A Crowd Asked Bob Dylan Where Ringo Starr Was as They Booed Him in Concert
In 1965, a jeering audience at a Bob Dylan concert asked the musician where Ringo Starr was. This wasn’t because they had expected to see the Beatles’ drummer join him onstage. Instead, they were using his name to express their displeasure with Dylan. They felt he had turned his back on them to embrace a more Beatles-style sound.
A crowd used Ringo Starr’s name to insult Bob Dylan in concert
In 1965, Dylan invited Canadian band the Hawks to join him at a concert in Queens, New York. He played his typical acoustic set before an intermission, and then he brought the band onstage with him.
“Before we went on, Bob gathered the four of us into a huddle,” drummer Levon Helm wrote in the book This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band. “He said, ‘We don’t know what’s gonna happen. It may be a real freak show out there. I want you guys to know this up front. Just keep playing, no matter how weird it gets.'”
The crowd began booing when they saw the band setting up, and their anger intensified when they started to play. Helm believed that part of Dylan’s drive to go electric came from hanging out with The Beatles, and evidently, the crowd agreed.
“People booed and yelled between songs,” Helm wrote. “‘Yay yay! Shake it up, baby!’ ‘Rock and roll sucks!’ ‘Where’s Ringo?!’ ‘Play folk music!’ ‘Where’s Dylan?!'”
Eventually, the crowd grew more receptive to the music, but not before they threw fruit at the band.
This was far from the only concert where the audience turned on him
The Hawks joined Dylan on tour, and they quickly grew used to playing for an angry audience.
“For the next month we played east of the Mississippi, becoming Bob Dylan’s band,” Helm wrote. “We were booed everywhere; by then it had become a ritual. People had heard they were ‘supposed’ to boo when those electric guitars came out.”
Their audiences’ reaction to the music was baffling to the musicians, though, because to their ears, the songs sounded good.
“The audiences kept booing,” Helm explained. “We made tapes of the shows and listened to them afterward in the hotel, because we couldn’t believe it was that bad that people felt they had to protest, but the tapes sounded good to us. It was just new.”
They never caved to audience pressure, though. Dylan continued to bring the Hawks onstage to play electrified versions of his songs.
Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr met multiple times
While Starr never joined Dylan onstage for this tour — he was far too busy with The Beatles’ schedule — they had met several times. Dylan introduced Starr and his bandmates to marijuana, and he greatly influenced their later music. Starr had a great deal of admiration for the American artist. Starr listed Dylan’s song “When the Deal Goes Down” as one of his top 10 favorite songs.
“He moves me on that record,” Starr told ABC in 2009. “That’s why I like it. If it moves me, it’s the sentiment of the record and how he says it. But no one else can say it like that … We met him in the ’60s in New York. We just sort of bumped into him ever since. He’s just an incredible artist that is well-placed in the musical history of American music and world music, so I put Bob down because of all of that. You couldn’t do a list without mentioning Bob.”
