How Not To Care What Other People Think

A lesson from Bob Dylan

At one time Bob Dylan was the most hated musician on earth.

It’s hard to imagine this is true of the musician who won the Nobel Prize, a boatload of Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet at one time Dylan’s fans rejected the person who is now considered one of the most influential musicians of all time.

And if you know anything about Bob Dylan, you know he doesn’t give a shit about what you or anyone else think of him.

Want just one example of not putting a lot of stock in what people think? He was too busy to attend the Nobel Award ceremony. But he did send a very nice letter (more about that later.)

Dylan began performing as a teenager. When he started out, he played to a handful of people in basement venues.

His fame grew when he started singing protest songs to an audience who connected with the music that reflected the angst of their disillusioned generation. He became an icon of the folk music generation.

Blowin In The Wind became the anthem of the civil rights movement in 1963. With God On Our Side was the most memorable protest song of the Vietnam War the following year. When Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, the crowd was in love with this folk singer with an acoustic guitar.

A year later, at the same festival, he put aside the acoustic guitar and played loudly on an electric guitar. This was not what his fans expected. To add insult to injury, that crowd decided that songs like Tambourine Man lacked the seriousness of a Dylan song.

His rabid fans turned on him. In films of the 1965 performance at the Folk Festival, you can hear people in the crowd yelling “Judas.” Some people booed the entire time he was on stage. Dylan was no longer the darling of revolution. He was a traitor who played trivial songs in the turncoat style of rock and roll.

Music critics weren’t much kinder. They complained that he had a terrible voice and that his music sounded like someone with a bad cold.

Dylan had no patience for any of it. He wouldn’t allow his music to be pigeonholed. He didn't care that the people who “made”…

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