Bob Dylan Gets Detained by the New Jersey Police

Bob Dylan once sang, “In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”

But he did get caught by the New Jersey police on July 23, 2009. Dylan was then on tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, performing in minor-league baseball parks across America. On that day, they’d played a show in Lakewood, New Jersey, roughly an hour and a half’s drive outside New York City.

That evening, police in Long Branch, New Jersey, about a half hour from the concert venue, got a call from a homeowner about a strange-looking man who’d wandered into their yard which had a “for sale” sign on it.

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“We got a call for a suspicious person,” 24-year-old Long Branch police officer Kristie Buble later told ABC News. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

But when Buble asked for his identity, the man’s reply was dubious to her.

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,'” Buble said. “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. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ 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.”

Buble explained that Dylan didn’t appear dangerous or delusional, “just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything.” It didn’t help that Dylan wasn’t carrying any ID and when asked where he was staying, the most specific answer he could give was that his tour buses were parked “at some big hotel on the ocean.” Buble wagered he meant Ocean Place Conference Resort, located right on the Jersey coast.

“‘OK Bob, why don’t you get in the car and we’ll drive to the hotel and go verify this?'” she then told him. “I put him in the back of the car. To be honest with you, I didn’t really believe this was Bob Dylan. It never crossed my mind that this could really be him.”

In this moment, some rock stars may have pulled the “Don’t you know who I am?” card, but not Dylan. He complied with Buble’s instructions entirely.

“He was really nice, though, and he said he understood why I had to verify his identity and why I couldn’t let him go,” Buble said. “I pulled into the parking lot, and sure enough there were these enormous tour buses, and I thought, ‘Whoa.'”

In the end, Buble was shown Dylan’s passport by his manager.

“‘OK,'” she recalled saying. “Um, have a nice day.”

Was Bob Dylan Looking for Bruce Springsteen’s House?

Following this incident, some fans speculated that Dylan had been looking for the former home of Bruce Springsteen, located just a few blocks from where he was picked up by the police. It was at that house that the Boss wrote much of the material for 1975’s Born to Run.

This theory was based on the fact that Dylan had recently visited the childhood homes of John Lennon in Liverpool, England and of Neil Young in Winnipeg, Canada.

In May of 2009, Dylan also went unnoticed in Liverpool, casually joining a 14-person public tour of the Lennon home for a modest £16.

“He could have booked a private tour but he was happy to go on the bus with everyone else,” a spokesperson for the National Trust, which owns the house, told the BBC then.

Several months prior to that, he chatted up the owners of Young’s former house in Winnipeg, who had come home one day to find a man waiting in their yard. The couple was used to people stopping by to look at the house, but even they didn’t quite recognize Dylan at first.

“I’m looking around, and I realize, this guy having a tuque on has really great cowboy boots on,” resident John Kiernan told Rolling Stone. “He was wearing really nice leather pants. And I realize I’m staring face-to-face with Bob Dylan.”

Allison Rapp is a New York City-based music and culture journalist. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Insider, Rock Cellar, City Limits and more. She is also the host of Big Yellow Podcast, a show about Joni Mitchell. She tweets at @allisonrapp22.