Who shouted “Judas” at Bob Dylan in Manchester?
They say that, in the era of social media, any stupid thing you say can be captured and held against you for all eternity. All those awkward moments of working yourself up, those times that teenage hormones got the better of you, and each of those first attempts at adulthood that came crashing down around you, all tucked away in a corner of the internet. However, a core part of the lore of Bob Dylan shows that this is hardly a new phenomenon.
After all, the early 1960s were a revolutionary time for pop culture wherever you looked. The music industry was learning how to market itself and, as legions of Beatlemaniacs buying anything with a mop-top on it showed, it was working. However, having legions of obsessed fans wasn’t just the Fabs’ experience; it was also Bob Dylan’s. His album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was a big hit, as were the fairly straight-ahead (yet still magical) folk albums that followed it.
Then, in 1965, the weirdest thing happened. If you’ve spent any amount of time perusing this fair website, then you almost certainly know exactly what I’m talking about. Sick of the restrictive nature of both superstardom and folk music, Dylan decided to branch out into rock ‘n’ roll-inspired music for the two albums he released that year. First experimenting with side one of Bringing It All Back Home before recording almost the entirety of his masterpiece Highway 61 Revisited on electric instruments.
Much like one’s worst moments living forever, if you think fandoms being obsessive, possessive and regressive is a modern phenomenon, you would be wrong. The backlash Bob Dylan got for “going electric” was sudden and deeply toxic. Best summed up by the immortal moment when, at a concert in Manchester, some young folkie in the audience was overcome by the so-called betrayal of his idol that he waited for a quiet moment between songs to bellow out “Judas!”
Who shouted “Judas” at Bob Dylan and why?
Thus, one disgruntled fanboy dissatisfied that his idol wasn’t doing precisely what he wanted when he wanted went down in the annals of rock history seven years before Eminem was even born, let alone before the term “stan” entered the cultural vocabulary. Now, if I’d said something that stupid, I’d leave for Nepal to live as a goat out of sheer shame. I wouldn’t even stick around long enough to know how hard Dylan served me by snarling “play fuckin’ loud” and kicking into ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
Yet, fittingly for a guy who has had somewhat of a shame deficiency historically, the guy who said it came forward and identified himself in 1999 as Keith Butler. Would you believe it, the barefaced entitlement he felt that night went a lot further than a single word. He and his friend Chris Cuttance had stormed out of the gig after making his sole contribution to the world and had been cornered by a TV news crew making a documentary about the controversial new Dylan records.
Now, if I told you that the words “Any pop group could produce better rubbish than that! It was a bloody disgrace! He’s a traitor!” were written in 2025 in the comments of a Kendrick Lamar video by a crazed Drake fan, would you believe me? Maybe not, but only due to the somewhat anachronistic verbiage. Those were the words that Butler spoke to the assorted cameras on his way out, showing that yes, people have always been weird about pop musicians, no matter the time period.
In the same interview with The Independent that he used to announce his identity to the world, he also explained why he said such a bone-headed thing at such a bone-headed volume. In fairness to the guy, he does cop to his anger coming from an emotional place, but he does first say that “I was very disappointed about what I was hearing”. Makes two of us, Keith.
However, he goes on to say, “But I think what really sent me over the top was when he did those lovely songs… `Baby Let Me Follow You Down,’ and the other one was ‘One Too Many Mornings’. I was emotional, and I think my anger just welled up inside of me. I think it was ‘One Too Many Mornings’ that really sent me over the top.” A fitting reminder that these antagonistic attitudes towards our pop stars come from the same place—our overriding love for their music and the hold they have over us.
If we could start growing the fuck up about it soon though, that would be great.
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