5 Musicians’ Least Favorite Fan Encounters: ‘It Bummed Me Out’
Musicians often give warm shout outs to their fans in interviews and onstage, but not all their encounters with fans are pleasant. Some artists face unruly crowds, angry demands, and intrusions into their private lives. A number have spoken about the problems they have with fans. Here are five musicians who have discussed their least favorite types of fan encounters.
A Stevie Nicks fan got a tattoo dedicated to the musician
One of Stevie Nicks’ least favorite fan encounters occurred when a fan got a permanent tribute to the artist.
“I came out of the stage door and a girl was crying hysterically,” Nicks said, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “I can never walk away from someone in tears, so I asked what was wrong. She said, ‘Will you sign my arm?’ So I did. The next night she was back with her arm tattooed with my name!”
Nicks scolded the fan for getting a tattoo but her chastising didn’t make much of an impact. The next night, the fan’s friend asked Nicks to sign her arm too.
“So I told her, ‘I’m not touching your arm. Don’t put that on me. I’ll sue! That’s pain. I’m not here to bring pain. I’m here to bring you out of pain. It’s not funny — it’s stupid,'” she said. “It bummed me out. I felt like I’d come out the wrong door.”
George Harrison bristled when fans demanded that The Beatles get back together
After living through Beatlemania, George Harrison dealt with almost everything fans could throw at him — sometimes literally. He often felt on edge in The Beatles but was more annoyed with people asking the band to reunite.
“They’ve got the films – Help!, A Hard Day’s Night, Let It Rot, Tragical History Tour. They’ve got lots and lots of songs they can play forever,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “But what do they want? Blood? They want us all to die like Elvis Presley? Elvis got stuck in a rut where the only thing he could do was to keep on doing the same old thing, and in the end his health suffered and that was it.”
He didn’t think people had much respect for his well-being when they asked The Beatles to get back together.
“People used us as an excuse to trip out, and we were the victims of that,” he said. “That’s why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can all get silly again. But they don’t have consideration for our well-being when they say, ‘Let’s have the Fab Four again.'”
Ringo Starr doesn’t like when people ask him for his autograph
Like Harrison, the Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr tired of some of the trappings of fame. In 2008, he issued a message to fans telling them to stop sending him fan mail and asking for his autograph.
After issuing this statement, it infuriated him whenever people asked for an autograph. Talk show host Sherrie Hewson said Starr irritably refused an autograph request from a child.
“At the end of it, one of the producers came up with one of her little children, who was only four, and said that she knew he didn’t do autographs, but told him that her daughter was only four, and she really loves the Beatles,” Hewson said, per Yahoo. “He just said, ‘really?’ And then he said: ‘Did you not hear what I just said? I don’t sign autographs.'”
Joe Strummer got into a brawl with his fans
In 1980, The Clash faced the ugly side of fan encounters when people turned on the musicians for “selling out.” They faced a particularly angry crowd at a show in Hamburg.
“[I]n Hamburg these kids attacked us, going ‘You’ve sold out, you’ve sold out,'” singer Joe Strummer told journalist Paul Du Noyer for NME. “But I figured that they hadn’t come to that conclusion, it was rather a trendy supposition that they thought, ‘Oh, we’ll follow that.'”
The crowd was so upset with the band that they started trying to rip the microphone off the stage.
“It was like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Strummer said. “They were all down the front, and if they could grab hold of a microphone lead they’d pull, and it was a tug o’ war. And then it started getting really violent — and that was my fault in a way. How much can a man take, y’know? I was playing and I saw this guy, sort of using the guy in front of him as a punch-bag, trying to be all tough. So I rapped him on the head with a Telecaster, I just lost my temper. And there was blood gushing down in front of his face. It wasn’t much of a cut, but it looked real horror show.”
Strummer ended up with an assault charge for hitting the man, which likely did nothing to warm him to his fans.
Bob Dylan doesn’t like any fan encounters, but had a particularly hard time with a ‘Dylanologist’
According to those who knew him, Bob Dylan was never comfortable speaking to fans. Joan Baez said that he always seemed terrified when fans approached him. He had the biggest problem with one particular fan, though.
Self-proclaimed Dylanologist Alan J. Weberman wanted to know everything there was to know about Dylan. To research, he dug through the musician’s garbage. He also knocked on Dylan’s door, demanding to speak to him.
While they had several long conversations, Dylan grew weary of Weberman’s constant presence around his trash cans. He told Weberman to stay away, and when he didn’t, Dylan tried another tactic.
“He grabbed me, threw me to the ground, and started bangin’ my f***in’ head against the sidewalk,” Weberman said, per Salon. “I had it coming.”
