What Was Bob Dylan Looking For When He Got Arrested In New Jersey?
Now we learn that Bob Dylan was detained by police in Long Branch, New Jersey last month after a couple reported seeing an "eccentric-looking old man" wandering around their backyard during a rainstorm. The 24-year-old policewoman who picked him up didn't recognize him, thinking he was an escaped mental patient when he told her his name and that he was considering buying the house. (There was a for-sale sign out front. But he was wearing sweatpants and two raincoats.) After driving him back to the hotel where he told her he was staying and checking a passport produced by his manager, she was embarrassed, and let him go with a sheepish "have a nice day."
An ABC News report wonders whether Dylan might have been looking for the house two blocks away where Bruce Springsteen wrote Born To Run, noting that he's made recent pilgrimages to former residences of Neil Young and John Lennon. Knowledge of the Long Branch area suggests two other possibilities:
1) Dylan was looking for the house fifteen minutes inland, in the town of Rumson, where Bon Jovi lived in the late 80s. A likely geographical source for "Livin' On A Prayer" and "Dead Or Alive."
2) The glass-and-marble grand-piano-shaped house Billy Joel built-also, unsurprisingly, in the 80s-ten minutes south down Ocean Avenue, in Deal. Where the muse might have struck for songs like "We Didn't Start The Fire" and "The Downeaster 'Alexa'."
Local youths have been known to make Dylan-like trips to both these sites, throwing beer cans over the ten-foot fence at Jovi's cul de sac, and breaking into the Joel property while it was under winter renovation-inspecting with disdain the Grecian-courtyard-like "keyboard" of the structure and forever cursing all of Billy Joel's musical output and his decision to move to New Jersey in the first place. (This on the the way home from a Bob Mould concert in nearby Asbury Park.)
He Wasn't There.
God I love local youths.
an oldths.
AND
Is #2 true? That was certainly the rumor at the time, but I seem to recall said rumor prompting an Asbury Park Press story that the house was actually being built by a dentist.
Bob Dylan was looking for The Meaning of Life, man.
Funny story, my web-design teacher in college grew up in Woodstock, and used to sell Bob Dylan weed when he (my teacher) was in high school.
Bob Dylan smokes weed?!?!
"I was only in there to get directions on how to get away from there."
Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to weed.
but only a dentist was cool enough to give them LSD.
He may also have been heading to the Windmill to get one of the world's best 3:00 a.m. hot dogs.
It was Jersey, she shouldn't have been embarrassed to have never seen a passport.
Billy Joel is the greatest trivia game to play with your friends! "What artist once opened for Black Sabbath and got booed loudly? You hate him but guaranteed you know the lyrics to 85% of his songs? And it's not Elton John!" It totally pisses off anybody you play this game with because they then realize they really DO know the lyrics to that many Joel songs.
Also, is it officially the year of the nosy neighborhood ladies?
Don't forget about ATTILA!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rbKePwvJIkM/Rwt_-anYKBI/AAAAAAAAAKs/zKtekD8doTU/s400/Attila.jpg
"You don't know who you're messing with."
Aww, Kristie, can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside the backstreets with Miami Steve again?