Crawling from the Wreckage: Bob Dylan and his Motorpsycho Nitemare

“I was mighty, mighty tired. I had come a long, long way”

“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.” ~ Chronicles, Volume One

Part 1 — In the Rat Race

The word “truth” appears some twenty-three times in Chronicles, that memoir full of Dylanesque half-truths. The motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966 is one of the few times Bob Dylan uses it when speaking about himself.

In June 1966, Dylan had returned to his home, an 11-room house whimsically named Hi Lo Ha on Camelot Road outside of Woodstock, after a grueling nine-month world tour. But any respite from the touring g-rind that Dylan may have hoped for was going to be short-lived. His manager, Albert Grossman, already had another 64-date U.S. tour planned to start in August, including detours to Rome and Moscow.

Dylan had also committed to deliver the final manuscript of Tarantula to his publishing house as well as to provide a filmed documentary of the tour he had just wound up to ABC TV.

Reviewing the galleys of Tarantula in early July, Dylan decided that his prose/poetry collection was a mistake and told Macmillan he wanted to revise. His editor gave him two weeks. ABC was chomping at the bit for their documentary, but in July 1966 all that Dylan had was yards and yards of unedited film.