Some things you might not know about Bob Dylan
By Patrick MacDonald
Seattle Times staff critic
archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
1. He played piano in Bobby Vee's band in 1959, using the stage name Elston Gunn — inspired by Elvis Presley and the TV show "Peter Gunn." He got the job after claiming, falsely, that he had played in Bobby Vinton's band.
2. He's a frat boy: He pledged to Sigma Alpha Mu as a freshman at the University of Minnesota. But he spent little time at the frat house, or in class.
3. When he built his mansion in Malibu in the 1970s — a rambling house topped by a copper dome, on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Point Dume, on property that includes a man-made lake — it was one of the most expensive houses ever built in California up to then, costing more than $6 million. It is worth many times that today.
4. According to "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited" by Clinton Heylin, Dylan was drunk when he performed at the Gorge on Aug. 18, 1990, the first time he had been drunk on stage. It was one of several incidents that led him to give up drinking in 1992.
5. For a hefty, undisclosed sum, he allowed an accounting firm to use his song of revolution, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," in a TV commercial.
6. He was born Jewish and later famously converted to Christianity, recording several Christian-oriented albums. But now he is neither: "I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists. ... I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs," he's quoted as saying in Heylin's book. |
