Credit: Far Out / Bob Dylan

The 1985 concert Bob Dylan wishes he never played: “They screwed around with us”

Sat 2 May 2026 19:30, UK

Bob Dylan has never been the easiest person to try to get a read on.

Even though he leaves nothing to the imagination in most of his songs, Dylan is a lot more enigmatic than pretty much any other rock and roll star in the world, to the point where you’re better off not expecting a straight answer out of him every single time he does an interview. But even if he worked best when giving his songs to the people directly, he did feel that some of his performances weren’t given the amount of weight that they really should have.

But Dylan wasn’t trying to judge his entire career on how he played on a certain day. His music was more about finding the best kind of songs for the moment, and even if they didn’t last much longer than any other tune in his catalogue, it was better for him to document how he was feeling whenever he performed some of his old tunes. Which probably explains why some hardcore fans are more befuddled than anything else when they hear him perform nowadays.

Anyone else would have been recycling their greatest hits for decades at this point, but Dylan didn’t want to be known as the same kind of musician that everyone else was. He was still as viable as ever, and while people might have expected him to play tunes like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, it made more sense to pull out some deep cuts and save some of his best-known tunes only for special occasions.

Even if he played by his own rules, though, it’s not like he didn’t know when he needed to play for the right reasons. The Concert for Bangladesh was the first time people got to see him in a while, but the idea of helping relief efforts for those struggling half a world away was enough to snap him back into action. This was what he had designed himself to do ever since writing his 1960s material, so when the call came to do it all over again for Live Aid, Dylan wasn’t going to roll over by any stretch.

But a lot can happen within the span of a decade, and Dylan almost didn’t recognise the kinds of people that he saw onstage. ‘We Are the World’ was already an uncomfortable experience for him whenever he performed, but when he decided to start jamming with Ronnie Wood and couldn’t hear himself, he wasn’t exactly proud of his performance compared to what Queen was doing.

Everyone might have been there with their own agenda, but Dylan felt that he wished he was treated a lot better than he was, saying, “They screwed around with us. We didn’t even have any (sound) monitors out there. When they threw in the grand finale at the last moment, they took all the settings off and set the stage up for the 30 people who were standing behind the curtain. We couldn’t even hear our own voices (out front) and when you can’t hear, you can’t play . . . you don’t have any timing.”

Then again, that wasn’t going to stop Dylan from turning his voice up where he thought it mattered, either. Some of the biggest names in music may have turned up in England and the US for that broadcast, but Dylan was much more comfortable putting on a show like Farm Aid with Willie Nelson, especially since he could see the kind of problems that farmers were dealing with day after day.

Any number of Dylan’s shows can be an acquired taste for some, but Dylan had enough sense to realise when one of his ideas wasn’t working. He could have tried his hardest to pull off the impossible whenever he got in front of the microphone, but if he couldn’t hear himself half the time he was playing, how was he going to get into it in the same way that he used to whenever he put on his own shows?