Bob Dylan Bootleg Finally Released

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Bob Dylan Bootleg Finally Released

By SCOTT BAUER Associated Press Writer

``Judas!'' a guy in the audience shouts.

``I don't believe you,'' Bob Dylan replies, dramatically drawing out the last word. ``You're a liar.''

The crowd snickers nervously, and Dylan and his band begin to play the opening notes of the next song.

Spurred on by the heckle, someone on stage, perhaps even Dylan himself, urges the band to play loud, unleashing a scorching version of ``Like a Rolling Stone.'' The band is accustomed to being booed; this night is not the first time an audience has reacted angrily to getting something completely different from what it expected.

But that concert in 1966 was a classic showdown. It caught Dylan at the zenith of his career, surprising an unsuspecting audience with his merger of poetic lyrics and electrified rock 'n' roll. The concert, never before officially released on vinyl or CD, will be in record stores Oct. 13.

The show gained a treasured place in the homes of Dylan collectors when it became one of the first illegally bootlegged records in the early 1970s.

The official release from Columbia/Legacy Recordings, titled ``Live 1966: The `Royal Albert Hall' Concert _ The Bootleg Series Vol. 4,'' contains every bit of music from that night. It also jokingly continues an error generated by bootleggers: The performance actually took place in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966.

Though recorded by Columbia, Dylan's record company, for possible release at the time, and prepared again for release in the early 1990s, the concert remained in the vaults.

``I don't know that Bob Dylan wanted it released all those years,'' says Mickey Jones, Dylan's drummer during the 1966 world tour. ``It might have been that it was such a personal thing for him and us, maybe he didn't want to give it to the world and maybe now he decides it's time for the world to hear it.''

Dylan has not spoken publicly about the concert and declined to be interviewed about the new release.

The audience's hostility that night and during the entire tour motivated Dylan and the band, Jones says.

``When we got booed we cranked it up and put it right back in their face,'' says Jones, now a film actor. ``We knew what we were doing was good music.''

The concert was considered so important that one historian, C.P. Lee of the University of Salford in Manchester, actually wrote an entire book about it. Lee attended the show.

Dylan hit the scene in the early 1960s as an acoustic guitar-playing folkie singing ``finger-pointing'' songs like ``Blowin' in the Wind'' and ``The Times They Are a-Changin'.''

When Dylan played electric music live for the first time, at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, he was booed by the audience who equated it with selling out to the mainstream. For Dylan, the move was a risk; he was largely abandoning the formula that had propelled him to fame.

``Within British Folk circles there was ardent talk of a `betrayal,' whatever that meant,'' Lee writes. Dylan ``no longer belonged to the small clique that inhabited Folk and to many of the Folk world's denizens, that was unforgivable.''

The audience's audible anger, heard through nervous laughter and a hand-clapping protest, created its own form of electricity that added a mystique to the recording.

``To imagine a popular artist today being called `Judas' in the middle of a concert is unthinkable,'' Lee said in an interview from his Manchester home. ``To Dylan in 1966 it was an everyday occurrence.''

Longtime Dylan friend and musician Tony Glover says in the CD's liner notes, ``To this day, this concert stands as one of the greatest events in rock history.''

The music being created by Dylan on that tour ``was the hinge that swung music in a different direction,'' Jones says. It stands as a link between folk music, folk rock and rock.

As audiences did throughout the tour, the Manchester crowd sat quietly through the seven-song acoustic set.

``The audience was reverential. It was really like being in a cathedral,'' Lee says. ``Every word was hung on. Every nuance, every note. Everybody was just in rapt attention.''

At the break, Jones says, Dylan was anxious to get back on stage with his band mates.

``He was like a 10-year-old kid. He just couldn't wait,'' Jones says. ``He would come back and strap that Telecaster on and he'd be jumping around the dressing room.''

But when Dylan returned for the electric half backed by the rollicking combo soon to be known as The Band, there were immediate signs of problems. It was easily the loudest concert heard in England, eclipsing the Beatles and Rolling Stones, Lee says.

After Dylan finished the first song, the never-before-released ``Tell Me, Momma,'' many of the people in the audience were in shock, Lee says.

Before playing ``One Too Many Mornings,'' audience members began a show of protest by slowly clapping hands in unison. People began getting out of their seats, walking in full view of Dylan at the front of the stage with their hands over their ears, and leaving the concert hall.

With the clapping as a background, Dylan began muttering bits of indecipherable nonsense into the microphone. He mumbled long enough for the curious to quiet down.

Then, when he had their attention, he quipped, ``If you only wouldn't clap so hard.'' Caught off guard, the audience laughed.

Dylan often shrugged off the boos and criticism during the tour, Jones says. ``Sometimes he would look back at us and laugh and we'd start laughing amongst each other,'' he says.

The tension mounted throughout the eight-song electric half until the heckler yelled ``Judas.'' Jones says he doesn't remember Dylan specifically telling the band to play loud then, ``but it was kind of understood.''

Jones' drum playing, which kicked off the song, has been described as sounding like a rifle shot. ``I killed it,'' he says proudly. ``I made my bass drum sound like a 105 howitzer.''

And then there were the vocals.

``Dylan's voice is a velvet sneer as he shouts out the line, `How does it feeeeeeel,' and the performance rolls on with power, defiance and a sheer majesty rarely captured on tape,'' Glover writes in the liner notes.

At the end of the song Dylan gave a curt ``thank you.'' There was no encore.

Filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker shot a documentary about the tour. ``Eat the Document,'' edited by Dylan, has not been shown in public since a brief run in New York City during the early '70s. It will be screened this fall at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and Los Angeles in conjunction with the CD's release.

In the film, members of the Manchester audience are interviewed as they leave the hall. Their anger is clear.

``Any pop group could produce better rubbish than that,'' one young man says. ``It was a bloody disgrace, it was. ... He's a traitor.''

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