In Praise of Bob Dylan's Cryptic Tweets

In 2016, Bob Dylan became the first musician to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Now, at the ripe old age of 83, he’s the first of all the literature laureates to become an active tweeter. (There’s also an account for Kazuo Ishiguro that was active in November 2019, but it’s only got 706 follows and doesn’t look entirely legitimate.) There’s been an official Bob Dylan Twitter account for years, but it was overwhelmingly a management-run thing, which promoted new and reissued albums from his vast catalogue, and his seemingly endless tour dates.

On September 25th, that changed. The chirpy, PR-y tone of previous messages was discarded. “Happy Birthday Mary Jo!” read the inaugural post from Bobby D himself. “See you in Frankfort.” Dylanologists turned their scholarly gaze from their hero’s lyrics to this eight-word online utterance. Who is Mary Jo? There are a few notable Mary Jos, it turns out, including a chef, a boxer and a novelist, but none have any known connection to Dylan. And Frankfort? Frankfort is the state capital of Kentucky, with a modest population of some 30,000 people. Frankfurt, however, is a German city that Dylan was due to play in a few weeks later.

Dylan has since tweeted four more times. On September 30th: “I just found out the other day that Bob Newhart was gone. Rest in peace Bob. You brought us a lot of joy.” Newhart, an American comedian, died in July, so Dylan was late on the uptake. (Like Michael Caine, another old, famous tweeter, there’s an inevitable need to mourn the passing of contemporaries.) On October 1st, he “highly” recommended a Creole restaurant in New Orleans he ate at when he was last in the city.

Then on October 9th, he posted: “I ran into one of the Buffalo Sabres in the elevator at the Prague hotel. They were in town to play the New Jersey Devils. He invited me to the game but I was performing that night.” Again, this was Dylanesque to the max: the happenstance meeting in a random European city; the all-American proper nouns of “Buffalo Sabres” and “New Jersey Devils”; the faint note of wistfulness from being unable to take up the invitation. You can imagine him slipping the line into a song, delivered in his gravel-gargling voice over a stately blues groove, and the audience being none the wiser.

The latest tweet to date was yesterday, and reads like an oblique, melancholy short story. “At the hotel in Frankfurt [that explains “Frankfort”, then] there was a publishing convention and every room was taken, parties all night. I didn’t know there were so many book publishers in the world. I was trying to find Crystal Lake Publishing so I could congratulate them on publishing The Great God Pan, one of my favorite books. I thought they might be interested in some of my stories. Unfortunately it was too crowded and I never did find them.”

These irregular insights are a fascinating development of Dylan’s public persona. The man gives very few interviews, and what he does say about himself is often tinged with mischief and misdirection. In 2004, he published Chronicles: Volume One, the first memoir out of an alleged trio (no others have appeared since). It’s equal parts insight and evasion: he writes at length about his early career and other episodes of his life, but the writing is semi-fictional, with biographical details omitted (his two wives are mentioned but not named) or massaged into a more compelling shape. He happily admitted this in a 2001 interview, saying: “I’ll take some of the stuff that people think is true and I’ll build a story around that.”

So far, his tweets are less misleading: all the anecdotes line up, date-wise. But they don’t really make Dylan less mysterious. Being only small fragments of disclosure about his life, they tend to prompt more questions than they answer. Maybe, like his memoir, they’re better treated as acts of creation than acts of biography. Dylan is often credited—including by the Nobel committee—with elevating a newish artistic medium, the popular song, to the level of literature. Is it too much to expect him to do the same for social media? Perhaps. If we get a judgement from him on how Timothée Chalamet does in the upcoming Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, we should count ourselves lucky.