Why Bob Dylan hated Woodstock with a passion: “That don’t excite me”
We don’t actually remember what the 1960s was like as overwhelmingly, the peace and love age is viewed with the intense rose-tinted lenses, colouring everything pink, painting over the bad bits, and there were a lot of bad bits.
While yes, the 1960s was an incredible age for music and film and advancements in art that moved towards caring less about appealing to the mainstream or the parents at home, there was more, with the decade a boiling pot always threatening to run over as social and political causes hit fever pitches.
While we remember things like The Beatles trying LSD for the first time, or Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar, people were on the street fighting for the rights we take for granted today. From segregation to gender inequality, workers’ rights to medical advancements, the ’60s were a time of high tension and great battle amidst a weary backdrop of political tension, horrifying war and bad ethics.
That’s part of the reason why so many were so disgusted when Bob Dylan publicly turned his back on protest music. At first, he seemed to not only see what was happening, but was truly in the weeds of it, fighting in the grassroots with songs that drew attention to news stories. But then all of a sudden, he admonished the entire thing, stating plainly, “I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world”.
Yet even while Dylan turned his back on trying to help the dark world, he certainly didn’t turn his back on seeing it. It’s not as if his rejection of protest music, or folk music on a whole, led to him embracing the rock and roll world with open arms and joining the hippie movement. Instead, it was quite the opposite, as when the ultimate event of the 1960s countercultural calendar came around, Dylan couldn’t have been more cynical about it.
If there’s one event rose-tinted more than any, it has to be Woodstock. Remembered as a magical gathering where the whole decade culminated in one free weekend of the world’s best music, it wasn’t quite that smooth. It was free because the organisational chaos led to them forgetting to build ticket booths, and by the end of the weekend, they had to call in the National Guard to bring supplies as so many people had showed up, abandoning their cars on the surrounding roads and blocking up the entire area. However, for the ever-prescient Dylan, a local resident of the actual Woodstock town, he knew this would happen, and he hated it from the second he heard about it.
Many artists turned down Woodstock, either because they were busy with an album, busy breaking up or already had a booking at the Isle of Wight festival, the latter of wich Dylan also used as his primary excuse to reject his invite, but the actual reason was more him being a grumpy old man, standing on his porch, shaking his fist at the idea of his sleepy town filling up. Talking to People Magazine in 1975, the fist was still shaking as he didn’t mince his words about the festival: “I didn’t want to be part of that thing”.
He didn’t want to see his quiet town ruined, especially given that he’d really only just moved there, all for the purpose of getting some peace away from the busy music world of New York. Now hearing that the music world was going to be brought to his doorstep, he wasn’t into it as he said, “I felt they exploited the shit out of that, going up there and getting 15million people all in the same spot. That don’t excite me.” But that whole scene didn’t excite him as he continued, “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.”
That was always his take, matching up to a 1984 interview with the Sunday Times where his cynicism continued, stating, “Like Woodstock, that wasn’t about anything. It was just a whole new market for tie-dyed T-shirts. It was about clothes. All those people are in computers now.” As perhaps the only artist immune, Dylan never put on the rose-tinted frames.
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