Why Mick Jagger "couldn’t record" like Bob Dylan

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Why Keith Richards thought Bob Dylan was “a nasty little bugger”

Fri 12 August 2022 18:00, UK

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have a twisted relationship fit for the sofa of a rock ‘n’ roll incarnation of Jerry Springer. Dylan is usually shy on both praise and cutting remarks, usually leaning towards the mystically obscure, but he has lavished and lashed Richards and the Rolling Stones with both. Richards, on the other hand, is no stranger to a blunt bird flip, but he’s usually just stockily respectful when it comes to old Bob.

A paradigm for this came to the fore when they performed together in Montpellier. As Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson recalled on the Howard Stern show, the Stones asked Dylan to join them on stage, but things went awry. “They go around to the chorus and then they come up to Bob’s turn,” Robinson explained.

Continuing: “Bob goes to the mic and doesn’t sing anything. And you see them look around and they’re like, ‘Okay.’ Cos it’s like you missed a turn at a roundabout and you gotta go all the way back around. So, they go all the way around again…and he just leans into the mic and turns away.”

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 “F–k you!” and gave them the finger, that said in no uncertain terms ‘Now you don’t talk so loud’. “It was the best fucking concert I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s incredible. I can see Keith, he goes ‘Don’t be like that, Bob!’” Robinson concludes with a shit-eating grin.

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Their hymn sheets came from different religions. As Robinson explained it, “The Stones don’t jam; they don’t deviate […] they go around the chorus, and then they come up to Bob’s turn. So the band brings the [rhythm], and Bob goes to the mic and doesn’t sing it. And you see them looking around, and they’re like ‘Okay’, it’s kinda like you’ve missed the turn at a roundabout, and you got to go all the way around.” As seemingly with The Stones’ one-way track had Dylan thinking they were fittingly left with no direction home.

All the same, Dylan has also blessed the Stones with the highest praise of all. In fact, he once lauded them with the highest praise of all, proclaiming: “The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too.” Even adding: “Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it… you can trace it all back to The Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one’s ever done it better.”

Nevertheless, he has also bluntly told Richards that their back catalogue is well within the reach of his unrivalled songwriting prowess. And this cut Richards, the guitarist once recalled: “Bob’s a nasty little bugger. I remember him saying to me, ‘I could have written ‘Satisfaction’, but you couldn’t have written ‘Desolation Row‘’. I said, ‘well, you’re right there, Bob.’”

Perhaps that uncharacteristic deferral is owing to how highly Richards and his bandmates regard ‘Desolation Row’, in particular. Mick Jagger even called it his favourite Dylan track, stating: “Desolation Row’s lyrics are just so interesting and diverse. It isn’t a real street so you create your own fantasy. I imagine an unforgiving place, somewhere you don’t want to spend much time, peopled with strange characters. The opening line about the ‘postcards of the hanging’ sets the tone, but then this awful event is juxtaposed with ‘the beauty parlour filled with sailors’ and all these circus people.”

Concluding: “Musically, he prettifies it. I love the lovely half-Spanish guitar lines from the session guitarist, Charlie McCoy. It’s actually a really lovely song, which shouldn’t work with the imagery but does. You can listen to it all the time and still get something wonderful and new from it.”

I suppose all of this just goes to show that nastiness and respect can coexist in the prickly world of rock. If someone calls your band the greatest in the world, then do you really care if they’re nasty about the depth of one of your biggest hits? Probably not, especially when there’s more than a grain of truth to it.