Who said “Play it fucking loud!” at Bob Dylan’s Manchester Free Trade Hall concert?
Bob Dylan wasn’t in the mood for taking prisoners. Dressed in a grey woollen beatnik suit with a mass of curly hair blown out to double the size of his head, he stood up and put a fresh cigarette in his mouth before slinging a guitar over his shoulder. “Last but not least, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced to his band backstage. “Here he is, back from the grave. Back straight from the grave,” he joked before leading them out into the limelight for an electrifying encore performance.
Before the crowning moment of the night, a cry arose from the back of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. The venue where he’d played an entirely acoustic solo set just a year before, opening with his iconic protest song ‘The Times They Are a-Changin”.
“Judas!” came the cry, followed by cheers and applause. Were they in support of Dylan or the heckler?
Either way, the singer wasn’t having it. He began the introduction to his final song immediately before stepping up to the microphone and responding, “I don’t believe you”. He stepped back to muted shouts from the crowd before adding, “You’re a liar!” Dylan then turned his back on the audience and counted his band in.
What came next was a defiant instruction that’s gone down in rock legend. “Play it fucking loud!” rang around the stage until the opening snare of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ snapped the tension in half. Dylan raised a toast to his detractor with his right hand and launched into a ferociously caustic, withering rendition of his biggest single. An electric wall of sound grating against sandpaper vocals and a stunned theatre of folk enthusiasts.
So, did Dylan say it himself?
It’s generally reported that Dylan himself is the one who barked the legendary instruction about how loud he’d like his song played. Not least because, in the edit of the moment featured in Martin Scorsese’s 2015 documentary No Direction Home, the words come at the same time that Dylan appears to be saying something else after his count-in.
The man certainly had some nerve to reply to the heckler in the way he did and then gesture directly at him during the exhilarating opening seconds of his band’s biggest number. But he wasn’t the one asking for things to be “fucking loud”. He may well have been thinking it, but he didn’t say it.
It’s not entirely clear what he said after his count-in, but it doesn’t look like those four words in our footage. What’s more, there wasn’t a microphone anywhere near Dylan when he was talking to his band at the start of the song.
Instead, there are two other possibilities. It could have been bassist Rick Danko from Dylan’s backing band, the Hawks. Danko would later become one of the principal singers and songwriters for The Band and was the only musician apart from Dylan on stage with his own vocal mic. He needed it to sing backing vocals on the song ‘One Too Many Mornings’, but it might just have come in handy picking up an expletive-laden order for his band to show their heckler who was boss.
Alternatively, there’s a theory that the instruction might not have come from any musicians. This theory stems from the suggestion that the accent we hear is actually northern English, not Dylan’s midwestern American or the Canadian accent of one of the Hawks. It could be that one of the stagehands running the technical side of the gig was standing next to the sound mic capturing footage for DA Pennebaker’s documentary Eat the Document, which was the original source for the quote.
We know that at least one documentary camera and mic had backstage access because they captured Dylan’s final remarks as he went out to perform. They could also have been used to record anyone shouting from the wings during the show, at which point Dylan himself couldn’t be heard except when he was standing next to his own microphone.
Whether it was Danko, a Mancunian stagehand, or anyone else matters not in the grand scheme of things. The order to “Play it fucking loud!” perfectly encapsulated the sentiments of Bob Dylan and his band as the entire music establishment, along with sections of the singer’s own fanbase, seemed to be lining up against them. If people didn’t like the noise they were making, they’d just turn it up even louder and drown them out.
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