The Gad About Town

Bob Dylan injured his back when he crashed his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle 50 years ago today on Striebel Rd. in Bearsville, New York. The road is a mostly straight connection between Tinker St. and the Glasco Turnpike, but something took him out. Only he and his then-wife, Sara, who was driving behind him in the family car, saw the accident.

Dylan gave different stories to different friends about the incident over the years. He told his friend Sam Shepard that the sun blinded him and the bike threw him. To Robert Shelton, who wrote the Dylan biography No Direction Home, Dylan said that he had hit an oil slick. To another, he said his brakes had stuck. (In the photo above, Dylan is on his bike in the center of Woodstock, New York.)

Dylan cracked a vertebrae in the crash, and he decided to have a slow healing process. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles, he writes about the crash: “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.” He performed live only four times over the next eight years.
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