“I feel bad about those”: the bands Bob Dylan regretted not seeing live
If you had a time machine, what classic band or artist would be top of your list to see? Let’s be real here: you can keep your Roman Empire, your hanging gardens of Babylon, or even your distant futures aside. If you give the opportunity to jump in the Tardis to anyone reading this site, chances are their first course of action would be to watch a band live that they missed for one reason or another. It could be Bob Dylan, Public Enemy, Joni Mitchell or any number of artists. Maybe it was a missed opportunity, or perhaps they were just born in the wrong generation. Either way, it’s an experience lost.
Because that’s the truth of the matter, isn’t it? We don’t think of music as a temporary medium. Rock history is immortal, right? The records will last forever; if you write great songs and record them well enough, people will remember your name for generations to come. That’s certainly one part of rock stardom, but the other is very different: the performance. Arguably, it’s the most crucial part of the job in the minds of some people, and certainly mine.
That side of the job is fleeting, though. Not just in the way that human lives are fleeting either, although rock history has shown that mortality is something all of us must worry about when it comes to our heroes. We also have to worry about whether the band or artists are willing to work together to make that old magic happen. Look me in the eye and tell me that seeing the Pixies without Kim Deal is the same as seeing them with her.
Even our heroes feel the same. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 1969, Bob Dylan was asked about keeping up with the then-modern pop scene, and he responded, “I try to keep up-to-date… I realise I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to. I don’t know half the groups that are playing around now. I don’t know half of what I should.”
When pushed for any groups he’d seen, he could only name those he’d missed, saying, “I never saw Traffic… I never even saw Cream. I feel bad about those things, but what can I do?”
Granted, his case is a little different from ours. There’s a big gulf between missing out on the great band of your era because you didn’t keep your ear to the ground and missing out because you’re busy being literal Bob Dylan. There is something comfortingly universal about that, though, right? Not even Bob Dylan can keep complete track of all the ridiculously exciting things going on in music all the time.
I think that’s the thing to bear in mind in the end. It’s fun to imagine what it would be like to see The Beatles in Hamburg, Aretha Franklin at Fillmore West, or (in my case) The White Stripes at The Astoria. However, that is sort of missing the point of live music. There are always going to be incredible things happening, and if you keep your eyes trained on the past, you’ll miss it.
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