Posted on 07/29/2006 8:18:50 AM PDT by Rocko
On July 29, 1966, something happened to Bob Dylan while he was riding his motorcycle near his Woodstock, New York, home. Forty years and a small library of biographies later, its still hard to be much more precise or detailed than that. What really befell Dylan on that day remains, like so much in this pop-culture icons closely guarded life, cloaked in mystery.
Ill-defined or not, the accident has been treated as a major event in Dylans life; at least one biographer divides the founder of folk-rocks career into pre- and post-accident. What made the event so significant?
Since 1961, when he had arrived in New York, Dylans life had moved quickly. In 1965 and 66 the pace only increased. As one observer put it, Dylan wasnt merely burning his candle at both ends; he was using a blowtorch. His incredible productivityperhaps his three best albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and the double album Blonde on Blonde, were recorded within a 14-month spanwas very likely fueled by methamphetamine; bone-thin in 66, Dylan had the giveaway look of a speed freak.
In June 1966 he returned from a nine-month world tour, made especially grueling by the relentless hostility with which audiences met his new sound (hed plugged his guitar in and added an electrified backup band). Though he was exhausted, embittered, and thoroughly road-weary, his aggressive manager, Albert Grossman, had booked him into a 64-date American tour, due to start in August. If Grossman had gotten his way, writes the biographer Howard Sounes, Dylan would have been on the road interminably until every last ticket dollar had been sucked up. Other commitments loomed as well. Dylans stream-of-consciousness novel, Tarantula, was scheduled for publication. Reading the galleys in July, he had misgivings about the entire book and told Macmillan, his publisher, that he wanted to revise it. He was given two weeks. At the same time, ABC-TV wanted an hour-long documentary of the just-completed world tour; all that existed as of July was miles of unedited footage.
The accident was Dylans means of escape from an unendurably fast-paced, pressurized life. As he said in a 1984 interview, When I had that motorcycle accident . . . I woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was just workin for all these leeches. And I really didnt want to do that. At some point during his convalescence he realized that he wanted a much more tranquil, family-centered life. (He had secretly married Sara Lownds in 1965, and he and she would raise five children together). His music changed, too, from the white-hot fury of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde to the sparer, quieter sound of 1968s John Wesley Harding and 1969s Nashville Skyline. He stayed off the road until 1974, when he toured with the same players who had backed him on the 1965-66 tour; they had since become famous as the Band.
But enough about the crackups aftermath; what about the crackup itself? According to Sounes, who gives the fullest, most judicious account, on the morning of July 29 Dylan and his wife drove from Woodstock to Albert Grossmans house in nearby Bearsville. Dylans motorcycle was in Grossmans garage, and Dylan wanted to take it to a repair shop. He set off on the bike from Grossmans with Sara following him in their car.
An anonymous source, a close friend of Dylans, told Sounes that as Dylan started on his way, he lost his balance and fell off the bike, and it fell on top of him. He himself told his biographer Robert Shelton that he hit an oil slick. He gave a different, longer account to the playwright Sam Shepard, who published it in Esquire as part of a one-act play. It was real early in the morning on top of a hill near Woodstock, he told Shepard. I cant even remember how it happened. I was blinded by the sun for a second. . . . I just happened to look up right smack into the sun with both eyes and, sure enough, I went blind for a second and I kind of panicked or something. I stomped down on the brake and the rear wheel locked up on me and I went flyin. Its impossible to choose between these varying accounts. In other words, were not likely ever to know what really occurred.
The first reports of the accident had Dylan barely escaping with his life. But if he had been seriously injured, an ambulance would have been called. None was, nor did Sara take her husband to the hospital. Instead, she drove him to the home office of his doctor, Ed Thaler, 50 miles away in Middletown, New York. As Sounes writes, This was a grueling one-hour drive by country roads, not a journey for a man in dire need of medical help.
Its impossible to pinpoint Dylans injuries. By most accounts, including his own, he broke several vertebrae. The damp weather still affects the wound, he told Shelton some time later. When the filmmaker D. H. Pennebaker visited him several days after the accident, he was wearing a neck brace, although, says Pennebaker, he didnt appear very knocked out by the accident.
Dylan stayed at Dr. Thalers for six weeks. If he wasnt extensively injured, why the long convalescence, especially when he had a wife and baby waiting at home? Rumors have long circulated that he was recovering from a heroin addiction, although Thaler has denied this. He did not come here regarding any situation involving detoxification, the doctor told Sounes. But Dylan had to stop using drugsif not heroin, then amphetaminesat some point, and this was a logical time. Post-accident photographs of Dylan show him fleshed out, not the wraith of 1965-66.
The accident itself was not a major event, but it gave him a much-needed chance to stop, rest, and take stock of his incredible journey since 1961. When he returned to work, it was at a much less frenetic pace than before the accident. He may not have been exaggerating when he later told an interviewer, I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. I probably would have died if I had kept on going the way I had been.
Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.
Unlike the global climate, which was always exactly the same for billions of years* until evil rich Americans started driving SUVs, people change with time, whether they want to or not.
*</global-warming sarcasm>
I agree. There was some filler on that album that could have been replaced with those gems.
According to one biography, he was having trouble writing at the time (songs don't come to him as easily as they used to), and he wanted to save them for future albums.
Yep. They contain some of his best work, but tend to be under appreciated by most fans.
But Dylan doesn't limit his contempt to the President. The long final track, "Ain't Talkin' Just Walkin'" which, with its ominous, portentous strings, is clearly intended as a major statement, sees a vengeful Dylan stalking "through the cities of the plague" to kill enemies who will "crush you with wealth and power". He doesn't name the neocons - just as he never directly named Vietnam - but he plainly despises them.
I hope this Brit writer is mistaken, because i would think Bob Dylan could see who the real enemies are in the world today.
.
This wouldn't be the first time the critics have read things into Dylan's songs that were not there.
bttt
Gee, aren't Osama Bin Laden and George Soros rich guys?
"natural causes"
other rumors: rock star deaths
I said, "Oh, kind miss, it most certainly does"
She says, "you must be jokin.'" I say, "I wish I was!"
Then she says, "you don't read women authors, do you?"
Least that's what I think I hear her say,
"Well", I say, "how would you know and what would it matter anyway?"
"Well", she says, "you just don't seem like you do!"
I said, "you're way wrong."
She says, "which ones have you read then?" I say, "I read Erica Jong!"
She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's going anywhere
my favorite source for dylan:
http://www.bjorner.com/bob.htm
Post-70s Dylan often gets overlooked, but he recorded dozens of amazing tunes during that (continuing) era.
I think "Highlands" is a classic, up there with "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." It has one of the best endings to a Dylan song:
The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away
Well, my heart's in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
But I'm already there in my mind
And that's good enough for now
Almost every verse in "Highlands" is quotable.
Another long Dylan song I quite like is "Brownsville Girl" (from Knocked Out Loaded).
Thanks for the link. I wasn't familiar with that one.
I lost my best friend the year (who I knew since I was 11) the week that TOOM came out. All of those songs hold a dark meaning for me. It was kind of ironic that this dylan album held such deep meaning for me, since he looked like Dylan from the cover of his first album.
I got my copy in the mail today and slapped it on my ipod. I have listened to it once. My question is: Why Alicia Keyes?
A bigger mystery: why Joan Baez?
PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock- 'n'-roll route?
DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13- year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?
PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?
DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.
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