Mysterious Stranger Looking in Windows

From the desk of Peter Crowley:

A resident of a low-income, mostly Latino neighborhood in Long Branch, N.J. calls the cops to report a scruffy-looking man wandering around, looking at houses. It's pouring rain.

"He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head," the 22-year-old cop, Kristie Buble, told a newspaper reporter later.

Officer Buble is right around the corner when she gets the dispatch, and she easily finds the man in question and stops him.

"What is your name, sir?" she asked.

"Bob Dylan," he said.

"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.

"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

Bullshit, she figures.

"Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all."

Ha ha.

"He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I'm really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was.

"We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn't sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something," she said.

So she asks him for ID, and she doesn't have any. In the squad car he goes - amiably, though, chatting about the tour with Nelson and Mellencamp. But then this ... "He asked me if I could drive him back to the neighbourhood when I verified who he was, which made me even more suspicious."

They drive to his hotel, where her sergeant, also in his 20s, is waiting. He doesn't recognize this sketchy-looking guy as the great American songwriter, either, but Dylan's manager saves the day by showing up with the man's passport.

This really happened on July 23. I took it from this article in the London Telegraph, this one by the Associated Press and this one by the BBC, but there are others.

Most intriguing of all is the speculation by the Telegraph that Dylan may have been looking for the bungalow where Bruce Springsteen lived for two years and wrote "Born to Run," "Thunder Road" and "Backstreets." It's just a few hundred yards away from where Bob was.

Coincidence? Yeah, maybe, but there's also this from the BBC: "Earlier this year it emerged Dylan mingled unnoticed with Beatles tourists during a minibus tour to John Lennon's childhood home.

"He was one of 14 tourists to examine photos and documents in the National Trust-owned home, when his European tour stopped in Liverpool for a concert on 2 May"

And in November, Dylan showed up at the Winnipeg house where Neil Young lived as a teenager with his mom. Rolling Stone had it here.

I like that Bob would feel compelled to track down clues of other great songwriters — especially on a tour bus, and in a downpour in sweats and two raincoats. I wonder if he expected to find anything in particular or just wanted to be there, like any other fan.

I'm gonna have to play Bob's "Man in the Long Black Coat" on this week's show.

(Photo is a free promotional pic from www.bobdylan.com. Thanks to them.)