“So small”: the legendary show Bob Dylan never thought was special
Bob Dylan at Woodstock, 1969. It’s got a good ring to it, and sounds exactly like the sort of thing that feels likely to have taken place in some alternate universe, but for the one that we live in, it remarkably never happened.
Dylan famously rejected playing at the legendary festival in its first incarnation, despite being the exact sort of artist who would have been expected to perform there. There was plenty of speculation as to why he declined the opportunity to appear on the grand stage alongside some of the most illustrious acts of the era, and among those was the notion that he’d said that he was worried that the festival attracting big crowds would ruin the peace and quiet that he’d found living there, and was therefore never hounded by the festival to come and play.
In reality, he’d also been booked to play at the Isle of Wight Festival that year, and his travel by boat was scheduled to set sail to the UK on the same day that the New York festival commenced. It wasn’t ever really the case that he didn’t want to play at Woodstock, although that may have been a slight factor, but the reality was that he wasn’t actually available to perform at Woodstock in the first place.
However, after decades of touring and maintaining a fanbase through consistent releases of new material, Dylan’s opinion of the festival seemingly softened enough so that he’d be asked to play at the 25th anniversary of the festival in 1994. If there was indeed any bad blood between the organisers and Dylan, then it had all but blown over by this point, and he was more than happy to agree to appear at their second ever event.
By this point in his career, he hadn’t wound down his schedule much, but revealed in a 1995 interview with USA Today that he didn’t seem to think that the rigorous schedule was all that impressive. “There’s a certain part of you that becomes addicted to a live audience,” Dylan expressed. “I wouldn’t keep doing it if I was tired of it. I do about 125 shows a year. It may sound like a lot to people who don’t work that much, but it isn’t. BB King is working 350 nights a year.”
As for his performance at Woodstock the year before, he was asked by interviewer Edna Gundersen whether he felt as though being asked to play at the anniversary event was a special occasion, and Dylan’s response did everything to suggest that he was pretty nonplussed by everything. “It was just another show, really,” he admitted. “We just blew in and blew out of there. You do wonder if you’re coming across, because you feel so small on a stage like that.”
Something evidently has to be truly special for Dylan to really seem like he cares, and this was not up to the high standards that he seemingly set for his performances to reach. He may well have been right about how difficult it is to reach an audience at such a large-scale event, especially if not everyone is there to see him, but at the same time, you’d have thought that finally getting gifted the opportunity to play at a momentous occasion like this would have at least registered in his mind.
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