The best Bob Dylan stories you know

bob dylan arrested for being creepy old man.

http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2004/10/06/dylan/index.html

great collection of people (e.g. joan baez, johnny cash, allan ginsberg, etc) recounting their first encounters w/ mr zimmerman

I went to try to get Dylan to sign a copy of his Complete Lyrics book when he played San Antonio some years ago (mid 90's). He was playing in a beautiful theater called 'The Majestic Theater'.
I was hanging out before the show and started chatting to another collector whom I saw regularly when we were trying to get autographs.
"Do you know about the Hood?" he asked me.
"The Hood?!" I replied.
Does he mean 'the ghetto'? The 'urban' area here in San Antonio?
"You know Bob wears a hood when he wants to be left alone, and no one speaks to him..."
I just sort of chuckled and thought that that was crazy... that my friend was a bit daft. We waited for a while and then around the corner came this old, black RV... with a trailer attached. And it was MATTE black - not shiny black. Not 'showroom quality modern paint technology' black, but like... can o' spray paint black. I was like "no way" that that's Bob Dylan... But it pulled right up to he stage door. A guy got out, opened the trailer, went back in, came back out with a big dog, and commenced to feeding the dog. The scene was a bit surreal and I was probably not paying close attention to the real reason I was there. My friend said "There he is!" and I looked up to see a desheveled looking gentleman exiting the bus... It was Bob.
We began walking towards him and all of a sudden he pulled a hoodie-like hood over his head and made a bee-line for the stage door. Hoodies are quite common now, but back then they were more like a sweat-suit kinda gym class thing. I was flabberghasted! "THE HOOD! It is true!!!" "How freakin' weird!" And no one spoke a word to him as he meandered around the back and to and fro the bus. I believe he even took off down the street, but I didn't follow. I didn't want to be a nuisance to Mr. Dylan.
The guy that was feeding the dog took a plastic bag and set it somewhere on the trailer. It blew down or fell down and started blowing towards me. I could tell there was some paper or something in it because it had weight and was moving slowly across the concrete towards me. I thought "if it makes it to me, I'm going to pick it up and see what's inside of it"... It did and I did. There were some receipts from various 'truck-stop' type places for hat pins and suff and a UPS slip from New Mexico sent to the hotel La Mansion across the street. I wish I would've held onto everything in the bag but I didn't... I thought it was just a bunch of trash (it was)... But I held onto the slip because of the address.

Later that night, at the show, Bob was playing. A girl held up an LP for Bob to sign in the middle of the performance. "Not now honey... I'll sign it after the show." I knew for an absolute FACT that she would NOT get her album signed. He was lying.
After the show had ended, people started surrounding the stage door and the path to the 'Darth Vader RV'. I was stationed perfectly right in front of the bus door, off to the side. Perfect.
Bob came out and the bus door opened. He through up the hood and parted the sea of screaming fans. I saw the girl with the album. She was short and engulfed by the throng of people surrounding her. She held up her LP... I don't know which one it was... You could't even see her; just a little arm and hand holding the flat cardboard. Almost like it was planned, Bob turned, reached out and took her album and signed it! "Holy Smokes!" I know I'm gonna get my book signed!
"Mr. Dylan? Could you sign my book?"
"I can't right now! Go to Austin... I'll sign it in Austin!"
"But, I'm not going to Austin!"
And the door closed. Me and my buddy were shut out!
I can't believe that chick got her album signed! But she seemed like a real fan, so god bless her!

My friend and his mom went to Austin... His mom got Bob to sign something for them and they talked about Education or teaching or something to that effect.

I never got my book signed. Never tried again either.
But I did find out just recently that the address and name on the slip belonged to Bob's driver...

A friend of mine used to tell a story about the first time Dylan played Dublin in '65: they tried to get to talk to him after the show in the Adelphi, but didn't catch him, but heard he would be getting the train to Belfast next morning. So they waited at Amiens St, and, sure enough, he shows up with his entourage and boards the train. He sits in a compartment for a while, but eventually they cajole to a door - my friend who has been silent up til know, proffers some paper and asks for an autograph.... Dylan goes 'later, man': and at that exact moment the train pulls off....

(nearly) thirty years later, Dylan is playing at a festival in Tramore at which I'm working. He was followed by Jerry Lee, and I'm standing at the monitor desk, and JLL is rockin' - I turn to my friend Davy, who's kinda short, and who was standing there, and say 'this is a great!' - the unmistakable voice rises from below shoulder level 'yeah, man' .....Davy has stood back to let Bobby see.

Tommy Shaw told a story on a podcast recently about how one time Styx played L.A., someone sent a message saying, “Bob Dylan’s at the back door of the theater, he wants to see the show.” They didn’t believe it, and blew it off. A while later, Shaw went to a Van Morrison show and ran into Dylan. Shaw introduced himself, said “big fan,” etc. — Dylan told him, “I tried to get in to see you guys once, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

Larry Charles has the greatest Bob Dylan story. It's funnier to hear him tell it, partly so he can do his Dylan impression where appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDTSu8v8QI

But if you want to read it, I'll copy in Business Insider's report on it...

[Larry Charles] mentions that back in the 90s, Bob Dylan was endlessly touring and stuck on a bus a lot of the time, so to combat his boredom, he would become "addicted" to different genres of movies and watch "every single one of them" during that period.

At one point, he became "deeply into Jerry Lewis" and decided he wanted to star in a slapstick comedy. Not only that, but he wanted to do it as a TV series for HBO. It wasn't long before Charles got a call.

Charles described the whole experience as "very dreamlike" and says he really only took the meeting so he could tell his friends he had a meeting with Bob Dylan. Charles describes the surreal meeting:

"He owns a boxing gym in Santa Monica, I meet him in the back of this boxing gym in a cubicle, he's chain-smoking the whole time...completely smoke-filled...and his assistant comes over and says 'do you want something to drink' and it's attached to this coffee house so I say 'yeah, I'll just have an iced coffee' and Bob responds 'I want something hot. I want a hot beverage,' because that's sort of how he talks, he talks in this very ornate way. So they bring a hot coffee for him, a cappuccino or something, and they bring an iced coffee for me and they put them together in the middle of the table and he immediately grabs my iced coffee and starts drinking the iced coffee.

"And I'm watching him drink it, and I'm not touching the other thing I didn't want the other thing, and finally he almost finishes my drink and goes 'why aren't you drinking your drink' and it's like 'you're drinking my drink,' y'know, and he kinda laughed, and that kinda broke the ice, strangely enough. It's like going to see a sorcerer...'cause it's like all a test...he drank my drink, how would I react?"

As the meeting progressed, Charles got some fascinating and unique insight into Bob Dylan's writing process.

"He brings out this very ornate beautiful box, like a sorcerer would, and he opens the box and dumps all these pieces of scrap paper on the table...and yes, that is exactly what he does...every piece of scrap paper was a hotel stationary, little scraps from Norway and from Belgium and Brazil and places like that, and each little piece of paper had a line, like some kind of little line scribbled or a name scribbled, 'Uncle Sweetheart,' or a weird poetic line or an idea or whatever, and he was like 'I don't know what to do with all this,'...and for some reason I was able to go 'oh y'know you can take this...this is a line, this is the character, and the character could say this line.' And he said 'you can do that?' and it's like 'yeah, yeah you can do that' because I realized that's how he writes songs, he takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that.

"He has all these ideas...and then just in a kind of subconscious or unconscious way he lets them kind of synthesize into a coherent thing, and that's how we wound up writing, also. We wound up writing in a very cut-up technique, we would just take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it, and we finally...we wrote this very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy which was filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff. So we say to Bob, 'if you come to HBO with us, we'll definitely sell the project because they won't have the balls to say no to your face,' and he agrees."

"So he showed up at the meeting...and at the time, by the way, I was only wearing pajamas everywhere I went, I used to just wear pajamas, I worked at 'Mad About You' for two years, I started wearing pajamas, everywhere I went, I would take my kids to events and I'd be wearing pajamas...I probably was having a nervous breakdown and didn't realize, but I wore pajamas everywhere I went."

"So I show up for the meeting in my pajamas...and he shows for the meeting at HBO in a black cowboy hat, a black floor length duster, black boots, he looks like Cat Ballou or something, he looks like a Western guy who's carrying six guns.

"We stride down the hall at HBO, if you can imagine that scene, my hair is super long, beard down to my belly button in f*ckin' pajamas and Bob Dylan is dressed like a cowboy from a movie. We go into the meeting and Chris Albrecht who was the president of HBO says 'Bob, oh, so great to meet you, look I have the original tickets from Woodstock' and Bob goes 'I didn't play Woodstock' and then he walks over to the other side of the office which has floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city and proceeds to have his back turned to us for the entire meeting.

"He never turns around, I have to start pitching this thing...this is who he is. Gavin Polone was there, who has my manager at the time, and he whispers 'he's like a retarded child.' So I would go 'Bob's going to do this, right Bob?' and at the end, ironically, despite all this discomfort, they bought the project, indeed.

"They bought the project, we go out to the elevator, Bob's manager Jeff, my manager Gavin, me and Bob, the 3 of us are elated we actually sold the project and Bob says 'I don't want to do it anymore.' He says 'I don't want to do it anymore, it's too slapsticky.' He's like not into it, that's over. The slapstick phase has officially ended. He's not into it anymore, and Gavin Polone said to me 'you gotta get out of this', and I said 'I'm on the Bob Dylan train, I'm going to take this train wherever it takes me' and we wound up re-writing that into kinda like a serious movie, and that's what we wound up shooting, which took another year to do that.'

Amazing - thx for posting that

This guy has one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAaCczUt7tk

Glyn Johns anecdote (from 2014):

“Dylan’s a fascinating character,” says Johns. “When I finished recording his European tour in 1984, he and I had to choose which performance of which song to use from eight or nine concerts. He single-handedly chose the worst performances. I assumed he was testing me, because he let me win in the end. Afterwards, I had him on the phone every night for a week, talking about songwriting. He was very pleasant.” Did he go to hear Dylan in concert still? “No, the element of risk in getting your money’s worth is too great.”

lol

Ian McLagan has some funny stories from that tour in his autobiography. Apparently there were few (if any) rehearsals, and if Bob called a tune Ian didn’t know, Ian had to just figure it out on the spot. After one of the early dates on the tour, Ian went up to Bob in the hotel bar and made some suggestions for the setlists. Bob said, “Tell you what, write all those songs down and slide the list under the door to my room.” Ian did so, and for the rest of the tour, none of those songs were played.

McLagan was also present when Peter Grant introduced himself to Bob. “Hello Bob, I’m Peter Grant. I manage Led Zeppelin.” Bob stared at him for a second and said, “I don’t come to you with my problems.”

Ian did so, and for the rest of the tour, none of those songs were played.

Amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CIOhY4ysRE

xp lol

And insanely/predictably, someone bootlegged a subsequent audition/rehearsal that must have been recorded not long after after GE's anecdote. Maybe later that night? Next day?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD0ZfFsYTDI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5zn8lblVeI

G.E. Smith's recollections are great. Gonna sit down later and listen to the entire interview with him. He's a natural storyteller.

The first and best time I saw Dylan was in Ottawa 1988 when he was backed by G.E. and band. No idea how closely they were adhering to a set list. You could see how he was following Dylan's hands for clues and then indicating the song to the rest of the band. Clearly not an easy task but he pulled it off brilliantly.

Jack White to Release Bob Dylan Collaborative Performance of “Ball and Biscuit”

White sat in with Dylan during show his show at the Detroit State Theatre in March 2004. As The White Stripes frontman recounted in a 2012 interview with The Wall Street Journal, the entire moment was by sheer happenstance. “That was just by accident. I went and saw him play in Detroit and he said to me, ‘We’ve been playing one of your songs lately at sound checks.’ I thought, Wow. I was afraid to ask which one. I didn’t even ask. It was just such an honor to hear that. Later on, I remember I went home and I called back. I said, ‘Can I talk to the bass player?’ I called the theater. I was like, ‘Did Bob mean that he wanted me to play tonight? ‘Cause he said some things that I thought maybe – maybe I misconstrued. Was he meaning that he wanted me to play with him tonight? I don’t want to be rude and pretend that I didn’t hear or something like that.’ So turned out yeah, we played together that night. He said yeah, come on, let’s play something, and we played ‘Ball and Biscuit,’ one of my songs. It’s not lost on me that he played one of my songs, not the other way around.”

My friend worked on Shadow Kingdom. She was given the basic “don’t bother Bob” instructions. So she had zero interactions during the shoot. But when the finished he went right up to her, kissed her on the lips and then walked out the room without saying anything.

How did your friend feel about this?

Totally cool with it. She described it as a comedy bit.

But I also heard probably untrue, but super dark Bob story from an acquaintance of Tony Garnier if any one wants to hear it.

Well if it’s “probably untrue”…(?)

Let me preface this with all caveats about third hand stories. I cannot confirm any of this and it’s just something a guy who said he knew Tony Garnier told me.

But he was a motorcycle guy. Bob and Tony were big riders in the 80s and 90s. That’s how they would spend time before shows and. So part of Bobs circle and security team were Hells Angles.

Around this time Bob had a pretty intense stalker. She legally changed her name to Sara Dylan and she would show up backstage because she was able to convince people she was his ex wife. She would contact his kids, show up at his house, do the things a stalker would do. One day, according to the story I heard, she just disappeared. Any it was implied that the security team of Hells Angels made her disappear.

Again this is just a story a guy told me. I think it’s probably untrue

I’m pretty skeptical, including the part about Hell’s Angels being his security detail, but he does indeed love motorcycles and others like Mark Howard also remember bonding over that.

His week long affair with Nico and “I’ll keep it with mine” from that new Lou reed book

That song isn’t much by BD standards