Bob Dylan’s scathing critique of five classic bands
“I met a young man who was wounded in love,” Bob Dylan once sang, “I met another man who was wounded in hatred.” While the lyrical master has endlessly discerned the human condition in song, he’s been rather more guarded with his thoughts and opinions away from the microphone. When he first burst on the scene, he might have been the big mouthpiece of a generation, but he quickly learned to acquiesce from that behaviour in favour of peace, and he has since kept his trap shu,t bar the odd comic putdown.
Nevertheless, he can be prodded into the odd remark, and when he is, his insight explodes like a Buddhist excitedly breaking a vow of silence. When that happens, it is always highly notable and never dull. He’s not a man of hate, but he’s certainly not a man of hero-worshipping either. While others wax lyrical, Dylan is happy to step out every now and again to redress the balance.
This means that Dylan by no means hates The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, merely that he has hated them in the non-fixed, verb sense. In fact, Kiss are perhaps the only band where Dylan’s hate has actually solidified as a noun. One thing that is for certain, regardless of whether his dislike was fleeting or fixed, the crux that really comes to the fore from the comments below is that the master definitely likes things a certain way.
What’s more, it’s worth remembering that this is only a bit of fun and aside from the odd jibe, Dylan has done more than his fair share of shaming cynicism. As he crooned himself: “Love and only love, that’s what makes the world go around.” Now, there’s a boldly simple lesson to live by, the rest of the rattling ridicule below is just a brief jaunt into the flipside for fun.
Five bands Bob Dylan hated:
Kiss
In the early 1980s, a strange hysteria swept over the US. The trend that is now dubbed The Satanic Panic saw vigilante parents turf up the grounds around a preschool in search of secret tunnels, in the end, they were just digging for dirt. Judas Priest were then accused of inexplicably killing off their fanbase with coded messages urging suicide. And then KISS’ Gene Simmons was suspected of having the tongue of a cow. Essentially, the only cause for this devilish meshuga was an increase in working hours. This resulted in parents spending less time with their children, and the guilt this induced manifested in a bizarre way amid the rise of the religious right. In other words, Little Tommy wasn’t less guided because his parents weren’t around, the real reason was because of nasty bands like Kiss, the Reverend said so.
However, KISS didn’t just receive a barrage of abuse from worried guardians; a born-again Bob Dylan was at it, too. While performing at the University of Arizona, the audience grew tired of him purely singing songs praising Christ and began to demand a few hits. Dylan fumed and thought that the time had a-changed for the worst.
He scathingly yelled: “If you want rock ‘n’ roll, you can go see KISS and rock ‘n’ roll all the way down to the pit.” This was the start of his belief that Simmons and his satanic face-painted cohorts were on their way to hell, and their gimmicky rock sound was not to his taste either. He’s still never rectified his take on the group, so perhaps it still stands that he found them to be a sinful pantomime.
Led Zeppelin
Dylan isn’t the most outspoken about his peers, so often, you happen upon his opinions almost inadvertently. As the comical story goes, Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant infamously approached the folk troubadour in 1974 backstage at a Los Angeles show and with an extended hand announced, “Hello Bob, I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.” Dylan then proceeded to dismiss the handshake and utter with unerring wit and disdain, “Do I come to you with my problems?”
Despite his comical tiff with Peter Grant, Dylan has remained on good personal terms with the rest of his fans in Led Zeppelin. They just came at a time when Dylan was concerned that rock ‘n’ roll was losing its glorious mix and being racially segregated into black soul and white British rock. Whether or not Led Zeppelin remains beyond Dylan’s own taste, he is not the sort who would fail to recognise that they have, indeed, fulfilled the highest purpose of art (according to Dylan himself) and inspired a generation of musicians.
However, they were, unlike many of their peers, notably absent from his Philosophy of Modern Song book—perhaps deemed not quite worthy of in-depth analysis?
The Beatles
Dylan grew to love The Beatles, but there was a period when he surely hated them, or at the very least, he resented them. In the end, Dylan might have told biographer Anthony Scaduto, “I just kept it to myself that I really dug them,” but he didn’t keep it to himself that he found them to be commercially inclined “cop-outs” and copycats in the beginning too.
“The Beatles are accepted, and you’ve got to accept them for what they do. They play songs like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’, a lot of smoothness there,” Dylan sneered in an interview with Robert Shelton for No Direction Home. Adding: “Yeah, it’s the thing to do, to tell all the teeny boppers ‘I dig The Beatles’, and you sing a song like ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Michelle’. Hey God knows, it’s such a cop-out, man, both of those songs. […] There are millions of songs like ‘Michelle and ‘Yesterday’ being written in Tin Pan Alley.”
So, there was the first dig landed—spearing them as commercialists. However, perhaps he was just temporarily annoyed that he thought they were imitating him with tracks like ‘Fourth Time Around’ as he raged: “What is this? It’s me Bob. [Lennon’s] doing me. Even Sonny & Cher are doing me, but, fucking hell, I invented it”. Since then, he’s sang their praises enough times to balance the books.
The Rolling Stones
Once again, Bob Dylan certainly doesn’t hate The Rolling Stones, he thinks they’re the last great rock ‘n’ roll band, but he has hated them. He may have said,“The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be,” but as a true punk, that doesn’t mean he holds them as unimpeachable heroes.
“I love Mick Jagger. I mean, I go back a long ways with him, and I always wish him the best,” Dylan once said. “But to see him jumping around like he does — I don’t give a shit in what age, from Altamont to RFK Stadium — you don’t have to do that, man.” He dismissed that gyrating as juvenile stuff that couldn’t hold a torch to the raw power of Howlin’ Wolf.While that might be a mere critique, there was a time when he fell out of love with the band to such an extent that they almost came to blows. As Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson recalled on the Howard Stern show, the Stones asked Dylan to join them on stage in France, 1995, but things went awry. “Bob goes to the mic and doesn’t sing anything. And you see them look around and they’re like, ‘Okay’.” Dylan eventually sang a few words, before walking off stage. As he left, he offered them up the ultimate ‘You’ll go your way and I’ll go mine’ gesture. According to Robinson, as soon as he got to the side of the stage he looked back at The Stones, shouted “Fuck you!” and gave them the finger, that said in no uncertain terms ‘Now you don’t talk so loud’. In short, he simply hated their rigid style and has never played with them since.
Simon and Garfunkel
You might think of Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel as the ultimate contemporaries; they both even made the journey over to England to learn the folk ways of Bond Street, but they didn’t always get on. The week before Simon and Garfunkel were set to play their first scheduled show at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan met Paul Simon, and the duo famously had nothing to say to each other in an awkward and cagey encounter.
When the show came about, Dylan slunk to the end of the bar with the critic Robert Shelton, as a hush descended and their set began, Dylan started guffawing at what was supposed to be a spiritual moment. The band kept playing, cutting a vicious glance in his direction, but the laughter didn’t abate, and, like the vicar farting at a funeral, the whole gingham-clad congregation cringed en masse. While Shelton said the giggles were merely bad timing, he did confirm that the meeting the week before was frosty enough to open up the potential that Dylan was scoffing intentionally. He described it as “an encounter typical of New York’s paranoia and instant rivalries.” When Simon later penned a song mocking the ‘original vagabond’, it confirmed their status as best of enemies. Once again, something that they have since put behind themselves, even if Dylan did once badmouth them in the Village.
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