Celebrity

Bob Dylan Got Lonely After His Promoter Told People Not to Talk to Him

Bob Dylan enjoys his privacy. His concert promoter knew this and instructed people not to bother him, but this began to worry Dylan.

by Emma McKee

Published on July 14, 2022

2 min read

The ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ singer appreciates his privacy

Dylan rose to global success in the 1960s, but he has always valued his privacy in spite of his level of fame. He even retreated from public life entirely after a motorcycle crash.

“Then, I had that motorcycle accident, which put me outta commission,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. “Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just working for all these leeches. And I didn’t want to do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids.”

This trait can sometimes rub people the wrong way. In 2016, when the Nobel Committee awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, Dylan completely ignored them. Per The Atlantic, his silence in the face of the honor led a member of the Nobel Committee to call Dylan “impolite and arrogant.”

Concert promoter Bill Graham told people to leave Bob Dylan alone

When Graham began working with Dylan, he knew the artist valued his privacy and wanted to make him as comfortable as possible on tour.

“Being a good tour manager means that you can feel what your artist is comfortable with,” he wrote in the book Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out. “Then you build an entire traveling world around him.”

At the start of the tour, Graham instructed staff to respect the singer’s privacy.

“Before we went out, I got the whole tour staff together in San Francisco and I said, ‘You know, this is Bob Dylan,’” Graham explained. “‘I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who wants you to say to him every day, ‘Hi, Bob! How you doin’? What’s goin’ on?’ Please try to understand that and give him some respect for his privacy.”

Apparently, the tour staff took this instruction a bit too seriously.

“The tour started,” he said. “In the third or fourth city in the middle of the night, someone knocked on the door of my hotel room. I opened the door and it was Bob. He came in. I could see he had a problem. I said, ‘Is everything OK, Bob? Something’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Bill. Why isn’t anybody talking to me?’”

The promoter was endlessly impressed with Bob Dylan as a performer

Graham wanted the tour to run smoothly for Dylan because of how much he respected him as a performer.

“I have great respect for Springsteen,” he said. “I have great respect for Jagger. But I have always thought Dylan was the ultimate performer of the ethereal kind. Different from Otis Redding. He just had such a profound effect on everybody. He communicated on as strong a level as I have ever seen an artist communicate with his fans.”