Bob Dylan Made The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones Cry With His Cruelty
Even early in his career, Bob Dylan had many admirers, including The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. The guitarist idolized Dylan and was happy to spend a night out with the musician and his friends. Unfortunately, Dylan greeted Jones with coarse cruelty that left him in tears. This was how Dylan behaved around many of the people who admired him.
Brian Jones looked up to Bob Dylan
Jones admired Dylan, and the two musicians settled into a friendship. According to the documentary Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones, Jones used to call Dylan every day.
“Yeah for a period of time he did because they were really good mates,” filmmaker Nick Reynolds told Express. “They used to drop a lot of acid together.”
Reynolds believed the two musicians were similar, so they understood each other.
“They had a mutual respect because Brian obviously thought he’d found a head that understood him,” he said. “He was very complicated and very sensitive, and I guess Bob Dylan was as well. They had a mutual understanding.”
Bob Dylan was not kind to Brian Jones
Dylan and Jones’ relationship was not always friendly, though. One night, musician Bob Neuwirth brought Jones over to a table where Dylan was already sitting with friends. Dylan, who could be cruel to the people close to him, turned on Jones.
“First of all he declared that the Stones were a joke — they could not be taken seriously,” Daniel Mark Epstein wrote in the book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait. “Now everyone could laugh at that, true or not, because the comment cost nothing, drew no blood. But then he explained to Jones that he had no talent and that the band, joke that it was, ought to replace him with someone who could sing.”
According to Epstein, Jones was deeply hurt, especially because this was coming from Dylan.
“This made Jones unhappy, after he had been so happy to see Dylan in the bar,” he wrote. “The Englishman swept his flowing hair out of his eyes, which were tearing up as Dylan went into detail about Jones’s musical handicaps. Jones began to cry. Now the whole mob could see his weakness; it was a terrible sight, the flowing locks, the lacy sleeves, the weeping — just the wrong image for a group called the ‘Rolling Stones,’ Dylan concluded.”
This reflected his relationship with most fans
Dylan’s friends said he got mean when he became famous, and he seemed to reserve most of his cruelty for the people who admired him most. He told Phil Ochs, a folk singer who idolized him, that he was a musical failure.
Dylan was typically uncomfortable around his fans, and those who knew him said fame overwhelmed him. He could ignore his fans, but he had a harder time doing this to people in his friend group. As a result, he pushed them away with his words. It was a defense mechanism, albeit a cruel one.
