The concert Bob Dylan always regrets: “Truthfully, I was disgusted”
There’s a good chance that Bob Dylan no longer performs live shows with the audience in mind. While any great concert thrives on the interaction between the artist and the crowd, Dylan now seems more focused on inhabiting his songs during live performances, as if he’s trying to infuse the wisdom of his later years into the songs he wrote in his 20s. These tracks carried different meanings in the 1990s than they did in the 1960s, and by the time Dylan received the Grammy ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ in 1991, he seemed indifferent to how his music was being received.
Before we even touch his performance, we have to peel back and see what was happening at the time. Dylan’s music has always been defined by what was happening all around it, and while the early 1990s seemed to be dominated by the rising alternative scene, the oncoming Gulf War was also becoming a major power player in musicians’ lives.
The impending doom of someone potentially wiping out pieces of the world was everywhere, and even Dylan’s friend Tom Petty put his hat into the ring when writing a few lines in the track ‘Learning to Fly’. Everyone could put their protest hat on and write a halfway relevant tune, but Dylan already had everything down to a science with ‘Masters of War’.
Since the war was still fresh in everyone’s mind, Dylan took to the stage for his award with a small band and performed an electrifying version of the 1960s classic, which was bound to divide the room the minute he opened his mouth. Whereas most people could understand why Dylan would be upset, he was more aggrieved that he didn’t have anyone in his corner to support him.
For an event that was supposed to celebrate his musical achievements, Dylan remembered everyone bowing out of various tributes to him for fear of getting on a plane. While some were driven away by fear of what would happen, that didn’t get them off the hook in the songwriter’s eyes.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2001, Dylan lost a lot of respect for many of his contemporaries playing that show, saying, “I knew the lyrics of the song were holding up, and I brought maybe two or three ferocious guitar players. Truthfully, I was disgusted in having to be there after they told me what they intended to do and then backed out. I probably shouldn’t have gone myself.”
In fact, the only reason why Dylan decided to hang around was because of Jack Nicholson, who was more than happy to give the folk songwriter the kudos that he deserved. But Dylan’s disgust says more about how he views his duty as a songwriter.
A lot of the biggest names in music had become more focused on their celebrity status at that point, and whether they claimed it was out of fear that they backed out was never going to be good enough. In Dylan’s eyes, songwriting is all about sticking your neck out on the line for what you believe in, and that means being fearless even when the rest of the world seems to be breathing down your neck.
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