again.

Until last October.

Last October saw the official release of the recordings of the event – as Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert – and a revival of world interest. If the concert took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, why call the official record “Royal Albert Hall”?


As CP Lee explains in Like The Night: Bob Dylan And The Road To The Manchester Free Trade Hall (Helter Skelter) – his book about the evening – when bootleggers came across the tapes in the early Seventies, they assumed they were drawn from the tour’s final performance, in London.

Their illicit releases were labelled accordingly. Under-the-counter sales were brisk. There was no doubting the quality of the performance.

Why question its finality?

It wasn’t until a copy of the bootleg fell into the hands of the young CP Lee that the mistake was discovered/ He’d been at the Free Trade Hall to see Dylan, and recognised his own experience. “Ain’t it just like the night I attended?” he thought. His mates agreed. But, by then, the myth had grown. The hostility with which Dylan’s electric tour was greeted had gathered an absurd momentum, given universal voice in that one accusation, that cry of “Judas!”

CP Lee knew that this wasn’t quite the case, that Manchester not London was where the famous bootleg had been recorded with its bitter exchange.

What he didn’t know was who that fan was and what had become of him. In Toronto one night last October, Keith Butler, 53, was awoken by an asthma attack. He puffed on his inhaler, but couldn’t get back to sleep. He did what he never does. He got up, picked up a copy of The Toronto Sun. He stopped at a review of Live 1966 by Scott Bauer. “Judas!” was the first word of the review.

Deep within Butler’s memory, something stirred. He read on. It came flooding back; first, the recognition that he had attended this very concert and, then, the understanding that he himself was a principal protagonist in the record’s history. Bauer describes contemporary reaction to Dylan’s audacity by quoting the words of a youth in the foyer of the Free Trade Hall by one of the crew filming Eat The Document, Dylan and DA Pennebaker‘s still-unreleased sequel to Dont Look Back. “Any pop group could produce better rubbish than that,” one young man says. “It was a bloody disgrace, it was… He’s a traitor.”

“Those were my words,” Butler now says, tracked down finally by Lee and in Manchester for the recording of an Andy Kershaw Radio 4 documentary about the night. He remembers being approached by what he thought was a news crew as he and a friend walked out. “Were we dissatisfied customers? Yes. Would we care to share our views with an American audience? Sure.”

Butler was only too eager to tell the camera crew what he thought of Dylan. He delivered a north country fatwa, and it was this, rather than the infamous accusation – which he confesses he shouted – which stuck in his mind.

Butler has lived in Canada since 1975, but his resemblance to the outraged fan in Eat The Document is compelling, his bluff northern manner entirely compatible. So what prompted his challenge?

“What really sent me over the top, I think, was when he did two songs that I was very fond of in the acoustic way and he did them in that electric guitar way. That was ‘Baby, Let Me Follow you Down‘, which I really liked, and ‘One Too many Mornings‘. The anger just welled-up inside me… I really flipped.”

Having realised his infamy, what did he think of his youthful fervour now?

“With all the wisdom of the years behind me, right, I kind of think, ‘You silly young bugger!”

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 1999/TAKE 22 IN THE ARCHIVE