How We Duped Bob Dylan’s Goons
Bob Dylan performing in Pensacola, FL during the Rolling Thunder Revue Tour, April 28, 1976. A print of this photo is now in the permanent collection of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Photo © Mark Petty 1976
Text © Mark Petty 2024
I’m being forcibly removed from the crowded gymnasium at the University of West Florida, dragging my heels as two thugs on Bob Dylan’s security staff, one under each arm, pull me backwards. Forearms tight to my chest, I act as though I’m struggling in an effort to mask the fact I’m rewinding the film in my camera. Once we’re outside three guys surround me. “Give us your film or we’re calling the cops,” one of them demands, his face just inches from mine.
How the hell did I get into this nasty situation?
The news a few days earlier had been shocking: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue is unexpectedly coming to the small town of Pensacola, of all places, on short notice. The Revue includes Joan Baez, T Bone Burnett, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson and many others. Rumor has it no photography is allowed and that fans are being patted down, police fashion, once inside the door, after they take your ticket. The year is 1976.
As a photographer fresh out of J School I accept Bob Dylan’s challenge. I’m determined to get an image of him at the concert. But how?
The night of the show I stick my Leica camera body in my pants and Marty, whom I will wed in a month, hides my lens in a similar fashion. We decide to go through the gate when the crowd is at its peak, figuring the angry fans waiting to be patted down will help provide cover. It works. The concert is underway when we reach the checkpoint and the horde of Dylan fans literally pushes us through security.
Our tickets cost $8.75 each. It’s festival seating. We sit high in the bleachers for the first half of the show. During intermission I kiss Marty and leave her alone. I go down to the gym floor and talk my way onto the front row in exchange for giving prints to two people who let me sit between them.
Several songs into the second half of the show Bob Dylan comes out on stage. He’s right in front of me. There are no barriers between my seat and the front of the slightly-elevated stage, not even security personnel. They are guarding the main aisles. The crowd around me is on its feet. I stay seated, double over, and assemble my camera. I stay low and start shooting, thinking the fans on either side of me will provide a lot of cover from Dylan’s bouncers. I am mistaken. I hardly have time to calm my nerves before they grab me.
They drag me outside. I’m surrounded by three guys, two of whom could play linebacker. The leader is in my face, so close I can smell his breath. “Give us your film or we’re calling the cops.”
My Sicilian blood rises. Without thinking I challenge him. “Great,” I say, “let’s go find a pay phone and call the cops. Because you assholes are from New Jersey. You’re on my turf here in the South and Bubba the sheriff hates assholes from New Jersey. So when he gets here I’m going to report a robbery in progress and you’re going to spend the night in the Escambia County jail. So c’mon, let’s go find a pay phone!”
More exchanges follow. Pissed off, he ultimately gives up and shoves me in the chest, ending the confrontation with “You can’t come back in the show, asshole.”
Off they storm.
Marty, having watched me being drug out of the show, is running outside past the goons as they re-enter the building. We embrace. I’m shaking like a leaf. I tell her about the standoff. In the cool of the evening we listen to the muffled sound of the Rolling Thunder Revue emanating from the gymnasium. Once the adrenalin stops flowing we head home.
The next day I develop my film and send a print to Rolling Stone Magazine. A few days later my phone rings. It’s a woman from Rolling Stone asking “How in the hell did you get this Dylan photo?” She tells me the photographers they’ve sent have either not been allowed in the concert or have had their film confiscated.
“Well you see,” I begin, “this is how we did it . . .”
My photograph of Dylan is published by the Rolling Stone Magazine in issue #214, June 3, 1976. I am paid $75.00. It’s a princely sum equal to half our monthly rent at the time.
P.S. I did not learn until the next day that local media, including a co-worker at The Pensacola News-Journal, who was working that night, had been given press passes to the concert and instructed to meet at a given location outside the gymnasium. Once gathered at that location, Dylan’s people denied them access to the show. It’s the exact opposite of the “Catch and Kill” process used by the National Enquirer decades later with Stormy Daniels, and a lot less expensive.
P.S.S. This photo, and one other I shot that night, were stolen off my previous website and used on the front and back covers of a bootleg album despite my © being on the site. Be careful out there!