Bob Dylan Is Judas (A Bob Dylan Story, Chapter 1)

this recording? Okay? This is Dr Ed Taylor. It's Friday, July six. I'm at my home in Middletown, New York. I have an unexpected patient here in my house. Robert Allen Zimmerman, a k a. Bob Dylan. He was involved in a motorcycle crash about an hour north to hear up in Woodstock. He was brought here to me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I assume he wants to keep a low profile. He is suffering multiple injuries, although as of yet I have been unable to ascertain exact details.

There is little bruising and there appears to be no broken bones, but the patient is alarmed and erratic and dead. He did that cat, that song and dance man that judas the voice of a generation, whatever the hell that means. The man named Bob Dylan. He died on a road in Woodstock earlier today. The history books will tell you otherwise. But believe me. Believe me when I say that he died that day. He went over the handlebars of his motorcycle. The sun is still burning in his eyes, and his

head hit the pavement back dead. I know because I was there. I saw it all happen, Because it happened to me. I needed it. I needed it to get free, free from the pressure, free from being Bob Dylan. But death is not the end, you know. The funny thing about life is it's not about finding yourself. People always say, go and find yourself. No, it's about inventing yourself. That's what life is. When you create, you're in control, you hold the cards, you write the narrative, and when you create,

you can also kill. With every death comes rebirth, transfiguration as I like to call it, as with every journey. Though there's a lot of pain, you can't travel through life without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Yeah, chapter one, Bob Dylan is Judas. It was the sun, Yeah, that was it. The sun caught my eyes and then I don't know the bike just I couldn't see anything. I guess we should start at the start. Every end

has a has a start, right, even death. Well, the end of Bob Dylan, you knew, began on July Newport Folk Festival. I was king of the world. Then, well somebody's world, I suppose, but everything was about to unravel. I remember sitting backstage with my manager, Albert Grossman and Alan Lomax. Do you know him? They call him an ethno musicologist. That's a job. Apparently. Joining us was the folk singer Pete Seeger. Pete and I went way back. He helped me get noticed by Columbia Records, the record

company I had a contract with. I had a smoke with each drag. It felt like everything was starting to speed up. The whole day had been a drag. We were due to play on Sunday night, but before we had to do what they call a contemporary Songs workshop, that sort of thing that sucks the life out of previously living art. I sped through some of my songs with my guitar, and we were due to cut the song Tombstone Blues and Studio next week, so I gave that a run out alongside a couple of earlier tunes.

I was happy enough until Paul Butterfield's Electric blues bands took the stage right after me. My friend Mike Bloomfield played guitar with them, and so I stayed to watch. If I hadn't done that, well, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe I wouldn't even be talking to you about this right now. I know because I was there. Anyway, someone had to introduce the acts onto the stage. That's the tradition. Right well before Paul Butterfield's band appeared, Lomax

had to introduced them. Now. I liked Lomax. I had spent many nights at his apartment meeting all kinds of folk music people that I would never have come in contact with otherwise the history books will tell you otherwise. He also introduced me to sus in New York. She was the one on the cover of the Free Wheeling album. But that day Lomax, being part of that folk set, sneered at this electric band coming on with a little

curld smile on his face. He said something like, now you're going to hear a group of young boys blah blah blah with electric instruments blah blah blah. Let's see if they can play this hardware at all. It was so pompous man, so repressed. Fuck him for being disparaging. Everything doesn't have to be the way it was, the way we always have done it. Life is about inviting yourself. That's what life is. I thought my annoyance would pass, but by the time the first notes from the Butterfield

Band rang out, I was still pissed. I wasn't alone. Just when I thought my anger was going to boil over, I saw Albert march up to Lomax and shove him with both hands. Do you write the narrative? Lomax fell to the floor, and Albert, who wasn't a small guy by the way, everyone called him the bear for crying out loud, he threw himself on top of Lomax. Lomax managed to get a punch in right on Albert's neck. Albert was about to smack him right back, but somebody

pulled him apart. I didn't throw a punch that afternoon, Unlike Albert, but I made up my mind to throw one later and when I was due to perform. As always alone with an acoustic guitar, but now I wanted everyone to drown in the sound of a band, a fucking rock and roll band. I put Albert on a mission go round up members of Paul Butterfield's band and some other guys at the festival who weren't too snooty. I went back to my dressing room and changed straight away.

I wore all black, black jeans, black Chelsea boots. I felt like a million bucks. I also threw on a black leather jacket to a race. All doubt I was a rock star. It's about inventing yourself. Why did I wear black? I thought I was going to a funeral, man, It turns out I was early. At the sound check, I was still pissed. We rattled through some Oregan riffs and two songs with the full band, but we didn't

need to. This show wasn't about rehearsal. It was the culmination of what I'd been feeling about this whole stuff He's seen over the last few months. Eight o'clock sharp, we were due to go on I stood at the side of the stage and saw seventeen thousand people waiting that happened. I grabbed my sixty Fender stratocaster and didn't even reply to Albert when he asked if I was okay. Peter Yarrow from the group Peter Paula Mary. He introduced

me in the band onto the stage. He said, ladies and gentlemen, the person that's going to come up now as a limited amount of time, limited amount of time. Never has a truer sentence been uttered. We strode on and I shouted, let's go. I needed it to get free. We launched into Maggie's farm and the sound of the band was like a Tommy gun, like we were spraying the audience with bullets from the speakers. He did. I watched lights flash brightly from camera bulbs and the sea

of heads. The noise was so loud it was chaotic. All my anger from earlier pulsed through my fingers. As I beat the stratocaster into shape, flash more camera bulbs. The huge floodlights blurred into spots in my eyes as I hit the strings harder. With each downstrum of the guitar, you hold the cards. I could already hear a din from the crowd. I always told reporters that I couldn't hear anybody booing over the loud music. But I did hear it, and it did bother me. I was just

using what the politicians would call plausible deniability. The way I was telling it was a good story, and why let the truth get in the way of a good story. Those vultures would probably thank me for a quote like that if sells them more papers. The folk purists, meanwhile, they hated us seventeen thousand Alan Lomax's The strings on the strato caster took more of a pounding as finally the camera flashes stopped, and then so did we. I remember blurting out thank you very much as the booze

rained down. They hung there in the air like invisible violence. Sure there were a couple of cheers sprinkled in there, but it was mainly booze. We reloaded and gave it to them again like a rolling stone. Was next. How does it feel? At that moment, I knew the answer to the question that song was asking. I know because I was there. It was an act of defiance and it felt good. But It also felt kind of lonely in the moment, even though I was surrounded by other musicians.

I can't say why. We were halfway through, like a rolling stone. When Pete Seeger appeared at the side of the stage. He was outing that it was too loud, that no one could hear the words good. I saw something in his hand, caught by the flash of the cameras. But death is not the end. It was an ax. For a split second, I thought he was gonna come for me. With it comes rebirth. He was screaming, screaming

about cutting the power. He drew the axe above his head, demanding that we stopped or he'd strike the p a cable. Suddenly Albert appeared and wrestled the ax from him, both of them falling to the ground and ruining a stack of perfectly good guitars in the process. Acoustic guitars. How appropriate, It was a destructive end to a destructive set because it happened to me. I mean, was there an ax there that day? No? But it makes for a better story. Okay,

don't forget. Life is about inventing yourself. That's what life is her. I was on a jet back to New York, staring at my strats, sitting on the seat opposite me. I just couldn't bear to hold it anymore. If I held it, I could feel the booze from the crowd resonating from inside the guitar's body. That reaction was worse than I ever thought it could be. I kept telling myself, this is just one show, this is just one show.

But what happened that night under flashes from the cameras and the Tommy gun fire of the music, it would open up Pandora's box for me, one I could never close. It was an oily patch on the road. That was it. That's the thing that caused it. I saw it, and right away I knew it was going to cause the bike to flip. I tried to avoid it, but it was it was too big. The Newport gigs set the tone for the next three sixty five days of my life. Back in New York, I was cutting what would become

the Highway sixty one Revisited album. I began recording that song positively Fourth Street, about all those purists who complained about that electric stuff, the same ones who would call me a judas. When I returned to England, in the following spring. A lot of nerve those people. And when you create everything that had recently happened to me I put into that song. I couldn't get it down quick enough. I was still writing the thing as we recorded it. Hunched a were a huge amp in Columbia Studio A

scribbling down these words. My hand was possessed. It was so last minute. The band had to wait till I was done the narrative. I've written some vicious songs in my time and regret them. I still WinCE over a tune called Ballad and playing d childish dig at a former love of mine. But this time it felt healing, kind of cathartic. I guess I was getting lost in the bitterness. And when you create, you can also kill. Fittingly, this mood was the backdrop to my first meeting with

Andy Warhol. I knew who he was. Of course, you couldn't be in New York and not know of the great Andy Warhol. He was a king, No, not a king, he was more of a dictator, our very own Napoleon. Andy apparently liked my stuff, which meant I was famous, and he wanted to be with me because I was famous. Mr Knnis Soup was just desperate to get me to his what was it called his factory. Dy a girl whom we both knew, invited me up. The place was

something else. Man aluminum foil all over the walls, cameras everywhere, strange people everywhere. It was like a spaceship had landed on street. Andy himself looked like a ghost. I mean a fashionable ghost, sure, but still a ghost. He wanted me in front of his camera for a screen test, as he called it. He liked to make these kinds of movies. All it was was me in front of a camera for I don't know three minutes. I just had to stand there while they filmed me right up close.

He just kept saying to me, be natural, be you. The camera's not here. I know because I was there. He kept calling me a beautiful thing, the voice of a generation. When it was done, I joked about my payment. I muttered something like, well, if this is art, then pay the artist. Can of Soup didn't really see the joke, so he actually offered me payment in the form of one of his Elvis pictures. It was a seven foot tall silk screen of Elvis from one of his movies

slinging a gun cowboy style double Elvis. He called it man. I loved Elvis, and while I wasn't particularly moved by this picture, I accepted it, and he asked if I would like it packaged up and sent over to my house. I said I'd just take it now, So me and my friend Bobby Knewarth tied it to my old station wagon and drove it all the way home. I needed it to get free. The fashionable ghost was apparently horrified. I do have one regret, though, for a start I

had nowhere to put the damn thing. It sat in the closet in my house forever. Eventually Albert took a liking to it and offered to take it off my hands. We broke it a deal. I'd swapped the Andy original for Albert Grossman's sofa. Done. The joke was on me, though Albert's wife would sell the picture for over seven hundred thousand dollars in the eighties. The sofa barely lasted a year after the factory, we were back on tour.

We were always on tour. I was exhausted. I had always had an intense type of fame from the press, from fans, but after Newport it got worse. People always say go and find yourself. I was expected to have answers on every political problem of the day, just because I'd written songs that pointed some fingers. I was also expected to speak for an entire generation just because what I had a stage. I learned just how bad things had gotten. When we got to Denmark, I wanted to

see Cronberg Castle, the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet is one of my favorite pieces. I even named my giant poodle after it. Quite the accolade for Bill. I'm sure the castle is grand and opulent. Who dominates the landscape. I was staring at it when Albert told me that folk singer and poet Richard Farina had been fatally killed in a motorcycle accident. I had known Richard well. He was a big part of the Greenwich village scene. He

had also married Joan by as his sister Mimi. Apparently it was Mimi's twenty first birthday and they were having a party. Richard saw a guest with a motorcycle and he asked for a ride. At an s turn, the driver lost control, motorcycle tipped over on the right side of the road, came back to the other side and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field. He went over the handlebars of his motorcycle. The driver survived, but Farina dead instantly. Transfiguration, as I like to call it.

I felt like death was everywhere in my life at that point. Geno Foreman an activist again, part of the Greenwich Village scene. He died around that time drugs. Of course, on tour. He'd asked me for money. I wasn't in a good mood and told him to funk off. I never saw him again. Bablo Clayton, a folk singer and friend of mine, died in April nineteen sixty six. He got into a bathtub and pulled an electric heating and after himself. I kept thinking about Richard though. That was

the one that got me. Of course I was sad, real sad about it. But there was something else there, another feeling jealousy. He was free. We'll be right back after this word word. It was the brakes, the damn breaks on that old bike. It was a Triumph Tiger. Sometimes they get a problem with the brakes. Apparently they just locked up. I remember that gray day clouds everywhere. I wanted to get home quick, but I never made it.

After that tour had finished, I returned home to High LOHI the first house I ever boughtve dollars for eleven rooms. It stood in the woodstock trees. It was a place where I could go and finally get away from all the bullshit. But I never seemed to spend any significant time there. I needed it to get free. When I walked in the front door, I caught my face in the rectangular mirror we had up in the hallway. It was pinched and paper white. My eyes were dark and vacant.

I drew my hands up to prod the bags under my eyes and saw that my fingers were nicotine stained and my fingernails were blackened. God, I've gone full Warhol. My wife Sarah was on the back porch with our son Jesse and Maria, Sarah's daughter from her first marriage, who I had already began adoption proceedings for The porch overlooked a parade of American elms, which crowded the back of the house. Time felt different here, like I was seeing everything through a new set of glasses. Pressure pure.

Jesse was only four months old at the time. He was sitting in his high chair, a milk bottle full in front of him, with his pacifier in his hand. Maria was on her tricycle. I stared at them both. I was struck by how content they were. The simplicity of it marveled me. Their whole world was on this porch. Everything they needed was here, everything they could ever want. That's what life is. Our old phone rang from the hallway.

It brought me back to reality. It was Albert informing me that I'd be back on the road for a six day tour in August. It was already the end of May, and dance Man two months, two lousy months off? Is that all I had? Then? What? Back to playing the part of Judas? They loved, calling me Judas in England Man. They booed me and ship talked me and said that I had turned my back on all of them. It got so add that leave on our Drummer went

back to the States. He couldn't handle it anymore. I wasn't sure I could either, To be honest, finding yourself. Albert didn't stop there, though, He sternly reminded me that we had to finish a tour film we've been making for the ABC television network. It was titled Eat the Document. The last thing I wanted to do was watch the last tour I've been on. I was there, man, and it had nearly broken me. I didn't need to see

it again from multiple camera angles. Before our call ended, he said that Columbia was playing hardball about a negotiated contract for our terms to be met. They wanted a new album quick, Oh is that all a new record? The last one, a double album, I might remind you, was being written while we were recording it when I was running on fumes, and now they wanted another one. I made a joke about possibly calling it Judas Returns.

Albert didn't laugh. For the next week, I tried to avoid any thoughts of film edits and new tour dates. Every day I would play with Jesse and walk Maria to school. I started to fantasize that this was my life forever, even though I knew I'd be on stage soon enough. It's funny people dream of being a rock star, but at this time I had started to dream of

white picket fences and household chores. The funny thing about life is one day, we had to go to Albert's house in Bearsville to pick up my motorcycle and a j S five hundred that previously belonged to Rambling Jack Elliott. Jack had run her into the ground and she was barely functioning, but I love the ride. Sarah and I left Albert's house. She was in the station wagon we had acquired to fit our new Woodstock lifestyle and I

rode out up front on the bike. I was cruising pretty fast at the top of a hill near Woodstock, very close to Woodstock. It was a little foggy, kind of moist in the air. As I came down the slope, I don't know the bike. I lost control. He went over the handlebars of his motorcycle. I skidded for a few feet, still trying to steer. I went left, then right. The bike was now diagonal across the road, steam billowing from the tires. The sun is still burning in his eyes.

I managed to get it straight, but I hit something and instantly I was pushed up. I vaulted over the front. My knee clipped the bike's front light. As I did, I seemed to stay in the air forever. I just hung there the bike below me. Trees either side the road. Out ahead, there was a strange quiet. The bike must have made a racket, but I didn't hear it. It was almost serene in that moment. I thought of Richard Farina. I thought of the barbed wire fence, and then then

I just thought of Jesse and Maria and Sarah. I hit the ground with a cold, hard thud, and all I could taste was grit. It was all in my mouth, grit and blood. I was on my back, spread out, looking up at the sky. Then everything went black. Bob Dillon died that day. Who came back? It's hard to say. I took time off. No film, no new album, no fucking tour man. I wouldn't play another show for almost eight years. I tried to write, but it wasn't the

same him as it was before. Things I've done unconsciously before we're now having to be done consciously. Songwriting didn't flow in the way it used to. Even though that concerned me a bit, it was also a blessing. I got out of the rat race. I found contentment. I guess you could say that it came at the perfect time. I couldn't have planned it. Better myself. For the first time in years, I had a purpose that wasn't shrouded and blame expectation or questions. All I wanted to do

was be a father and a husband. I carried on my daily routine of playing with Jesse and taking Maria to school. That's what life is. In fact, one day after dropping her off, I spoke to our neighbor and artist named Bruce Dorfman. Sarah had got me some oil paint for my twenty seven birthday, and I wanted to know how to use them. I figured, if I don't want to write songs, and I'd paint. I even had fantasies of becoming a painter, like a proper painter, not

just printing cans of soup. Bruce introduced me to the work of Mark Chagal, and that was it. I was off. I painted day and night. When the kids were in school or down for a nap or eating. I was painting with or without Bruce. I took to it straight away. I was still writing songs, but the songs took a back seat for the moment as I lost myself in paints and canvases. Every day comes rebirth. That's the funny thing about inspiration, though, especially with songwriting, it comes and goes.

You don't choose when it appears. It can reappear without you even noticing. One day, Bruce was in my studio and I had just finished the piece which he was admiring. The imagery was sparse, apocalyptic, surreal. I was inspired by it. Bruce asked me what it was called. I told him All along the watch Tower. On August two, two, Don Peterson sat in her New Jersey kitchen waiting for her phone call. She anxiously spun her wedding ring round and

round on the bottom of her finger. She'd been spinning the ring and waiting for the call for over half an hour. She thought about what had happened to her only two months ago, and how it had led to this moment, a moment that change her life forever. On a quiet Tuesday evening, she had been watching a documentary on Bob Dylan. Suddenly her stomach did a somersault as she watched perform with Electric Venom all those years ago at the Newport Folk Festival. She fixated on the guitar.

She knew that guitar. She stared at the screen, the black and white image from nearly forty years earlier flashing before her eyes, and she could hardly believe it. The guitar Bob Dylan had played on that faithful night at Newport was identical to the one that currently sat in her attic. It was a guitar that had been given to her more than a decade ago by her father, Victor Quinto. Victor was a private jet pilot who often worked for rock and roll stars, farrying them around on tour.

After flying a visibly shaken Bob Dylan home to New York on July, he noticed Bob and left his Electric Vendor stratocaster with its sunburst finish, on one of the plane seats. Despite contacting Dylan's people, Victor ended up taking the strap back home, which is where it came to stay for decades. Don knew if the guitar was the one Dylan had left on her father's plane, that it was a piece of rock history, and perhaps a priceless

piece of rock history. Her phone finally rang out. She drew a deep breath and answered it quickly, and the person on the other end was Agnes Davidson from the

PBS television show History detectives. Agnes informed Don that after a lot of research and tests, they had determined that her Fender Stratocaster with a sunburst finish was, in fact the very guitar Bob Dylan had played at the Newport Folk Festival in or at least the chances were high around Don stood holding the phone and the receiver now shaking in her hand. Tears made her vision blur as she thanked Agnes for the update and they discussed possible

filming dates. The Stratocaster would go on to sell for nine hundred and sixty five thousand dollars at auction, the most expensive guitar to ever hit the auction block. Around two hundred and sixty miles away, Bob Dylan sat backstage in his trailer at the Newport Folk Festival. It was the first time he had played the festival in thirty seven years, and the man he was looking at in the mirror was unrecognizable. His hair was long and straightened,

the brown color deep and rich. His face was decorated with a medium length beard, gray tips in the middle, and both the hair and the beard were fake, and the glue that was used to attach the beard was uncomfortable and irritating, so we rubbed it with his fingertips before brushing the wig hair into a slight parting. He finished the look by placing a pure white stetson on the top of his head, smiling to himself as he did. His thoughts then turned to Alan Lomax, who died some

two weeks ago. Dylan felt like Alan, while maybe not in person, would be somewhere in the crowd that day, looking on, perhaps approving of the whole thing. And there was a knock at his trailer door. It was the third time the event organizers had asked him if he was ready. He was now ten minutes over his call time, and the spaghetti western music that usually accompanied his arrival

on stage had already played through twice. Dylan reassured them he was coming before taking one last look in the mirror, and then he opened the door of his trailer and made his way down the tiny metal steps, where a golf buggy greeted him. It was the one thousand, four hundred and thirty second show of Bob Dylan's famous never ending tour, and while the press, critics, and fans had made a big deal of his return to Newport. To Dylan, it felt no different than any other gig, and there

was a brief moment that changed all that, though. It happened when the band launched into the set seventeenth song Like a Rolling Stone. As he sang the song's chorus, Dylan's mind drifted back to that day in nine. He recalled that different man, that man he no longer knew, that man who was no longer alive, That man was living in a sped up world all alone. He thought about how everything from that moment in sixty five had

led to this. He thought about how you make yourself in this life, and about how he transformed himself with music, about how he presented a different man to the world through his art. He thought about all the water under the bridge between those two new Ports shows, all the time that had elapsed, all the lives he had lived,

and all the things that had happened. Events from the past three decades came and went in his mind as he played that day, crazy moments like God appearing in a hotel room, or the time he spent in Nashville, the madness of the Rolling Thunder review tour in a Bloody Murder, which he himself became embroiled in and he thought about how when he lived so many lives, you can't help get Blood on the Tracks. Blood on the Tracks produced by Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio.

It's hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan, also executive produced by Brady savy Zeth Lundy is lead editor and producer. This episode was written by Ben Burrow, Story and copy editing by Pat Healey. Mixing and sound designed by Colin Fleming. Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spreaker. This episode featured Chris Anzeloni is Bob Dylan. Sources for this episode are available at double Elvis dot com and

the Blood in the Tracks series page. Follow Double Elvis on Instagram at double Elvis and on toy ch at s Grace Slant Talks, and you can talk to me per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace Land, Pond Rock and rood Di Baby, Her Dad m