“If only we’d done three shows”: Bob Dylan and the one show he wanted to play again and again
Bob Dylan was never an artist big on repeating himself. There were occasional pieces of his catalogue that sounded similar, and he certainly had favourite genres he would dip in and out of, but the last thing that he wanted to do was have the audience be one step ahead of him whenever he played one of his shows. He needed to keep everyone on their toes from the minute they saw him, but even he had to admit that there were some performances that he felt could have gone on forever.
Then again, looking at any of Dylan’s performances feels like capturing a certain moment in time. The whole point of him going electric was about leaving his typical folk music in the past, and while a lot of people may have been pissed off the minute he started playing rock and roll, the entire world had already shifted on its axis by the time he had started coming out with tunes like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
However, after getting on that high a pedestal, Dylan slowly started to realise that he had become bigger than he wanted to be. Being the voice of a generation was a heavy burden for anyone to carry, and since Dylan wasn’t looking to please anybody, he figured the next best thing was for him to ease up and make the kind of records that deliberately pivoted away from everything else, like the country-tinged Nashville Skyline.
Even looking at the people he was hanging out with at the time, Dylan was far from the most in-demand artist of his peers. Everyone stood on in wild amazement at his records, but The Band had already started working on Music From Big Pink in the late 1960s, and while he did help George Harrison pen a few tunes on All Things Must Pass, the former Beatle was bound to blow him out of the water in terms of sales.
“it was touch and go. He could have gone home again. [After the show], he picked me up and hugged me, and he said, ‘God! If only we’d done three shows!”
George Harrison
If Dylan couldn’t get as much attention on his albums, though, he was going to get one of his biggest reactions onstage at the Concert for Bangladesh. While Harrison wasn’t sure if Dylan was going to make it to the benefit gig, hearing Dylan perform tunes like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ couldn’t have been more perfectly timed for the moment, knowing of the people suffering in Bangladesh that were already dealing with far too many days of hard rain.
But after the show was over and all the nerves were gone, Harrison remembered that Dylan dropped his signature scowl, saying, “Bob came because, first of all, he knew it had sold out anyway, and he decided he’d like to do this to help a good thing. It was only the night before the concert that we knew he was going to be on the show, but even then, it was touch and go. He could have gone home again. [After the show], he picked me up and hugged me, and he said, ‘God! If only we’d done three shows!”
Despite everyone having a great time, though, Dylan didn’t have a good enough time for him to stick around for much longer. He had played everything that he wanted, and considering how he wouldn’t release another album until 1973 proved that he was not interested in keeping up the hot streak simply because there was higher demand.
He was an artist in every sense of the word, and while he was no doubt proud that he was able to do some good for rock and roll as a whole, Dylan was never going to play for the sake of playing. All his art was a reflection of him, so if he wanted to get back up onstage for anything, it was going to have to mean something greater than a single tour.
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