The Great Dylan Crash

The Great Dylan Crash

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

JUST LAST WEEK I FOUND MYSELF ON A cross-country trip in my ancient 356 Porsche, driving along the southern edge of the Catskill Mountains in New York, right through the famous village of Woodstock. Sharing the driving with me for a few days of the trip was my old motorcycle touring buddy, Mike Cecchini, from Bethesda, Maryland.

Woodstock, of course, is best known for the great rock festival of 1969, which actually took place on a farm near Bethel, New York, about 35 miles away. The Woodstock title stuck, however, because (a) that’s where the festival was originally planned to be; and (b) the name had a certain magic.

Why magic?

Well, mainly because Bob Dylan lived there, having discovered the place while visiting the country retreat of his manager, Albert Grossman.

Also, Dylan’s backup band (who later named themselves, simply, The Band), rented a little pink-shingled house nearby, a place they christened “Big Pink,” composing the songs there for their first album: Music from Big Pink. With The Band and Dylan in town, lots of other musicians moved into the area, so the place became a kind of counterculture hotbed.

But, besides its abundance of famous residents, Woodstock was also known for another event in pop-culture lore: The Dylan motorcycle crash.

As every reasonably hip high school and college student knew in those days, Bob rode a Triumph. He was pictured on the cover of his Highway 61 Revisited album in a Triumph T-shirt, and he’d been photographed sitting astride his Triumph 500. I still have this photo in a book, and the bike looks to me (on close inspection with a magnifying glass) to be a 1964 Speed Tiger T100SR. Or maybe a ’63. In any case, you can see that the left front fork is drooling oil from the upper seal, just as my own ’68 Triumph 500 is doing at this very moment. Nice to know nothing ever changes.

I was working that summer on a railroad section crew, just about to start my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, when news came over the radio of Dylan’s crash on July 29, 1966. My friends and I were both stunned and not surprised at all, in equal measure. This, after all, was the Age of Disasters. Assassinations, the war in Vietnam, race riots, drug overdoses and motorcycle crashes seemed to be claiming lives of the famous and non-famous at a rate almost too fast to calculate. None of us, in fact, thought we would live to be very old.

Still, Dylan’s motorcycle accident was sad news. I think I can say without contradiction that he was simply the man, the music legend of the era. He was held in the same high artistic regard as the Beatles, but with all of it poured into a single individual. If nothing else, he wrote more songs that I took the trouble to learn on my own guitar than any other songwriter before or since.

Anyway, he crashed his motorcycle, and the underground rumor mill went wild: Dylan is paralyzed; Dylan is so badly disfigured he will never appear in public again; Dylan has a head injury and cannot speak, etc., etc.

Then in 1968, he came out with a new album, John Wesley Harding, and we all examined his photo on the cover for signs of damage. Scars? Stitches? He appeared to be standing upright under his own power. The album sounded good. Apparently he was okay.

The accident is still somewhat shrouded in mystery, but biographers seem to agree that he indeed had a motorcycle accident, locking up his back brake while swinging into a corner just south of Highway 212 on Zena Road, about a mile east of Woodstock, where the road takes a tight S-bend near the site of an old mill. Some visitors to his home reported him wearing an arm sling and a neckbrace. In any case, the accident seems not to have been too terrible, and it appears Dylan used the mishap as an opportunity to quit touring for a while, stay at home with his family and get some much-needed rest.

So, against this background, Mike and I came driving into Woodstock on Highway 212, on a late fall afternoon, 31 years later. And there, just out of town, was Zena Road. We turned off and, sure enough, found a severe Scurve just past the site of an old mill. I got out and walked around in the late afternoon sunlight.

Bad curve, all right. Beautiful spot, right next to the mill creek, with yellow autumn leaves falling lazily onto the water and whirling downstream. But easily a place where you could go in a little too fast. Maybe brake too hard too late, lose confidence, fail to countersteer or just plain run out of traction. I walked through the corner and thought, “Yes, I could crash here myself. No problem.”

Mike, who is not so steeped in rock lore as I, smoked a cigarette patiently and leaned on the car, soaking up the sun rays while I walked around. I hoped he didn’t mind the little detour, my dragging him here for some kind of quiet contemplation of historical vibes and private meaning. He kindly left me alone and said nothing, as he had two days before, when we visited the Vietnam War Memorial.

Hard to explain what brings us to these places. What are we looking for? My friend George Allez has visited at least three times the Iowa baseball diamond where Field of Dreams was filmed. He can’t explain the allure, but every time he drives west, he stops there for a while and just takes it all in, as though the ghost of Shoeless Joe might still walk out of the cornfield.

We all have our own ghosts, I guess, and we like to pay them homage. Triumphs and the songs of Bob Dylan meant a lot to me at the time of his crash, and they still do. So it was just a place I had to go, to see for myself, as if to visit an incident from my own past at which I had somehow failed to be present. Such is the power of music-and motorcycles-to move us around in time. Pure transportation.

After a while, we got back in the Porsche and drove off in search of Big Pink. As we headed up the road, a line from a Band song ran though my head: “If I thought it’d do any good, I’d stand on the rock where Moses stood....”