The day in 1998 when four of folk’s greatest ever icons were all in the same room but “too shy” to speak to each other
Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Lucinda Williams all walk into a folk bar – no, it’s not the beginning of a really shit joke. It did actually happen.
Well, it was technically an amphitheatre rather than a bar, if you want to get picky about it, but the point remained that four of the greatest folk legends were all in one space, at one time, a night to remember for the ages, right… I hate to burst your bubble, but it actually wasn’t – none of them even spoke to each other.
While you could easily blame Morrison for his hermit tendencies, putting a wall of tension between him and the other artists, it wasn’t actually fully his fault. Indeed, all four of the folk legends could take a portion of the guilt for the fact that they each turned up to watch and perform at a gig in California, but they were all too shy to approach one another.
In some ways, it could be considered a miracle that Morrison and Dylan even got together in the first place to go on the road for their 1998 tour – neither of them is exactly known for their sparkling social skills, you can imagine that that tour bus probably wasn’t the most jovial affair.
And to an extent, this was part of the reason that when Waits and Williams turned up to the show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, each of the quartet simply felt too intimidated by the other. Williams later recalled that it went down like this: she was asked if she would like to meet Waits, but was feeling too shy to go backstage to find him.
So, he was asked if he would like to come out front and meet her, to which his feelings were reciprocated. As for Morrison and Dylan? They never revealed themselves either, and were hiding in separate spaces behind the stage. At least for that part, the eschewing of the spotlight – and of other people – was nothing particularly new.
Williams couldn’t have put it into better words when she said: “So there we all were, these neurotic folk singers, hiding. It was so funny. All these legendary people in one place and everybody’s too shy to come say hello.” It’s actually ironic when you think about it. Four such prolific wordsmiths, and yet they were too awkward to string a sentence together in real life.
Of course, you could lambast the group of them for this, calling it vanity or self-absorption or sheer stubbornness. But here’s the thing – what if they weren’t putting up pretences, and were genuinely nervous of each other? After all, with all that talent burning up in one cramped place, it was easy to be outshone.
When the regular crowd of punters went their separate ways at the end of that night, they could have potentially done so without realising the greatest ever folk dynasty that was so closely in their midst. Four bona fide legends of their time, and yet they outright refused to get up on stage together, let alone even grace each other’s presence. An absolute abomination.
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