The one musician who gave Bob Dylan an identity crisis: “I didn’t feel I knew who I was on stage”
Over the past 60 years, Bob Dylan has left little to doubt about how strongly he believes in himself and his craft, sometimes to the point of pompousness, but even being hailed as one of the greatest musicians of all time isn’t enough to keep one from feeling insecure every now and then.
For proof, let’s rewind to 1985, when Dylan partnered up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the Farm Aid benefit concert in Champaign, Illinois, for a creative leap from an artistic standpoint.
Despite the disparate fanbase as a result of getting their start in the business a decade apart, this was an incredibly well-received performance, which prompted them to further embark on the True Confessions Tour series across Australia the following year.
The trek too turned out to be a massive hit, so much so that they continued playing together well past their commitments in the ‘Land Down Under’. However, during their nearly two-year tally on the road, witnessing the Florida native’s colossal star power firsthand gave the folk hero Dylan a lot to think about regarding his own standing with the people, especially since he began to feel as though the crowds weren’t nearly as interested in him as they were in Petty.
“I remember playing shows and looking out [thinking] I didn’t have that many fans coming to see me,” he said in an interview published in Dylan on Dylan, “They were coming to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.”
Mind you, this was in 1986, at which point Dylan had been an active musician for almost two decades, while Petty had just reached the very peak of his popularity among the generation in control of popular culture, so there may have been some validity to his concerns. At the same time, Dylan has never been just another artist whose cultural significance is so easily susceptible to dissipation, where only a handful of musicians can boast the monumental impact he has had on the world, so it’s rather funny that he himself lost sight of that.
“I had been going on my name for a long time, name and reputation, which was about all I had,” Dylan recalled, “I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell…I didn’t feel I knew who I was on stage”.
At one point, he even started thinking about calling it quits and outright retiring from music, except he had an epiphany while performing one night that kept him from doing so. In his book, Chronicles: Volume One, he wrote, “Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension. Even I was surprised. It left me kind of shaky. Immediately, I was flying high”.
Petty also remembered a switch in Dylan’s demeanour, as stated in his biography, “I remember having a shock when he went to sing and nothing came out. He just kind of took a deep breath and came back, full-voiced”, showing that sometimes, it’s just about taking a moment to realise you need to let the talent speak rather than your insecurities.
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