Did Bob Dylan try to get rid of his own fans?
Bob Dylan has always had a complex relationship with fame. In the music world, it’s not enough to just be an artist. Especially within our modern understanding of the industry, musicians must also be public figures whose lives their fans get to pry into way beyond simply digging into their lyricism. Dylan clearly never wanted to play that game as he, at several points, seemed to be on a mission to get rid of his fans.
“The press?” Dylan writes in his book Chronicles, “I figured you lie to it. For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible.” Originally the disciple of the folk greats, initially thinking his music could make a difference to people, Dylan’s relationship with publicity seemed to switch the second he abandoned that. As he lost faith, or perhaps simply interest, in talking about things that matter, he seemed to no longer want to talk at all.
Maybe the electric Dylan moment was the first clear example of Dylan actively pushing people away. While obviously a moment when he honoured his artistic whims by refusing to less traditional genre constraints squash his creativity, there was undoubtedly a side to which the musician knew this would piss a lot of people off. With the release of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the start of these more full-band, rock-informed songs, Dylan was willing, or even eager, to lose his folk followers.
But while that can be brushed off as an artist needing to be bold in order to move forward, arguing that Dylan was simply inviting his fans to evolve with him, he suddenly started actively pushing away those who stayed. His reclusiveness stepped up again in the mid-to-late 1960s when he moved away from New York, out towards Woodstock, and started making Self Portrait—an album that appeared like a weapon.
Dylan himself said it best: “And I said \Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you know? They’ll go on to somebody else.”
When he came to make his 1970 album, that was the clear motivation; Bob Dylan wanted to get rid of his fans. He wanted to be left alone and escape the fame he’d fostered, telling Rolling Stone, “There’d be crowds outside my house,” as the celebrity that came with his artistic success made him hate the whole thing.
So he made an album he thought surely no one could like, complete with some of his all-time worst tracks, like ‘All the Tired Horses’ and a bunch of random covers. Including some fully instrumental tracks, too, he ripped away from his fans exactly what they like him for, which is his poetic lyricism and his voice. Denying them exactly what first made him a star, he was on a mission to stop being one.
But it didn’t work. “The whole idea backfired,” Dylan said as the demands for more and normal music only got louder. By that point, though, Dylan’s almost god-like status was locked in. He was a legend, and people were going to say that and believe it, realistically, no matter what he did. Even the artist couldn’t dethrone himself.
Yet still, there’s a degree to which Dylan is still on a mission to throw off his fans. Through all his career twists and turns, whether it was becoming super spiritual or leaning into ‘80s pop-rock, there always seems to be a degree to which he’s trying to shake off some of the burdening weight of the sheer amount of people paying attention to it. It’s reflected in his live shows today as there are no phones allowed, meaning there are no videos of him performing to extend beyond that immediate crowd, once again trying to narrow the scale of his success down even long into his old age.
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