Bob Dylan - Practicing in Public

I’m reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography ‘Chronicles’ - an amazing (and amazingly written) book. It’s hard to put down.

The other night I came across the part where he’s talking about touring in the 80’s with an eye to retiring. Feeling like he was all dried up and being fine with that. He knew that he had to get through his last big tours though (one with Petty and one with the Dead) and was feeling like he almost didn’t have it in him. It was taking it’s toll and when the Dead made some requests he felt he just wasn’t up to, he walked out with the intention of not coming back.

He had a couple of revelations though that did bring him back. Not only to the Dead gigs, but which made him want to tour intensely for the next three years, perfecting a technique of playing he’d discovered that liberated him and his songs. But he realised that if he was going to do this, if he was going to play this way and perfect this technique, he was going to have to find a new audience:

“… my audience at that time had more or less grown up on my records and was past the point of accepting me as a new artist… in many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was.”

I like that he talks about the audience having to find him. And that despite - and likely because of - his immense fame, he was going to have to roll up his sleeves and work at building a new audience. He knew exactly how he was going to do it too - playing lots of gigs in towns across the world and then going back to each of those towns a total of three times over three years in order transform his audience from the old one that was dragging him down to the new one that would push him forward.

” I figured it would take me at least three years to get to the beginning, to find the right audience, or for the right audience to find me. The reason I thought it would take three years was that after the first year a lot of the older people wouldn’t be coming back, but younger fans would bring their friends the second year so attendance would be just about equal. And in the third year, those people would also bring their friends and it would form the nucleus of my future audience. “

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