It was false advertising, folks

Poster promises "Folk Music Concert"! Yeah, sure....

Surely, Bob, of all people, would understand.

I was on the road myself on May 17 so I missed the actual 59th anniversary of THE Bob Dylan show that I and all sorts of Bob Dylan fans had sought for years. The Bob Dylan show that was talked about, written about, even partially filmed (Remember the “Judas” moment at the end of “No Direction Home”?) The Bob Dylan show that, if you haven’t yet heard it, well, you missed the damn boat, folks!

Of course, I’m talking about the legendary “Royal Albert Hall” concert with Bob Dylan and the Hawks, which actually took place at the Manchester Trade Hall on the evening of May 17, 1966, just a few days before Bob turned 25. The poster below — not sure if it was the authentic poster from 1966 (I’d never seen it before) — tells a lie. “Folk Music Concert.”

If this is a “folk music concert,” I’m a monkey’s uncle. And then Groucho would quip: “Leave your family out of this.”

Like many a Bob Dylan fan who signed on a few years after the explosive 1966 tour, I’d read and heard about these legendary shows and of course, the famous “Judas” moment, but like many of you, I never got to hear the damn thing for years and years.

I don’t remember if it was Greil Marcus who held it over us or Jann Wenner or where exactly I’d read about it first, but it felt like those bastards were just rubbing it in, didn’t it? “Guess what I heard AND YOU DIDN’T!” How I ACHED to hear that concert. Once I heard there were bootlegs of that concert — that was how they heard it — I was on the hunt. You just had to find the right store.

How I looked. Waterbury, Connecticut. Harvard Square. Hampton Beach, Even Greenwich Village where they were trying to get you to cough up $60 for a Bruce Springsteen B-Side “The Big Payback.” (I actually considered it for a moment.)

Then, a move to Philadelphia and a historic visit to the 3rd Street Jazz and Rock Shop and there it was. I couldn’t believe it. I yanked it out of the rack.

The Dylan bootleg where I finally heard “The Royal Albert Hall” show

I don’t remember what I paid for it. Way too much, I’m sure. Maybe as much as $40, quite a price in those days. These record stores understood that people who were looking for Dylan bootlegs were converts, they NEEDED, they HAD TO HAVE, these bootleg records. I was so excited, I didn’t even hardly look at another thing in the store; not like me at all.

I zipped back to the apartment, put it on the turntable and unlike so many of the Dylan bootlegs I’d bought before this one, it was CRYSTAL CLEAR, professionally recorded and just, well, absolutely sensational in every way. One of very few records I’d ever heard that completely lived up to my pre-hearing hype. So I played it again. And again. At maximum volume like my ass was blasted by the sound coming from that stage in Manchester all those years ago.

It was only the electric side — fine by me — I’d heard many of the acoustic songs already. But never before the thundering “Tell Me Momma” (never recorded!) “Fools gold in your teeth and your cemetery hips, put it outside of your graveyard lips” or “Come on, Baby, I’m your friennnnnnnd” or “what’s wrong with you, thissssss timmmme?” (Been there.)

Or this swaggering version of the previously sort of wimpy “I Don’t Believe You” from “Another Side Of Bob Dylan” -- “This is called “I Don’t Believe You,” he snarls. “It used to be like that, now it goes like this…” and here’s our Bob, our Uncle Bob singing his scrawny little ass off, the Hawks thumping along with him, Mickey Jones pounding the drums as if to wake the buried warriors and poets like the Duke of Wellington and Horatio Nelson and John Donne in St. Paul’s Cathedral some 204.7 miles away, Rick Danko’s plonking bass setting a rock-solid musical foundation for Garth Hudson’s soaring, tantalizing organ or his piano wizardry, whatever the band needed, the whole sound fueled by Robbie Robertson’s upfront stinging guitar work and Richard Manuel’s supporting vocals and subtle work on the keys.

This was NOT FOLK MUSIC, the poster should have read and it was simply glorious, music that was breaking through AS YOU LISTENED TO IT. This was past The Beatles, The Stones and anybody else you dared think about. Breakthrough music.

And nobody writes about how cool it was that Bob’s set list was an unreleased song, one from “Another Side”, an immensely beefed up cut from his first album (“Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” ) a wonderfully atmospheric version of “Tom Thumb” from “Highway 61 Revisited,” “just like a ghooooossssst” and an excited yell from Bob to the band! (Hell, I was yelling, too!)

After an interrupted introduction “This is, uh, this is, uh ‘Yes, I see you’ve got your brand new Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” — the crowd leaped into a suddenly quiet moment and started clapping to try to disrupt, to annoy, to irritate, who knows…— as Bob calmly delivers a wry, then-unreleased cut from the forthcoming “Blonde On Blonde” —- “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat.” New music! Where is this guy going?

Then, it’s quiet again as Robbie (or Bob) tunes up for the next song and the clapping starts and Bob has to lean into the microphone with a bunch of gibberish to quiet them…finally, they stop and he says, gently, almost sweetly, considering it was coming from him — “If you only just wouldn’t clap so hard.” It was almost as if, in that instant, he understood somehow just how far away he was from “Love Me Do” and “Under My Cloud” and everybody else.

Bob follows that with a killer reworking of a cut from his Guthriesque very somber third album (“One Too Many Mornings”) that may never walk the same. As Bob sings “And a thousand miles…” we get Rick Danko and maybe Richard Manuel on the chorus “BEHINNNND.” Go ahead, listen to the original, then this. Talk about recasting a song!

Vibrant, dynamic, explosive, this was no hootenanny or a bunch of “Ban The Bomb” folkies in tweeds and cardigans smoking their pipes, this music had a razor’s edge, fueled by a Bob Dylan strung out on God knows what at the time, this was a sneering, defiant Dylan, absolutely SURE that what he was laying down was great, Goddamn great and it’s too damn bad if they don’t get it. SOMEDAY THEY WILL.

And he was right, wasn’t he?

Then Bob sits down at the keyboard and roars into “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” his takedown of everybody and everything who DOESN’T GET IT. “You have many contacts…anyway they already expect you donate your check to tax-deductible charity organizaaaaations….”

Nobody writes songs like this. Or will ever write songs like this. We can HEAR THAT NOW.

Then, if all the kind folks in the Manchester Trade Hall, their ears buzzing from the sorts of sounds they had just been birthed before them, hadn’t heard enough, there was this moment that lives on — and should.

It comes at the 7:19 minute mark on Disc 20 of the 36-CD set of that 1996 World Tour that of course I had to buy, just after the final chords of “Ballad,” we hear a voice, loud and strong, one that rings out from the crowd, “JUDAS!” and moments later, “Dylan sold out.”

Bob, as collected as a then-not-quite-25-year-old assassin could be, cool and angry as he leans into the microphone and fires back, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!”

Then, he turns to the band and says, loud enough that you can hear it from the stage mike, “Play fucking loud!” and they roar into a majestically angry, the perfect-song-for-that-moment, “Like A Rolling Stone,” a version that soars and burns and explodes over that Manchester stage so ferociously that I almost bet you could hear echoes of it today if you stuck your head in the Trade Hall, 69 years and 11 days later.

There were still more shows to go on that tour that would conclude, as last year’s tour did all these years later, at the Royal Albert Hall, the rumored location for this remarkable set. I was sort of hoping that Bob, just for the hell of it, would play those eight songs from that magical night last year and hang ‘em up.

Of course, he had something else in mind and is back on tour now, at 84, playing Ricky Nelson covers and changing his set list and wrapping that ravaged voice around whatever songs happen to strike his fancy on a particular night.

All the Hawks are gone now, of course. Having seen “Eat The Document” and “No Direction Home,” you never would have thought Bob would have outlasted the bunch of them. And he’s still going.
But I don’t know that he ever again let himself get into a show as intensely as he did that May night 59 years ago. He sang every song, played every harmonica solo, took command of that stage and that band as if it would be the very last time he’d ever do it.

Maybe I’m hearing more than is really there but it seemed at that moment, nothing in the world mattered to Bob Dylan more than putting across his songs the very best, strongest, ass-kickingest way he could think of. And if the audience didn’t get it, screw ‘em. It’s their loss.

How lucky were we that Columbia Records just happened to find a stage where the louder they played, the better it sounded. And that they were there at all was our good fortune. Now, we need our friend Jeff Rosen, who has steered and nudged and tickled Bob in such a surgically strategic way to come up with a final entry for The Bootleg Series, “An Evening With Bob Dylan” — a DVD of the lovely acoustic set and the explosive electric set — even if it repeats some of the “No Direction Home” and “Eat The Document” material — a filmed representation of what it would have been like to see Bob and The Hawks on those stages in Europe in 1966. D.A. Pennebaker did a film we’ve never seen — “Something Is Happening” — and maybe we’ve seen it all, maybe we haven’t, but putting that entire package together would be fantastic. Wouldn’t you love to sit and watch those two sets? By the way, they were almost exactly the same length - 48 minutes each.

According to Clinton Heylin’s “Judas,” the management at the Trade Hall wrote a letter to Tour Manager Tito Burns after the show, complaining about all the equipment on the stage, stating “we were practically held to ransom – if recording was not permitted, then no concert, practically sums up the situation.”

But it did happen, gloriously loud and raw and dynamic and triumphant, a concert that jumps off the vinyl or CD whatever attempts to capture that extraordinary sound.

Bob has never really talked about that tour; he’s mentioned the “Judas” moment of course, but never shared what was in his heart that May night when he and the Hawks had to know that they laid it down like never before and never again. And you bet I listened to it again, writing this. Now, it’s your turn…

THE “JUDAS” MOMENT

John Nogowski is the author of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography, 1961-2022” and will be signing that book, as well as his new baseball book “Diamond Duels” on Saturday at Barnes and Noble from Noon to 2 p.m.