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Giving stupid answers to smart questions, it’s our weekly snarky pseudo-interview… Fret Buzz. This week: Bob Dylan’s guitarists keep going on garden leave. But what makes The Bard a tough gig, and who are rock’s most notorious paymasters?
Dylan’s guitarists are walking out? You just can’t get the staff…
They’re dropping like flies. Last month, long-term sideman Doug Lancio quit the road band, followed a fortnight later by Bob Britt. We wouldn’t like to speculate, but Britt’s farewell post – “Sayanora Bobby” – seemed flippant (at best) or a man bursting with bottled-up venom (at worst).
Yes, I’ve always gone with ‘thanks for the opportunity’. What’s Britt going to do now?
Gardening, apparently. He wrapped up his next post by announcing he was off to weed his flowerbeds.
He’d rather do that than play with Dylan? Next you’ll be telling me Stevie Van Zandt has quit the E Street Band to creosote his fence.
Well, tell that to the 35-plus guitarists who’ve blown through Dylan’s lineup [indeed, Dylan debuted his third new guitarist in three weeks, Jad Tariq just this past weekend – Ed]. The guy gets through sidemen like kamikaze pilots.
But Dylan is the era-defining poet of the rock ’n’ roll epoque. A seminal visionary who…
Yeah, yeah, we know all that. But being his guitarist isn’t necessarily easy.
Isn’t it just G, A minor, C, and A?
In theory (although what you just said is slightly reductive). But Dylan’s freewheeling onstage tendencies can apparently feel like one long hazing ritual.
“I was great friends with the Heartbreakers,” Dave Stewart of Eurythmics once recalled. “They were on tour with him and said he’d suddenly play the song in a different key, or he decides to miss out a verse.”
Heh. What a jokerman. I bet he’s a riot in the studio?
Not according to Robben Ford, who recalled one ’90s session where Dylan arrived in the studio only to slump wordlessly on a stool – “[he] doesn’t say anything, head down, nothing”. Then there’s the relentless death march of his touring schedule.
Don’t people nickname it the Never Ending Tour?
Yep. By the time you finally get home, the babies whose births you missed are arthritic old gargoyles hobbling around looking for their dentures.
Is Dylan the toughest rock icon to work for?
Not by any means. Rock ’n’ roll is full of borderline despots. Take James Brown, who reportedly fined his players for missing a note, or even just wearing the wrong shoes.
Wow. So by the end of Sex Machine, you could owe him $50? Maybe I would be better off as a dog-walker.
That’s nothing. Prince demanded a ‘purple’ lifestyle of his band members.
What does that even mean?
Search me. Lots of beets on the backstage rider?
Maybe he should have just hired Barney the dinosaur.
Then there’s Frank Zappa, whose standards were so absurdly high that you literally had to be Steve Vai.
And what about that poor sessioner that Axl Rose humiliated by making him wear a KFC bucket every night…
No, that was his choice. I mean, the guy’s called Buckethead. He’s kind of painted himself into a corner on that one.
So how do I apply for the Dylan gig?
Just hang around the stage door for the next sessioner to storm out. We’ll have your gardening gloves waiting for you…
