This never bothered me. If I want to see a showman, I go to see Queen, Bruce Springsteen or the Stones. If I want to see serious singer/songwiters (not saying that the former are not) who don’t care much about glamour and effect and let the music do the talking, I pick Dylan, Van or Neil Young.
Neil Young is a great showman. Dylan and Morrison offer nothing I can’t experience from listening to one of their records. The only point in seeing an artist live is to feel some shared experience with the performer. Dylan and Morrison make zero effort to acheive that kind of connection with their audience.
Well, both are known to never play a song on stage like in the studio recordings, especially Dylan changes the arrangements and sometimes even the lyrics constantly, which often causes criticism from another faction of the audience. You can’t please everybody, and I personally don’t need any verbal or physical motivation by the artists to enjoy the music, but YMMV.
Granted, he is not the best example, he sure likes to do a lot of talking to the audience. But he also never runs up and down the stage like Jagger or Freddie Mercury and asks the audience to clap or sing along, like others do.
Hell, I saw them both at the same show back in 1998. The did a duet of Blue Suede Shoes in tribute to Carl Perkins, who had just died. I recently watched to concert on YouTube.
I have not heard that of him - that he would drink to excess. Axel Rose, David Lee Roth would often have a bottle of Jack Daniel’s (though I reckon he was faking it a-la Dean Martin always having a glass of “champagne”). A little bit to loosen up is one thing, yet I’ve not heard Bob Dylan would ever play shitfaced.
Almost no musician - excepting maybe a front man (not a guy who is going to sing/play guitar/harmonica) can get away with it. Jim Morrison was fat, bloated and sloppy from what I’ve heard of the Doors live after 1969. Compare the svelte Jim on Sullivan to him just a few years later.
It seems the drummers - guys who beat the shit out of their instruments every performance - are the ones likely to do lots of drugs yet not while they’re onstage. I will just highly doubt Moon or Bono were ever not there when playing live.
Frank Zappa - who I only saw twice - was an exacting musician who tolerated absolutely no drugs from his fellow bandmates. Not sure if that extended to after the show, but you fuck up a chord and are not sober you were gone from his band.
As to the Grateful Dead - they certainly “partied” during set breaks. LSD may or may not be noticeable all the time - how many performers at Woodstock have said they were tripping. John Sebastian showed up to see the show and had dosed (so the myth goes - yet he’s said it for sure) yet the wet stage needed to be swept of the water before Santana (who has said he was totally tripping) played and he was asked to do an impromptu acoustic set which was marvellous. And the myth of the Grateful Dead at Woodstock was not only were they tripping (like a 40 minute Anthem of the Sun?) but getting zapped from the electricity that tends to flow on wet stages (at least back then - yet most shows I’ve seen the stage at least is covered)
I would just say you see any “jam band” which now is what, Phish? I’d like to think Neil Young whom I’ve not yet seen. CSN always played at least slightly different shows so it was worthwhile to see them a couple times in a row. Sometimes they’re on - and a lot of that I reckon has to do with audience feedback - and sometimes it’s meh. I just don’t think Bob Dylan is ever meh because he’s drunk.
As I posted before, from all I’ve heard he was a serious drunk in the 80s, and I can believe that this fact made his shows somehow erratic. And if you wanna hear Dylan on drugs, listen to the legendary “Royal Albert Hall Concert” from 1966 (it really was in the Manchester Free Trade Hall, including the famous “Judas incident”). The first half of the set was solo acoustic, and he obviously sounds sedated (by which drug(s) I don’t know), yet he hits every note and remembers all the lyrics from his most complicated and longest songs. Then he comes back with the Band, he must have taken some uppers in the break, and delivers a furious, energetic electric show, now legendary.
I will look for that. Never did ‘downers’ or ‘ludes’ (qualudes) yet I’ve heard likely WAG’s about 'it’s equal to four beers". I remember back in the 80’s going to some cousin wedding in Boston from NYC - and I felt totally awful. Not hungover, no reason for it. My brother gave me something - I still don’t know what - yet by the time we got there I was all smiles.
If The Band is there, I’m just going to imagine the smartest. eldest yet down-to-earth guy, Garth Hudson had what Bob needed.
Me too, never took anything stronger than booze or weed, but I have a few friends who did every drug you can imagine at least once, and I’ve seen them react to uppers and downers. I’ve also read a lot about music and thus about musicians doing drugs, been to a lot of concerts when the band was obviously drugged up, so I’m quite certain of my assessment of Dylan’s state of mind at the “Royal Albert Hall concert”.
Right after the “Judas” shout which gets a laugh - I assume that’s the UK being intolerant of a folk musician who plugs in an electric guitar - a radical pioneer futurist which by no means he ever mastered. He gave Jimi lots of credit for “Watchtower” and if he won’t say it, I will: Jimi owns that tune.
In " Bob Dylan - It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England) 1965" I am not seeing anything but a heckled musician (whilst still playing acoustic guitar) playing that song live as I wish I’d seen it. Yet there are some interviews with Robbie Robertson saying in other places, like Australia, they’d be booing and throwing stuff at him.
Lisa Simpson:
Why would they come to a concert to boo us?
If he was ever drunk or drugged and sucked, I absolve him. Jesus forgave Judas.
I knew his music pretty well before I heard his first album. I knew his influences were Woody Guthrie. He has a splendid sense of humor.
The way he pronounces “Greenwich Village” like some hick, “GREEN-witch village” is positively Bob Dylan.
I swung onto my old guitar
Grabbed hold of a subway car
And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride
I landed up on the downtown side
Greenwich Village
I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
Got on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, “Come back some other day
You sound like a hillbilly
We want folk singers here”
If there’s any myth about Bob Dylan it’s stuff like who and what is " Positively 4th Street" about? Doesn’t even mention 4th street.
Oh, he got heckled and booed in the US too when he first went electric, at the Newport Folk Festival and Forest Hills in 1965 for example.
That’s easy to answer. It was addressed at the folk purists who had loved him for his early protest songs but scolded him for going electric rock. They thought it was commercial crap. Oh, how wrong they were.
I read an interview with David Lee Roth once, in which he said something like that-- he figured out early on the key to longevity in the biz, while keeping up ‘rock star’ appearances-- whenever he was handed a bottle of Jack, he’d tip it way back as if taking a huge swig, but he’d actually just take a tiny sip at a time.
My barber sort of made up his own myth about Dylan after seeing A Complete Unknown. He was telling me how much he enjoyed the movie and said “I never knew Alice Cooper was in his back up band!”
I stifled a laugh and informed him the guy playing keyboards was Al Kooper.
I cannot hear that name without reacting the same way 
That was Dylan f’ng with the Letterman show because he thought the performance would just be him and his guitar. Here’s Dave with the background story!
Here’s a myth I recently learned was dispelled (is that what happens to myths?)
Duane Allman, the eldest of The Allman Brothers, without a doubt was the greatest slide guitar player ever, founded a band with his brother Gregg: The Allman Brothers, even though everyone else in the band was not their brother, like the Jacksons.
He very tragically died in a motorcycle accident in October 1971. The Allman Brothers next album was called “Eat a Peach” and the cover art features a truck carrying a huge peach. I’d always heard Duane had hit a peach truck. Yet the term comes from a Rolling Stone interview, where at the time he was asked:
Duane was asked about how he was contributing to the anti-war movement. His response:
“Every time I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.”
Sounds good to me. Alas, the truck he crashed into was a logging truck.
And coincidentally, the Allman Brother’s bassist, Berry Oakley, also died in a motorcycle accident within a mile of Duane’s crash not even a year later. Dunno what he was doing for world peace, yet likely was in favor of it.
Really? Not from the quote from the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
“Do I dare to eat a peach?”
I thought it was urging folks to get out there and do stuff, to live.
Why can’t it be both? Though I thought T.S. Eliot’s poem was scandalously sexual related. How could that be related to Rock and… oh I see.
Likewise, what is “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” about?
Oh, yeah.
An analogy would be Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow emptying a Jack Daniels bottle in concert, which was full of iced tea.
Another myth/tale I’d heard was that Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend had a guitar “duel” before the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival over who’d play first, The Who or Jimi Hendrix Experience. Both were relatively new to the US audiences, esp. Jimi.
The Who had especially destructive stage antics, Townshend would smash his guitar and Keith Moon would often use pyrotechnics to blow up his drum kit. Jimi would play with his guitar (tuned/turned sort of upside down as he was a lefty and learned to play by watching righties) behind his back and play with his teeth (not at the same time).
Pete Townshend (on Hendrix):
“I was really scared of him. Not as a person, but as a performer. I just thought, ‘I’m not gonna follow him!’”
Townshend described it as a Mexican Stand-off yet he “won”, not by some guitar duel but a flip of a coin. So The Who went on first and played a literally chaotic, explosive set, Moon merely kicked over his drum kit and Townshend of course smashed his guitar.
All Jimi did was play a stunning, electrifying set concluding with the song “Wild Thing” during which he knelt down in front of his Stratocaster, poured lighter fluid on it and set it on fire. Then smashed it to pieces.
You’ve all likely heard or seen pictures of the iconic moment so it really happened. I was unsure of the “duel” about who goes on first.