Bob Dylan - 1965 - London - Royal Albert Hall

Credit: Far Out / Alamy

The counterculture colleague Bob Dylan called hard to get along with: “A colourful and unpredictable character”

Fri 10 April 2026 19:15, UK

Bob Dylan doesn’t typically strike anyone as the most agreeable person in the world whenever he gets in front of a microphone.

It was hard to get a read on the guy for two seconds at a time during his peak years in the 1960s, and even when looking at him in the modern day, it’s almost more difficult to figure out what he’s trying to say in his interviews. But even if he left all of his private moments for when he wrote songs, Dylan did remember that there were some musicians who could be more than a little bit tough around the edges when he first started singing his ballads.

Then again, Dylan was always talking out of both sides of his mouth, even when he seemed to be honest with you – he wanted to make sure that no one got to see the full man underneath it all, and while he did usually bob and weave through every single question a journalist had to ask him, even the people closest to him only got to see a little bit of the man who had written all of those classic songs back in the day.

Not even The Band could have told you what he was like from day to day, but when looking at the rest of the rock and roll scene, Dylan could at least see when some bands understood his work. The Byrds may have launched a thousand jangle-pop bands when they started covering Dylan’s work, but there’s a good chance that ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ would have been the massive hit that it was were it not for Roger McGuinn’s guitar part soaring over top of it.

The Byrds were practically the halfway house between The Beatles and Dylan, but David Crosby was already looking to break free from the norm whenever he started working with them. He had grown up listening to more sophisticated music, and while rock and roll was a great place for him to start, he wanted to focus on being the best musician that he could, no matter if it meant rolling over anyone else in his path.

And while Dylan could definitely respect that, he admitted that Crosby was going to be the kind of person that people were either going to love or hate, saying, “Crosby was a colourful and unpredictable character, wore a Mandrake the Magician cape, didn’t get along with too many people and had a beautiful voice – an architect of harmony. He was tottering on the brink of death even then and could freak out a whole city block all by himself, but I liked him a lot.”

That admiration went both ways, but Crosby could also be perfectly blunt when it came to Dylan’s songwriting. He could shoot straight when he said that Dylan didn’t have the greatest voice on a lot of his songs, and even though he claimed that Joni Mitchell was miles ahead of Dylan from a musical perspective, there was no doubt that Mr Zimmerman created a whole new world for musicians to work in that they hadn’t even thought of before.

But if you really want to know how divisive Crosby could be, just look at a lot of his bandmates in Crosby, Stills and Nash. To say that Crosby was a loose cannon during his lifetime would be severely underselling it, and while he did find himself on the straight and narrow eventually, the fact that he was able to constantly survive drug escapades and face serious jail time was the kind of rap sheet that would have made Ol’ Dirty Bastard telling him to tone things down if he had seen what he was doing.

Sure, Crosby could have had a few moments where he felt he shouldn’t have opened his mouth, his story was ultimately a tale of rock and roll survival. He may be playing beautiful music on the other side of the cosmos these days, but the fact that he was making fantastic tunes until the end of his career was proof that the natural high of making music was all he really needed.