The three things that will always piss off Bob Dylan
By now, I’m sure no one is under any false impressions that Bob Dylan isn’t an easy man to please. “You’re an idiot, babe,” he once sang succinctly in one of his many, many diss tracks dealing direct with decades worth of gripes.
In his defence, Dylan has always remained pretty tight-lipped about who his songs are about. But either way, annoyance surely stands out as one of the key emotions in his discography. Frustration and hatred follow suit as tracks like ‘Positively 4th Street’ go right for the throat, while even what might seem like a love song on the surface has bite to it as he signs off ‘Just Like A Woman’ by requesting that its muse act like they’ve never met.
All of it is backed up by stories from his life, too, like the folklore about him using an original Warhol as a dartboard because he hated the artist, or his harsh and varied fallouts with the entire folk scene. No matter the contexts, no matter the righteousness, one thing is for certain: Dylan is a man you don’t want to get on the wrong side of.
But sometimes it doesn’t even come down to people, as perhaps the easier way to irritate him and make energy is to simply, or even accidentally, hit the nerve of one of his main pet peeves.
Bob Dylan’s biggest gripes
Want to really piss Dylan off, though? Get your phone out! At his shows now, there is a strict no phones policy. It’s less about him wanting people to be present and undistracted, and more about the fact that he hates concert photography and the feeling that he’s having a photo shoot while he’s trying to play.
“Take pictures or don’t take pictures,” he said at one gig where he caught a culprit, “We can either play or we can pose. OK?”
That’s an easy and understandable annoyance for a musician who has not only spent decades of his life being watched, but has witnessed the dawn of the mobile phone and its impact on crowds.
As for the others, though, Dylan’s pet peeves are somehow both utterly trivial and somewhat poetic.
For Interview magazine back in 1986, he listed them: “Preachers who preach the ‘Wealth and Prosperity’ doctrine. Women who sit and eat meat all day. Salesmen who slap you on the back and wink.”
Fresh off the back of his Christian phase, it seems like he pivoted to a more hateful view, turning his irritation direct on the church as a first thing. Maybe that one makes sense given that he seemed to have recently gone through some kind of spiritual crisis, and maybe even the salemen slander makes sense to someone who famously hates schmoozers. But women eating meat? What did they ever do to you, Dylan?
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