Veteran filmmaker David Lynch says he walked out of a Bob Dylan gig after seeing “how small” the songwriter was.
The Twin Peaks mastermind couldn’t figure out why Dylan was so small on stage. Though he had allegedly smoked a joint before the show, Lynch was left stunned by the appearance of a small speck on the stage and decided to leave the gig early. This peculiar story was shared by Lynch in the documentary The Art of Life, where he spoke on his early years as an artist and his first encounter with Dylan’s music on stage. It wasn’t all too positive an experience for Lynch, who cited pot as a problem for how he felt, which ultimately convinced him he needed to leave the show early. Dylan has toured nearly every year of his career, with fans calling the decades-long series of shows the Never Ending Tour. In that time, Dylan has played hundreds of shows across the world.
Lynch had the chance to see Dylan perform, though leaving early appears to have caused a split with his roommate at the time. It wasn’t the height of the man but being so far back which was seemingly the reason Lynch left. He said: “The next time I smoked dope, Bob Dylan was playing, you know, at this big place right down the street.
“And so, lo and behold, out of thousands of people in this, you know, auditorium kind of thing – which was real steep, I was way in the back. Out of all those seats, when I sat down, there was this girl sitting next to me that I’d just broken up with. Then, Bob Dylan came on the stage and I couldn’t believe how little he was.
“And I measured him with my fingers on my knee and I said to her: ‘his jeans are only this big!’ And then I measured his guitar and said, ‘his guitar is only this big!’ And I wasn’t even digging the music – I was so far away. So I wanted to get out of there really bad.”
Lynch ended up leaving the show, much to the disgust of his friend who had taken him there. The veteran director behind Blue Velvet continued: “Then, when the concert was over, Peter came back with a bunch of his friends and he said: ‘nobody walks out on Dylan!’ I said, ‘I walk out on Dylan, get the fuck outta here.’
“So that was the end of Peter as my roommate. I just didn’t want to be anywhere in this world that was, you know, now my world.” In other interviews, Lynch, who died in January 2025, said viewers of his debut film, Eraserhead “have everything” they need to understand it.
He said: “You have everything in the film. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what I say. Zip. It can only be a negative. The thing is built so you don’t want to keep anything away, and you don’t want to add anything to it. It’s complete. That’s it.” Lynch would also cite a Bible passage as an influence for his vision, though he did not reveal which line it was before his death.
