Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on His Motorcycle Accident)

“I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X…I didn‘t see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded.”--Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004)

Bob Dylan is characteristically cryptic but expressive in his memoir in describing the motorcycle accident in upstate New York that occurred 45 years ago yesterday.

Actually, “mentioning” might be a more appropriate word than “describing,” in terms of the details he provides: zilch. He has said somewhat more about the circumstances elsewhere in interviews, though usually no more than a sentence or two. The upshot of his statements: he broke some vertebra, had it taken care of, didn’t tour for awhile, and moved on. No big deal.

Only it was a very big deal on the rock ‘n’ roll scene, for these reasons:

* This being the Sixties, all kinds of rumors circulated. At the time, one of the wilder ones—on the order of the “Paul Is Dead” canard that later floated around about Paul McCartney—was that Dylan had suffered such injuries to the brain that he was no longer mentally functioning. A more plausible rumor was that he had been treated for drug addiction. (A neat summary of the known facts, eyewitness testimony and rumors surrounding the accident can be found in this post from the blog Rule Forty Two.)

* The rock ‘n’ roll scene was in the midst of a creative, can-you-top-this moment. Along about 1965, rock ‘n’ roll entered a period when all kinds of experimentation with new sounds and lyrics occurred. One seminal album that spurred much of this was the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The Beatles would respond, most emphatically, with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Dylan himself contributed much to the creative ferment with the double-album Blonde on Blonde, released just a few weeks before his accident.) But now, as the different artists weighed the challenges posed by other musicians, surveyed the increasingly uncertain world outside the studio, and indulged in all kinds of drugs, one of the key figures in this creative revolution was, uncharacteristically, out of the picture for nine months—or, as Don McLean would put it several years later, in “American Pie,” “the jester [was] on the sideline in a cast.”

* Dylan, the principal songwriting influence of his generation, was now, preposterously, under the radar of the music business. Dylan had no sooner helped the folk-music movement reach its popular zenith with “Blowin’ in the Wind” than he had spurred the growth of a more introspective, “folk-rock” movement by taking a cue from The Byrds and going electric. In the two years just before the accident, he had released five albums. Increasingly looked to as “the voice of a generation,” he was the epicenter of a hurricane of change and attention.

And that, precisely, might have been the trouble. Whether Dylan was treated for substance abuse, or whether, as some have thought, he was not seriously hurt at all but let the world think so, I have no doubt that Dylan’s memoir expressed his psychological, if not his physiological, state of the time very well.

“Truth was,” as Dylan might put, he was profoundly tired of all the “voice of a generation” talk. It was more than the fact that he was just a musician and flabbergasted by the amount of attention he was receiving, by the way every last one of his utterances was dissected. A musical magpie who took his influences wherever he found them—Woody Guthrie, Smokey Robinson, Theolonius Monk, Frank Sinatra—he did not want to be put into a creative pigeonhole. And he was becoming ever more wary of being seen as a political oracle: “Don’t follow leaders, just watch the parking meters,” he had warned waggishly in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” (Come to think of it, even the image accompanying this post is emblematic of his spirit then and, to a large extent, now. It doesn't at all preclude him observing everything, but it sure keeps the listener and viewer from thinking that they can see into him and, therefore, peg him.)

Before the accident, Dylan had a helter-skelter schedule of 60 concerts planned. All that went by the wayside during his convalescence. Love and commitment (at least for a time) had made him a different person.

During the latter stages of his convalescence, he began to record with The Band, in a series of loose, carefree sessions that soon found their way onto bootlegs, known as The Basement Tapes. The studio album he finally released in 1968, John Wesley Harding, was quieter, simpler, starker than any he had released before the accident. Yet even in that way, in the midst of a year when the world went crazy from shouting and shooting, it expressed the heart of Dylan’s independent, ferociously contrarian spirit.

(Photo of Dylan by Lisa Law. ©Lisa Law, from her Web site “Flashing on the Sixties”)