Why Bob Dylan will never change his performing style: “Commercially, it would have gone down well”
Commercial appeal and maintaining artistic principles is a battle that has been waged on in the pages of music history since its very beginning, with very few artists able to toe the line between the two.
If there is one artist who has never been willing to bend to the wants and demands of the music industry, however, it is Bob Dylan.
If the music industry had its way, Dylan might still be churning out uninspiring renditions of traditional folk songs to this very day, in the same spirit as his 1962 debut. Instead, the songwriter has consistently marched to the beat of his own drum, subverting expectations and refusing to conform to audience or industry expectations of him. Back in 1965, for instance, he alienated a core section of his fanbase when he ‘went electric’ at Newport Folk Festival, but, in the long run, it only spread his legend further across the globe.
Even then, though, Dylan was not content to do the same thing forever – hence his Self Portrait album, created in a deliberate and successful attempt to reject the expectations of his fans. This sense of reinvention has followed the songwriter throughout his extensive discography, in fact, seeing him embrace everything from those age-old folk sounds to the pious world of gospel music. Still, there is a not insignificant part of his audience who would prefer if he stuck to those iconic mid-1960s works which made him a countercultural icon all those years ago.
For the most part, though, the songwriter has rejected those pleas, particularly within his performing career. Although he does still perform the likes of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ on occasion, Dylan has never felt troubled to stick to the original arrangement, instead creating a litany of improvisations, pastiches, and genre-defying versions of his old material – much to the chagrin of certain audience members.
In this world of reunion tours and band reformations, nostalgia is big business. So, it should come as no surprise that Dylan has fielded a wealth of offers to tour his old material in the modern age but, to his credit, the songwriter has never succumbed to those offers. During one interview, for instance, he revealed, “I was offered certain amounts of money to do the old songs or the old show we used to have with the old songs done in a new way, but I couldn’t do it.”
For an artist like Dylan, money rarely enters into the equation; since his early days back in the 1960s, he has always been driven by his staunch artistic principles rather than a chequebook. “My heart wasn’t [in it],” he continued. “Commercially, it would have gone down well, I guess, but you can do things as an artist and know you’re slipping, but the audience will buy it. It will leave you with a very unfulfilled, very empty feeling.”
Dylan is something of an outlier in that sense; there are countless other artists, many of whom he might once have considered contemporaries, who would have no problem shilling out for a nostalgia-fueled tour provided it brought enough money into the bank.
Dylan, on the other hand, seems to gain more sustenance from satisfying his artistic drive than any amount of money could provide. Perhaps that is why he is one of the select few artists of his stature who could never be considered to have ‘sold out’.
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