"His mouth moved, but I'd have to say he gave me only 30 percent": The night Bob Dylan trolled David Letterman and a TV audience of millions

Bob Dylan onstage at Radio City Music Hall — (Image credit: NBC)

Bob Dylan's name is in the news again, with the early-awaited biopic A Complete Unknown scheduled to hit theatres on Christmas Day. It's the kind of outing Dylan seems to prefer, with the lack of direct involvement allowing him to remain out of the spotlight and look on, presumably bemused, as others theorise about him endlessly.

It's as if he has no truck with the public side of being a public figure. In 2016, he became the first musician to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but didn't acknowledge the honour for days, and then didn't travel to the ceremony. Instead, his acceptance speech was delivered by the US ambassador to Sweden.

Occasionally he's obliged to step into the spotlight, where he's no longer in complete control. And sometimes this backfires, like during the 1998 Grammy ceremony, when Dylan's closing performance of Love Sick was interrupted by a dancing, half-naked interloper with the words "Soy Bomb" scrawled on his chest.

Six years earlier, Dylan wasn't in complete control. NBC had organised a show at Radio City Music Hall in New York to celebrate the tenth-anniversary celebration of the chat show Late Night with David Letterman, and Dylan was the star turn. Bob would front a band led by longtime Letterman musical director Paul Shaffer and featuring a lineup that included Chrissie Hynde, Carole King, Steve Vai, Anton Fig, Roseanne Cash, Nancy Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Michelle Shocked and Mavis Staples.

In a new video uploaded to YouTube, Letterman – alongside Mary Barclay, producer of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, and Barbara Gaines, host of The Barbara Gaines Show – reveals that the evening did not go according to plan.

"As Paul tells it, Bob agreed to be on the show, but did not realize he would be accompanied by others," says Letterman. "Bob was under the impression it would be Bob and his guitar."

Bob's way of showing his disapproval was to deliver a performance that might kindly be disguised as lacklustre. He mumbled his way through Like A Rolling Stone in a way that must surely have been deliberate, even by the standard of some of Dylan's more recent performances, where he occasionally sounds like an elderly cat struggling to evacuate a particularly stubborn hairball.

"This was Bob sending us all a little message," Letterman says. "I think this was Bob’s little way of having fun with us. You almost needed someone signing [translating via sign language] because it was so bizarre."

"I had forgotten that it was odd,” he continues. “But boy, is it odd!”

YouTube

Watch On

In his autobiography, Shaffer claims that Dylan didn’t bother to sing during the rehearsals, and eventually walked out. He didn’t want to do Like A Rolling Stone, and he certainly didn't want the all-star band.

"His mouth moved, and some of that wonderful reediness came out, but I’d have to say he gave me only 30 percent," wrote Shaffer.

"I don’t need this band to play my music," Dylan is reported to have said. "Me, I got four pieces. That’s all I need."

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.