The iconic four words Bob Dylan said after being called “Judas”
There are some nights in music that go down in history. There is the night that Elvis Presley performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, shaking his hips for all the nation to see and causing uproar in the process. You also have the moment when The Beatles played on the same show and kicked off Beatlemania with a bang. Then you have the Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan, at the height of his fame, witnessed a furious audience turn against him.
Bob Dylan is a man obsessed with his own myth. The most recent movie we have about him, A Complete Unknown, is arguably the closest thing we have to an accurate portrayal of his life. Some of the films before that have been cryptic and riddled with tales of fiction and factual inaccuracies.
That’s not to say that A Complete Unknown is 100% accurate either. For instance, it makes out that people at Newport were booing because Dylan was playing his electric guitar. That may well have been the case, but there are other reasons as to why that performance was controversial. For instance, Dylan was incredibly late to arrive on stage, and he only played a handful of songs despite being the headliner. Why he was actually booed has been misinterpreted and lost in the sands of time.
Equally, it implies somebody called him “Judas” at that show, which didn’t happen. There was a great deal of controversy that followed Dylan around when he started focusing on playing more electric music, and as such, crowds everywhere would boo him and make their thoughts on this new sound known. One of those crowds was in Manchester, and it was here that a disgruntled fan, in a moment of silence, decided to shout “Judas”.
The real story behind Bob Dylan’s “Judas” heckle
The audience member has since been identified as Keith Butler. He yelled out in response to the new direction that Bob Dylan was going down with his music that he wasn’t a very big fan of. His words might seem harsh, but they echo the sentiment of a lot of Bob Dylan fans, who had come out in force on the ’66 tour to make their opinion of this new sound known.
Bob Dylan had grown used to the controversial reaction by this point, and therefore was more than equipped to deal with the criticism. This is best reflected in his response to the man in the crowd who called him “Judas,” as he leaned into the microphone and spoke four iconic words which have since gone down in musical history: “I don’t believe you.”
The story goes that after delivering the witty response, Dylan then told Butler, “You’re a liar,” after which he turned around to his band, each of which had been criticised by fans in the past for playing too loud, and instructed them to “play fucking louder”.
Bob Dylan shot to fame because of his unique voice and excellent way with words, and it turns out that his talent with words transcended music and dripped into the way he spoke to people as well. No matter who was giving it and where they were, no one dealt with critique better than Bob Dylan.
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