Veteran songwriter and stage performer Bob Dylan once shared the unlikely “biggest idol” he always thought of when performing.
The Mr. Tambourine Man hitmaker has been touring since the early 1960s and will perform across North America on a Summer 2026 tour. Dylan, who has previously cited Woody Guthrie as a clear influence on his music, also noted a movie star who affected his on-stage style. Speaking with Billy James back in 1961, Dylan confirmed one of his unlikely influences was the silent film star, Charlie Chaplin. How The Kid and The Gold Rush star had affected Dylan is unclear, though the Highway 61 Revisited hitmaker swears by the Academy Award winner as an influence.
He said: “If I’m on stage, even my idol—my biggest idol on stage—the one that’s running through my head all the time, is Charlie Chaplin. And, uh, it takes a while to explain it, but he’s one of the men.
“I seen some of his films. I just sort of knew who he was and that kind of stuff. Vaudeville, that kind of thing. Will Rogers. And I never really met anything—I never really came across anything that changed my mind about this. I never lived in a big city until I lived in New York. I don’t think it’s got the best of me.
“At least I know it hasn’t got the better part of me. I don’t think it touched me. It might have touched me a little bit. In fact, it has touched me a little bit, but I never lived in a city that was more than 15,000 people. And there’s an awful lot of difficulty here.”
Those wondering why Dylan has been performing on piano at recent shows may find the answer in this interview too, with the veteran performer comparing himself to Little Richard and suggesting he had a lot of time for the piano, despite being defined in the 1960s as a guitarist.
He said: “I play the piano. I used to play the piano. I used to play great piano, very great. I used to play piano like Little Richard’s stuff, only one octave higher.
“And everything came out. He made a big mistake, his records were great records but couldn’t have been greater records. His great mistake was he played low. If he had played high, it would’ve compensated.
“Little Richard’s something else. He’s a preacher, now. But I sort of played the piano in his style. And I played everything high and it amplified it.”
Dylan would show his appreciation for contemporary musicians over the years, notably performing with Grateful Dead in the 1980s, and covering the likes of The Pogues and Warren Zevon in the twenty-first century.
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