As Bob Dylan rose to incredible career heights, his friends noticed some worrisome behavior. He got incredibly stressed before and after concerts. This anxiety sometimes manifested as angry outbursts backstage and fear of his fans. It also potentially caused some reckless behavior. Joan Baez, who was dating Dylan at the time, recalled a time Dylan put his friends’ lives at risk with his driving.
Joan Baez said Bob Dylan was such a terrible driver he put all his friends at risk
Baez said that Dylan, for all his talent as a musician, was a terrible driver. She preferred to drive his motorcycle because he was so out of control on it.
“I used to prefer to drive because he was a terrible driver, just terrible,” she said, per Rolling Stone. “I mean, I figured he was writing ten songs at once and trying to drive at the same time, and I always feared for us. So I’d always say, ‘Could I drive?’ he drove so sloppy, he used to hang on that thing like a sack of flour.”
After one of his concerts, Dylan had been drinking and took things to a new, more frightening level.
“Bobby insisted on driving and we got in the old station wagon,” Baez said. “He was driving us all from the city to Woodstock, Mimi and Dick and Bobby and me and maybe somebody else. And he was driving horrendously. We were just all terrified. Gee, he terrifies you. You’re afraid to say anything.”
After making several half-hearted attempts to get Dylan to stop the car, Baez finally got him to pull over.
“‘Hey, I don’t know what everybody’s so f***in’ scared about. I can drive, right? I can drive,’” she recalled him saying, adding, “I mean, if he’d taken his glasses off it wouldn’t have made any difference. He really nearly killed us. Finally Mimi and I said, ‘Oh, we have to go to the bathroom,’ so he had to pull in, and we all got out of the car and he got out of the car, and somebody else jumped in the driver’s seat. And he laughed when he came back from the bathroom. ‘Oh, man I can’t believe it. Everybody’s so f***in’ scared. Everybody’s so chicken. Wow, I can’t believe it.’”
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Joan Baez said people were often afraid of contradicting Bob Dylan
According to Baez, Dylan often had outbursts before and after his concerts. She recalled a time he threw a tantrum over a missing coat. She hinted that during these outbursts, people didn’t stand up to him because he wouldn’t accept it.
“I said, ‘Oh Bobby, take it easy’ or something, and he started to blow up because nobody was supposed to talk to him like that,” Baez said.
It’s possible that people worried about confronting Dylan because of his level of success. It also seems that his reaction to any contradiction discouraged people. Friends of Dylan noted that he had a mean streak and, when told to calm down, he would lash out at the person confronting him. People didn’t seem to want to be the target of his ire, so he got away with more than most people could have.
Bob Dylan’s friends complained about his behavior
While Baez never seemed to hold Dylan’s bad behavior against him, some of his other friends did.
“When he got famous around then, he got kinda mean,” fellow musician Jack Elliot told Rolling Stone in 1972. “He was very quick, very sarcastic, dealt with people like a boxer, parrying blows and remarks and skipping out in a hurry.”
Others noted that he could twist people’s words to use against them. One friend believed this was a defense mechanism, but it still made Dylan difficult to be around.
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