Life Bookazines - Bob Dylan - 2020

60 LIFE BOB DYLAN

D

ylan wanted to get out of the rat race, sure, and whether he purposely caused his exit from

the scene or it was forced upon him, there was an irony to the first weeks and months of

his rehabilitation— physical, psychological, spiritual rehab—in Woodstock. The irony:

Nothing was calm, all was chaos. If anything, it was even worse than it had recently been. Dylan’s

fans desperately wanted to know how he was and what had happened. Journalists were their

only agents, and so the drumbeat from the press was cease-

less. Across the globe, a story ran in a Japanese newspaper

recounting a bedside interview in a hospital—an interview

that had never happened. It was all so very ponderous and

urgent, as Dylan lay at home rubbing his neck. This, from

the respectable Chicago Tribune: “A traditional gesture of the

prophet is the retreat and the re-emergence... with a new

message. A good deal of what will or won’t be in pop music

hangs on Dylan’s re-emergence and his message.”

Prophet, please, re-emerge!

The temptation with Dylan is to assume he was amused,

but he wasn’t, not at this juncture. He was surely worried.

Albert Grossman was out there downplaying the serious-

ness of his client’s injuries and insisting Dylan would be

back at work—meaning, back on the road—in a matter of

weeks. (Meanwhile, Grossman was fuming as he stomped

around the office, “How could he do this to me?”) Dylan

was insisting, because he felt compelled to, that he had

indeed been hurt, and might not return to touring or even

recording anytime soon. When Robert Shelton specu-

lated in The New York Times that the injuries might not be

as critical as previously thought, Dylan’s brother, David,

quickly departed the singer’s camp in Woodstock to quell

this most injurious of speculations. He traveled to the city

and told Shelton directly, “There was an accident. There

definitely was an accident.”

Shelton continued in his Dylan biography with a para-

graph that seems to completely delineate what was going on,

and how, even if Dylan hadn’t caused the crash, he somehow

welcomed it: “Dylan only told me, ‘It happened one morning

after I’d been up for three days. I hit an oil slick. The weather

still affects the wound.’ He said he was riding along Striebel

Road, not far from his Woodstock home, taking the bike

Retreat,

Return

BACK IN WOODSTOCK, THE BEARDS

would come and go, the shades would come

and go, the cigarettes would come and go,

the hair would get shorter and longer. The

music would be made more intermittently,

as the frantic rush of the young Bob Dylan

was curtailed by circumstance. This proved

to be a good thing. DPA/ZUMA

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