According to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan Never Got Used to Having So Many Fans: “I Was Always Afraid for Bobby”
Bob Dylan‘s public disposition has always been one ingrained in mystique, illusiveness, and contradiction. As a result of these traits, nobody in the public really knows who Bob Dylan really is. Of course, people have speculated and formed theories, or just not really cared. Regardless, the bottom line is that Dylan has always kept himself an arm’s length away from his fans. Why is that? Well, we don’t know, but one person who seemingly does is his good friend, Joan Baez.
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s past is one full of romance and friendship. That being said, the two have spent a lot of time together and know each other well. Baez once pulled back the curtain on Dylan’s illusiveness in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1972, and by doing so, she just might have given the people a reason for Dylan’s rather ambiguous disposition.
Bob Dylan “Was Like A Little Kid”
If you were a celebrity, would you accept the lack of privacy and purge the fear it entails, or would you be the opposite? Well, it seems Bob Dylan, according to Baez, wasn’t the kind who accepted and purged, but quite the opposite.
“I was always afraid for Bobby,” and “He didn’t seem to have the stage fright kind of fear. He seemed to submerge that and it came out in paranoia about people afterwards, like coming at him for autographs. He was so terrified,” said Baez.
Recalling a moment in which this fear arose in real life, Baez stated, “One time we got out of a limousine somewhere, when we were doing concerts together, and two girls came screaming, ‘There’s Bobby.’ They came screaming at him, and he said, ‘Oh, wow, let’s run,’ and I said, ‘You dumb a—, just stand here,’ and I took his hand, and he was like a little kid and they came up all hysterical and teary and I said, ‘Now stop acting so stupid and he’ll give you his autograph.’And then he calmed all down. They looked a little embarrassed. It was beautiful. I said, ‘Just talk to them a minute, Bobby,’ so he did. He gets control the minute he sees he can have it, but I think he genuinely was terrified of people like that.”
While Bob Dylan and figures like him tend to seem like larger-than-life figures, they aren’t. Now, we aren’t trying to subvert their accomplishment, but at the end of the day, all people feel fear, stress, and insecurity. So, maybe the reason Bob Dylan hasn’t always been an open book is as simple as the fact that he, too, is human. After all, do you want everyone to know everything about you?
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