Inside Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s tumultuous relationship, which is rumored to have inspired his biggest hits

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s brief but transformative relationship has gone under the radar in his recently released biopic A Complete Unknown.

The former lovers – played by Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro in James Mangold’s film, which hit cinemas on Christmas Day – dated from 1963 to 1965.

Baez was an established performer by the time she first met the then-unknown “urban hillbilly” in Greenwich Village in April 1961, but she soon began inviting him on stage to perform with her at her concerts .

They both performed at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom event, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic I Have a Dream speech.

The couple continued to spend time together in the summer of 1964 in Bearsville, New York, a hamlet in upstate Woodstock.

He was working on what would then become his fourth album, Another Side of Dylan, which prophetically contained the song It Ain’t Me Babe.

Baez and Dylan’s relationship ended painfully during his 1965 British tour, when he invited her on the road but refused to let her go on stage.

“I was just trotting around, wondering why Bob wouldn’t invite me on stage, feeling very sorry for myself, becoming very neurotic and not having the brains to leave and go home,” she later told Rolling Stone.

‘That would be the best way to describe that tour. It was really just a waste of time.”

Dylan walked down the aisle with Playboy Bunny Sara Lownds in late 1965.

In his 2015 posthumous memoir, Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and off the Tracks, Dylan’s former tour manager Victor Maymudes questioned him about why he married Lownds and not Baez.

‘Cause Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it if I want her to,” Dylan told him.

“Bob didn’t want to compete with her,” Maymudes said.

“If Bob was a king, Joan was a queen, and Bob didn’t want a queen. He wanted something simpler.”

In her 2023 documentary Joan Baez I Am A Noise, Baez revealed that Dylan broke her heart so badly in 1965 after their whirlwind three-year romance that she described it as “crushing.”

“We were in our early twenties,” she said. ‘We were stupid, and you can’t blame someone forever. I certainly tried, but I eventually gave up.”

Speaking about their split, Baez added: “Dylan and I couldn’t figure out how we felt about each other.

‘The other problem was that I was the only one who didn’t do drugs. I was on the outside.

“Even when I tried to be cool and hang out with everyone, which I did, I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Dylan has also spoken about their breakup, once saying in a documentary, “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately she got swept away, and I felt very bad about it.”

And the former lovers didn’t keep in touch, with Baez revealing in 2018 that she hadn’t spoken to Dylan in 25 years.

However, she told DailyMail.com that “whatever happened between them was completely healed.”

‘There’s still a bond, and that’s enough for me. The fact that in some people’s eyes I’m forever linked to him – well, there could be worse things,” she said at the time.

‘I’m smart enough to know that I never understood him, and I never will.

“I’ve probably gotten closer than a lot of people, but in the end I don’t understand it.” But she does have a theory about his ability to maintain a mystique.’

Despite the sadness, Baez sang about Dylan in one of her best songs, Diamonds And Rust.

The song included the lyrics: “Your eyes were bluer than a robin’s egg / My poetry was worthless, you said.”

Fans have also long speculated that Baez influenced some of Dylan’s most iconic songs, including the 1965 song Like a Rolling Stone and the 1966 hit Visions of Johanna.

He never confirmed those theories.

Baez married only once, to journalist and activist David Harris, the father of her son Gabriel. Their relationship ended in an amicable divorce in 1973.

In the early 1980s she had a relationship with Apple founder Steve Jobs, then in his mid-twenties and already a multi-millionaire.

Dylan has been married twice. First to Lownds, with whom he shares four children: Jesse (born January 6, 1966), Anna Lea (born July 11, 1967), Samuel (born July 30, 1968) and Jakob (born December 9, 1969).

He also adopted Lownds’ daughter Maria from a previous marriage; they separated in 1977 after 11 years of marriage.

Dylan then married Carolyn Dennis in 1986, but divorced her in 1992. They share daughter Desiree, born January 31, 1986.