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heard of it. ‘The Grossman office won’t help me one bit on
this,’ said Abe. ‘And I can’t get through to Sara. Would you
please see if you can find out something—anything—and
call us back, collect? Bob’s mother is very worried—and so
am I.’ Four months earlier, a similar phone call had informed
me of [folksinger Richard] Fariña’s death in a motorcycle
accident. I rang The New York Times for more information.”
Shelton soon learned: “Details about Dylan’s accident...
were not easy to ascertain. It was widely reported that
Dylan nearly lost his life. To me, it seems more likely that
his mishap saved his life. The locking of the back wheel of
Dylan’s Triumph 500 started a chain of redemptive events
that allowed him to slow down.”
No ambulance had been called to the scene; Dylan hadn’t
been admitted to any hospital. Dylan has said that he broke
several vertebrae in the crash, but there is no injury report.
What happened?
The suggestion has been made that Dylan, faced with
unrelenting pressure of his own initial making, panicked,
and perhaps spun out with something approaching pur-
posefulness. Dylan, for once, will not argue the point, and
has written in Chronicles: Volume One—which is as ellip-
tical as it wants to be, when it wants to be—“I had been in
a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered.
Truth was I wanted to get out of the rat race.”
He convalesced in Woodstock.
He ate better, and dressed more casually.
He and Sara continued to build their family.
He would occasionally turn up for a benefit concert or
surprise appearance, but essentially he retired from the
stage for most of the next decade.
He found it more difficult to write songs.
He thought about becoming more serious about his
painting.
If he wondered what the future of Bob Dylan might be,
well, to this day he still hasn’t admitted to that.IN CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, DYLAN, WHO
is never one to wave a white flag, freely
admits that he required something new after
the battering of the world tour—he needed, in
as much of a concession as he will ever make,
to get out of what he called “the rat race.”
What had happened: The wave of criticism,
which barely existed in America in February,
had built as the tour progressed, until the
point where it became truly ugly in England:
nightly walkouts, epithets screamed, a
savage press corps. In a remarkable and
unfortunate way, this major rock ’n’ roll tour
began to feel like anything but: no rapturous
welcomes, no fifth encores, no partying after
the concert. “After those shows we were
lonely guys,” Robbie Robertson remembered
later. “Nobody wanted to hang out with
us.” When it was finally over, Dylan knew
there were a few folks somewhere whom
he was eager to hang out with: his family, in
Woodstock. He was eager to get home.BARRY FEINSTEIN
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