3 Times Bob Dylan Scolded His Audiences: From Irritation to Condemning Them to Hell

Bob Dylan has been touring with very few breaks for decades and typically has little interaction with the audience. Dylan gets onstage, plays his songs, and leaves with virtually no talking breaks in between. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, including three times when Dylan chastised his audience. Whether in concert or the middle of a speech, if Dylan feels he needs to tell the audience off, he makes time to do it. 

1. Bob Dylan paused his show to tell the audience to get off their phones

While Dylan doesn’t often address his crowds, he makes it clear that he doesn’t want people using cell phones at his concerts. Sometimes, he employs flashlight-bearing ushers to stop people from using their phones. Other times, he takes matters into his own hands. 

After noticing cell phones and camera flashes at a 2019 show in Vienna, Dylan stepped away from the microphone in the middle of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He stumbled over a guitar amp and managed to right himself before addressing the crowd.

“Take pictures or don’t take pictures,” he said, per NME. “We can either play or we can pose. OK?”

Even if the crowd heeded his warning, the damage was already done. Dylan played an abbreviated version of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” before exiting the stage for the night.

2. He insulted a crowd’s age and politics

Much earlier in his career, a drunk and nervous Dylan took shots at an audience’s age. While begrudgingly accepting an award from the Emergency Civil Liberty Committee in 1963, Dylan gave a rambling speech. 

“You people should be at the beach,” he said, per Dissent Magazine. “It’s not an old people’s world … Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out.”

He then told the politically involved crowd that he didn’t want to even involve himself with something as trivial as politics. 

“There’s no black and white, left and right, to me anymore,” he said. “There’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics.”

He got polite laughter from the audience with these remarks, but they turned on him when he said he could understand Lee Harvey Oswald, who had assassinated John F. Kennedy just several weeks before.

3. An angry Bob Dylan told his audience that rock music would lead them to hell

In the late 1970s, Dylan’s music took on overt religious themes, and he often preached to his crowds. On one occasion, though, he lashed out at them. 

Many of Dylan’s fans rejected the new direction of his music, and they made this clear during his shows. During one concert, a fan yelled, “rock ‘n’ roll!” to get Dylan to play some of his older music. Dylan responded irritably by saying his fans were free to listen to rock music, but it would have heavy consequences.

“If you want rock ‘n’ roll, you go down and rock ‘n’ roll,” he snapped back, per the Portland Mercury. “You can go and see KISS and you can rock ‘n’ roll all the way down to the pit!”