At 46, Bob Dylan Walked Out to Quit Music and Was Saved by a Singer in an Empty Bar
Empty after years on the road, he found the way he used to sing by watching a stranger sing for almost no one.
Founders · #429 Bob Dylan's AutobiographyThe rehearsal room was full of musicians waiting on him. The Grateful Dead, the long-running rock band, wanted to try one of his old songs. Bob Dylan said he had forgotten something at the hotel, walked out the door, and kept walking down the street. He was not planning to return.
He was 46 and empty. He had just finished touring with Tom Petty, the rock star, and Dylan wrote, "I'd been on an 18-month tour with Tom Petty." He described himself as a burned-out wreck. "Tom was at the top of his game, and I was at the bottom of mine." "My own songs had become strangers to me."
This was the closest Dylan ever came to quitting. After a 26 year run that had made him famous around the world, he was ready to end his career on the spot and never perform again. An old man singing in a bar stopped him.
"Maybe four or five or six blocks went by." "And then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead," "walking past the door of a tiny bar." He looked in. "There were just a few people inside," and amateur musicians playing jazz ballads to almost nobody. "It looked like the last stop on a train in nowhere," the exact kind of small room where he had started out himself 27 years earlier.
He ordered a gin and tonic and stood four feet from the stage, facing the singer. The singer was an older man, relaxed, singing jazz ballads. "He was relaxed, but he sang with natural power." "Suddenly, without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul."
What hit him was how the man sang, not the voice itself. Dylan realized the singer was using a simple way of singing that he himself had once used without thinking and had forgotten, though he never names the technique or explains how it worked.
He ran back to the rehearsal he had meant to abandon. He could not wait to try it. "At first, it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall." Then something internal came unhinged, and "In the beginning, all I could get out was a blood-choked, coughing grunt," that bypassed his brain. It burned, but he was awake.
He played the shows with the Grateful Dead without having to think twice about it. Afterward, for the first time in more than 10 years, he started writing songs again, and kept writing.
Questions people ask
Who was the old jazz singer?
Dylan never names him, and no one has publicly identified him. In his memoir he describes him only as an older man singing jazz ballads in a tiny, nearly empty bar near the Grateful Dead rehearsal. The encounter reads as chance, not a meeting with anyone famous.
What singing technique did Dylan relearn?
Dylan never gives it a technical name. He says only that the power came not from the voice, and that it was something automatic he had once done and forgotten. He describes the result as singing that bypassed his brain, which let him get out of his own head.
What music came out of this comeback?
The writing burst led to his 1989 album Oh Mercy, recorded in New Orleans. Reception was mixed, with some critics finding it lackluster and others praising it as a return to form. He kept touring and recording afterward.