July 29, 1966 Bob Dylan leaves the house of his manager Albert Grossman on his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle. Upon leaving the house on his motorcycle, with Grossman and Grossman’s wife Sally following behind in a car, Dylan sped up out of sight and apparently had a serious crash.
Multiple reports say that he broke several vertebrae and had a concussion. According to Sally Grossman, Dylan was “kind of moaning and groaning” but that he didn’t look injured after the crash. This is some of the only evidence we have about the accident besides a two-sentence article in the New York Times which was titled “Dylan Hurt in Cycle Mishap.”
Due to an ambulance not being called to the scene of the accident, these two pieces of information and Dylan’s unwillingness to speak about the event have created a great mystery around what really happened on July 29, 1966.
The crashed happened a month after Dylan released his Blonde on Blonde album which propelled him into “folk-music or rock messiah.” According to multiple articles written about Dylan post-crash and his own admissions, he had changed.
Following the accident, instead of going to a hospital Dylan opted to be driven to the house of Dr. Ed Thaler who lived an hour away from where the crash happened. He lived in a third-floor bedroom of Thaler’s house for a month, regularly having dinner with the family and hanging out with members of The Band.
According the Robbie Robertson of The Band, who would know all things Dylan due to the fact that he toured with him for two years, said that, “He [Dylan] fell off the motorcycle and fractured his neck, and he had to wear this brace on his neck for quite a while, I would say about six weeks.”
During the years after the crash there were rumors that Dylan had died, he had become a cripple, he couldn’t play guitar anymore, or used the crash as an excuse to detox from amphetamines.
I believe that he did crash on that motorcycle in 1966 but the injuries were not as severe as the ones that were reported. He used the crash as a excuse to get away from the public, get away from the publisher demanding a manuscript on his novel Tarantula, get away from his growing fame, get away from get away from get away from the mounting pressure on him to tour more, basically get away from everything.
He took off about 19 months before he returned to the studio which led to the John Wesley Harding album. His first live appearance since the crash was on January 20, 1968 at Carnegie Hall during a memorial for his mentor and hero Woody Guthrie.
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