Electric Judas

By the time Dylan arrived in England in May of '66, the stage was set for a similarly taxing run of shows. The U.K. sported its own small-minded, Stalinist folk movement. Dylan and his pack of unreconstructed Canuck greasers coped by showing up loaded to the tits and spoiling for a fight. Eat the Document, jaggedly edited by Dylan and Howard Alk, richly captures the amphetamine-stoked heebie-jeebies that ensued. The shock and sense of betrayal on the part of Dylan's fans is caught in a series of post-show interviews in the movie; one outraged man snarls, "'E's a traitor, 'e wants hangin'." Writer Lee found similar feelings 30 years after the fact: One erstwhile fan called the Manchester Dylan-Hawks show "all your worst nightmares coming true." The second disc of Live 1966 is a full-scale representation of the collision between the irresistible force of Dylan's electric music and the immovable object that was his folk-fan base.

The Manchester audience, who listen in enchanted silence to the gyroscopic word-spinning of "Visions of Johanna" and "Desolation Row" during Dylan's solo acoustic set, erupt during his performance with the Hawks. The show is punctuated by jeers, whistles, catcalls, foot stomping and clapping; Dylan mutters incomprehensibly until the noise dies. But Dylan and the Hawks win this cage match with a set unparalleled in its time for painful volume, and still unequaled in the stateliness and elegance of its execution. It's a princely noise, as elements carom seamlessly into one another - Robertson's gnarled, ringing Ike Turner-isms on guitar, Garth Hudson's carousel fantasias on organ, Richard Manuel's whorehouse interjections on piano, the thunder of Jones' all-meat drums and Rick Danko's bass kicking it home.

The set list is a series of warnings, curses and farewells to the crowd, slugged out with a fistful of vitriol by Dylan. "Tell me, momma - what izzit, what's wrong with you, this time?" he whines in his opening number, and then he lets loose with a round of kiss-offs ("Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and "One Too Many Mornings") and accusations ("Ballad of a Thin Man").

The album ends with what may be rock's most famed condemnation, and its greatest rebuttal. A fan screams, "Judas!" His voice full of bile, Dylan drawls, "I don't buh-leeve you . . . you're a liar," and then the band hurtles into a version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that is nothing less than the musical equivalent of an execution - a furiously overamped fever dream of frustration and rage. It's a confrontation that leaves you breathless, and one so full of blood and near-Shakespearean drama that it's easy to see why, 30 years later, Robyn Hitchcock and his audience chose to act it out like Titus Andronicus.