Inside Bob Dylan’s Mysterious Motorcycle Accident: What Really Happened on That Road 59 Years Ago?
On July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan got aboard his ’64 Triumph Tiger T100 and, ultimately, disappeared from the public eye for nearly a decade. Dylan suffered an accident in the morning after leaving his manager’s home in Woodstock, New York. According to The Vintagent, Dylan’s accident came after “locking up the brakes.”
“I was blinded by the sun for a second,” he later said, per Rolling Stone. “I just happened to look up right smack into the sun with both eyes and, sure enough, I went blind for a second, and I panicked. I stomped down on the brake and the rear wheel locked up on me and I went flyin’.”
The incident took Dylan out of the public eye at the peak of his success. Just a few weeks prior, Dylan had released Blonde on Blonde, the third of a historic streak of albums that included Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.
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Dylan was also reportedly burnt out: he had been on a whirlwind tour, and at home, there was a pile of work: an overdue book of prose poetry titled Tarantula; editing the documentary, Eat the Document; and his manager, Albert Grossman, was reportedly planning another tour in the wake of Blond on Blonde’s success.
The crash remains a mystery, nearly 60 years later. Dylan claimed he broke several vertebrae in his neck, per American Songwriter. But there were no police reports, nor did Dylan ever go to a hospital. This has spurred theories that Dylan exaggerated his injuries to take a break from the high pressure of success and slow down his hectic life.
Dylan spoke about the accident in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, as well as his mental state at the time. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” he wrote. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”
“Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on,” he said. Dylan married Sara Lownds in 1965. Lownds had a daughter, Maria, from a previous marriage, whom Dylan adopted. Sara gave birth to Jess Byron, the first of her and Bob’s four children, in January 1966.
“Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses,” wrote Dylan.
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Dylan also spoke about the incident in a 1984 interview with Kurt Loder for Rolling Stone. “Then I had that motorcycle accident, which put me outta commission,” he said. “Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just workin’ for all these leeches. And I didn’t wanna do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids. I’d also seen that I was representing all these things that I didn’t know anything about.”
Dylan continued to record over the next few years, releasing albums like John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning and Planet Waves. In 1974, Dylan returned to touring, hitting the road (metaphorically) for the first time in seven years.
By that time, Dylan and Lownds had become estranged, and the return to touring exacerbated things. He would channel his emotions into Blood on the Tracks, an album many have come to view as one of his masterpieces.
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Where Are They Now? Music Legends
July/August 2025
They rocked and rolled us, they shredded, they head-slammed and they crooned, but what happened to them and where are they now?
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