Thanks to the many people who responded to the Dylan post yesterday with relevant links of one kind and another. First, with regard to my question about the booing, several people sent me this piece by Andy Kershaw about 'the most famous heckler in rock'n'roll history'. See also this post by Rob at Eine Kleine Nichtmusik. He was at the Free Trade Hall in 1966. An email from 'random noize dude':
A friend suggested... that it wasn't amplification per se that got their goat, but rather very poor amplification (= they had paid their money and then couldn't hear properly). I suspect there is embarrassed revisionism in this claim - but also some truth: the live sound in the Scorsese doc is excellent by virtue of modern sound-tidying techniques and therefore surely in no way representative of how amplification would have sounded to the audience in 1966, when it was still a very raw and untried technology.Rob Spence points me towards this site of a billion recollections. See also the discussion at Mick Hartley; and - specially for Rosh Hashanah - Talkin' Hava Nagilah Blues (h/t: L).