The singer Bob Dylan never wanted to be like: “I’m not gonna give it all”
Bob Dylan was certainly an acquired taste to anyone who was looking for a casual rock and roll show back in the day.
He may have loved the rock and roll icons like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but whenever he had a microphone in front of him, Dylan was never going to play the same bog-standard hits that everyone heard from him on his records. He could still give people a night to remember, but that came more from the variations that he put into his music than from looking larger than life.
Because, really, who the hell was expecting Dylan’s shows to be a spectacle? His entire ethos was about stripping a song down to its bare essentials on half of his record, and even when he did bring in the rock and roll instrumentation, you weren’t going to hear the same off-the-wall solos that Eric Clapton played, much less the theatrical music that you heard out of someone like David Bowie.
He knew what he was capable of onstage, and that suited him fine throughout his career. There would be a few occasions where he would have people like The Band, The Grateful Dead, and even Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers playing with him, but no one ever questioned Dylan whenever he kicked off a tune. Not everything was recognisable compared to the original, but Dylan was never interested in being some rock and roll puppet whenever he played his music, either.
He was the consummate artist in a lot of ways, and that meant giving people the best version of himself that he could muster in the moment. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ may have been one of his signature songs throughout the 1970s, but whenever he performed it, there was no telling whether was going to play it in the same key, at the same tempo, or throw verses out entirely when they weren’t relevant to him anymore.
That may have been frustrating for fans, but it was all part of the mystique behind him as well. Everyone understood that they were never going to see the real man behind all of those classic hits, and even if they got a good idea of what he looked like and sounded like, he was always going to be talking out of both sides of his mouth whenever someone asked him to explain any of his tunes.
He could still get the job done whenever he performed, but he felt that it was useless for him to give the kind of showstopping gigs that he saw Judy Garland give back in the day, saying, “I’m not giving anybody a hundred per cent. I’m gonna give you this much, and this much is gonna have to do. I’m good at what I do. I can afford to give you this much and still be as good as, if not better than, the guy over across the street.’ I’m not gonna give it all – I’m not Judy Garland, who’s gonna die onstage in front of a thousand clowns.”
And when he was on tour with Petty, Dylan himself already started to realise that he was pushing himself a little bit too far. He remembered later about the show where he had a musical epiphany and nearly stopped playing halfway through the set, but even if all he did was recite his lyrics in front of a crowd, that was usually enough for everyone to be glued to the stage when he opened his mouth.
Not all of it was perfectly in tune, but Dylan needed to make sure all of his shows were human before anything else. There are plenty of bands that have their music down to a science, but what Dylan has been doing for years is giving people different looks at the kind of artist that he wants to be.
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