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The one festival that Bob Dylan wanted nothing to do with: “I felt they exploited the shit out of that”

Wed 22 April 2026 4:00, UK

It’s almost an impossible task trying to gauge the kind of mood that Bob Dylan was ever going to have when it came to his music.

Some days, he would be looking like the one person who was going to save rock and roll, but it didn’t take much for him to tear his entire persona down and emerge looking like someone else every single time he came out with a new record. He changed his persona in the same way that David Bowie did from album to album, but even when the rest of the world banded together around him, he knew that it was time to burn the whole operation down.

Because as much as Dylan liked the idea of preaching to his musical congregation like Woody Guthrie did, he probably didn’t expect the baggage that came along with that. He wanted to share music with the masses, but you’d have to wonder at what cost when you look at the sheer number of times that he was being heralded as the voice of a generation and the one who was going to lead things into the future. So when he had a house in Woodstock, it didn’t take long for the town to become ground zero for the Summer of Love.

While Dylan might have been out in the country, it didn’t take long for Michael Lang to get the idea of putting together a festival of the greatest talent of the day. This was going to be the festival to end all festivals, and even though the rest of the world hadn’t grasped the hippie movement just yet, they were about to get a good idea when listening to Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young play at the first Woodstock festival.

And when you look at the personnel there, it did feel like a musical utopia was about to happen. They weren’t able to pull bands like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, but even with Hendrix looking like one of the greatest musicians that ever lived at the festival, Dylan did everything within his power to make sure that he was as far away from that kind of movement as he possibly could.

Everyone would have loved to see him there, but he felt the only way to preserve that part of his life was to not be there at all, saying, “I didn’t want to be part of that thing. I liked the town. I felt they exploited the shit out of that, going up there and getting 15 million people all in the same spot. That don’t excite me. The flower generation – is that what it was? I wasn’t into that at all. I just thought it was a lot of kids out and around wearing flowers in their hair taking a lot of acid.” And if we’re being fair, Dylan does have a point.

It’s not like every single hippie was out there to exploit the movement, but there were definitely a bunch of people who weren’t actually in it because they believed in world peace. Even when George Harrison ended up visiting San Francisco in the midst of the Summer of Love, even he admitted that most of the movement was a bunch of bums getting together to make the greatest festival they had ever seen.

Once Dylan did finally re-emerge, though, he had already started focusing on something entirely different. He had already been recovering from his motorcycle accident, and hearing him picking up on country music on Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding was his way of reinventing himself, almost like the drug-addled poet behind ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ had been left behind on that highway that he had his accident on.

So while the rest of the world could try all they wanted to create the kind of musical paradise during Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’, Dylan figured that the revolution needed to go on without him. He was always one step ahead of everyone else, and when an entire rebellion started to form around him, the only logical thing left to do was rebel against the very thing he created.