…..prior to his show at First Energy Park, Lakewood, New Jersey, Bob Dylan was picked up by a police officer who had been alerted to a man who was seen to be ‘acting suspiciously’. The young Police officer drove up to (yup, you guessed it) Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name, needless to say she didn’t recognise him! Unable to produce any identification, Dylan was promptly driven to his hotel where staff were able to vouch for him. The incident happened when Dylan decided on an afternoon stroll while on tour with Willie Nelson….you couldn’t make it up! Full story below….
From Esquire
On July 23, 2009, Kristie Buble (pronounced “Bubble”), a police officer in Long Branch, New Jersey, picked Bob Dylan off the street because residents had complained about an old man walking around in the pouring rain and peering into the windows of a vacant home. She thereby had the experience that any Dylanologist prays for: Bob Dylan talked to her. A lot. But she didn’t listen to a lot of what he was saying — she just thought he was crazy. Here, she gives her most complete version of the experience.
He’s saying these things that are normal indicators of liars. “I’m Bob Dylan.” Okay, what’s your real name? And he told me his real name — his real, real name, his government name. I think it’s Zimmerman, right? And I’m like, that’s totally weird now, that’s not right. He has two names! Some other kid came and backed me up, and he’s my age. He didn’t believe him either.
I just put him in the car and said, “Okay, where are you staying, Bob?” kind of sarcastically, messing with him a little bit. “Where’s your hotel, where might you be staying, where are your friends?” And he says, “Oh, it’s this hotel out by the ocean,” and I think that kind of makes sense. And even when we pulled up to the hotel and there were buses and stuff, I thought it might be some guy in character, someone who might be imitating him and won’t get out of character, even dealing with the police.
Bob Dylan was nice! He talked a lot. And I wasn’t even paying attention to some of the things he was saying because in my head I was wondering, “What am I going to tell the hospital, what am I going to tell my supervisor?” He’s just blabbering in the back. I actually remember he said, “Just take me over there, I’ll give you tickets to my show, you can see me play.” I remember he said that. And I thought, this guy is crazy.
He told me he’s famous for singing. He told me he wrote all these songs. It didn’t actually occur to me to ask him, “Sing me a song.” That was the third question my mom asked. “Why didn’t you ask him to sing?” I was like, “I don’t know Mom, I didn’t think about it.” In retrospect it was the number one thing I should have done.
He wasn’t in trouble. There wasn’t any chance of him being arrested. It was just a suspicious thing. There was no chance of him going to jail or anything. He probably knew that. I mean, if he couldn’t tell me where those buses were he might have been in the hospital — I would have had to have made some phone calls.
Even if he didn’t say he was Bob Dylan, I would have thought something was off. Normal people — well, you usually ask, “What are you doing here, where do you live, where are you from?” He said, “I have houses all over the place. I don’t live in one place. I travel so much, I have a house in London, I have a house in California.” People in Long Branch say, “I live in Long Branch. I live here.” So little red flags are going off, and he’s not lying, but a normal person would have made sense. If he didn’t say he was Bob Dylan, the totality would have been: “Who is this person, why do they say they live all over the place?”
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