The artist that gave Bob Dylan an identity crisis
As one of the greatest songwriters of all time, it is difficult to imagine Bob Dylan getting humbled. The countercultural icon came onto the scene during the 1960s and has remained a well-loved and respected artist for the past six decades. However, back in the 1980s, the folk star experienced an identity crisis after an Australian tour, which led him to an onstage epiphany that reinvigorated his career.
A disciple of Woody Guthrie, Dylan entered the mainstream consciousness in the mid-1960s among the countercultural movement. As his career progressed, the singer-songwriter began experimenting with different musical styles, from blues rock to gospel, continuously receiving mountains of praise for his genius songwriting. Still touring at the age of 82, Dylan was even awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2016.
So, who could cause such a distinguished and respected artist such as Bob Dylan to have a crisis of identity? In 1985, Dylan performed at the inaugural Farm Aid benefit concert. The gig had come about after Dylan’s controversial comments surrounding Live Aid, in which he expressed a desire for money to go to farmers in America rather than victims of the famine in Ethiopia. Elsewhere on the Farm Aid bill was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who backed Dylan during his set at the benefit.
“We backed him up at Farm Aid and it went really well,” Petty once revealed, “And then afterwards in the trailer, Bob came back and said, ‘Hey, what would you think of doing a tour? I’ve got a tour of Australia I want to do, and what would you guys think of doing that?’ And we’d all been huge Dylan fans, and we were very intrigued by the idea of playing with Bob. So off we went.”
The tour was a huge success, and Petty’s group ended up backing Dylan for nearly two years. During this period of touring, Dylan experienced a crisis of identity, as he believed the audiences were more excited to see Petty than himself. “I had been going on my name for a long time, name and reputation, which was about all I had,” Dylan said in the book Dylan On Dylan, adding, “I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell … I didn’t feel I knew who I was on stage.”
Famously, Dylan’s live shows have the potential to be a bit hit-and-miss. The songwriter often rewrites his classic hits or performs them in a wildly different fashion from the original recordings. He received criticism on his last UK tour for not playing many of his bigger tracks, but when touring with Tom Petty, he noted that audiences seemed to favour the younger artist. Apparently, the tour even led Dylan to consider retirement after seeing how much more popular Petty was.
Thankfully, though, Dylan managed to keep going. Experiencing some form of awakening onstage, “Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension,” he wrote, “Even I was surprised. It left me kind of shaky. Immediately, I was flying high”. So perhaps we have Tom Petty to thank for Dylan’s continued activity over the past four decades after that fateful Australian tour.
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