Bob Dylan Was Furious With Joan Baez for Cutting Her Hair Years After They Broke Up
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan met in the early 1960s, and their musical relationship soon turned romantic. They ended their relationship by the mid-1960s, but they continued to work together professionally. Roughly a decade after their split, Dylan was married, and Baez joined him on tour. They hadn’t been together in years, but he was so obsessed with her hair that he became furious when she cut it short.
Bob Dylan decided he couldn’t marry Joan Baez
When Dylan moved to New York to pursue a career in music, Baez had already established herself in the folk scene. She performed with Dylan, bringing him exposure, and their relationship soon turned romantic.
“I was crazy about him,” she said, per the Toronto Star. “We were an item and we were having a wonderful time.”
They ended their romantic relationship in 1965, and very soon after, Dylan married Sara Lownds. This surprised the people close to him, including his road manager Victor Maymudes.
“Bob’s desire to get married to Sara surprised me,” Maymudes wrote in his book Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks. “I asked him about it. ‘Why Sara?! Why not Joan Baez?’ He responded with, ‘Because Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it.'”
Maymudes believed that Dylan didn’t want to compete with Baez in the relationship, so he decided to cut it off.
He was angry with her for cutting her hair long after they broke up
Years later, Dylan and Lownds were still married, though their relationship was struggling. In 1976, Baez joined Dylan for the second leg of his Rolling Thunder Revue Tour. By this time in her life, she had cropped her hair short. When she first met Dylan, her long hair was one of the things that first caught his eye.
“I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink,” he wrote in his book Chronicles: Volume One. “She was wicked looking — shiny black hair that hung down over the curve of slender hips, drooping lashes, partly raised, no Raggedy Ann doll. The sight of her made me high.”
Dylan believed he had the right to be angry about Baez’s new hair and refused to speak or even rehearse with her for days.
“Bob had a thing about wanting me to grow my hair long, the way it was in the beginning,” she said.
Despite his anger, Baez stuck with her short hair for decades.
Bob Dylan felt bad about the way his relationship with Joan Baez ended
In 1984, Dylan invited Baez on another tour and promised her equal billing. He barely gave her any stage time, though. When she confronted him about this, he reportedly started complimenting her figure and touching her legs. Baez stopped him and left.
He doesn’t often comment on their relationship, but he admitted he has regrets about it.
“I feel very bad about it,” he said in 2009. “I was sorry to see our relationship end.”
