Over the past couple of years, Bob Dylan has embraced the Internet in bizarre and unexpected ways. He’s used his official Twitter account to wish a happy birthday to a mysterious figure named “Mary Jo” he planned on seeing in Frankfort, shouted out Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans, and talked about running into a member of the Buffalo Sabres in an elevator in Prague. His Instagram page is rarely used to promote his music, but is instead a hodgepodge of vintage video clips, including Les Paul’s appearance at a 1988 Van Halen concert, a James Cagney monologue from the 1949 film noir White Heat, and even Machine Gun Kelly freestyle rapping at a record store back in 2016.
But he somehow managed to up the weirdness by a significant margin over the weekend, when he shared a link to an official Bob Dylan Patreon account that offers fans “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan” for $5.00 a month. The initial offerings includes a “letter never sent” between Mark Twain and silent cinema star Rudolph Valentino, claiming to be penned by “Herbert Foster.”
“Dear Mr. Valentino,” it begins. “I take up my pen under circumstances that would puzzle the calendar and embarrass the undertaker, for I am told that both of us have already completed the respectable business of dying. Yet if letters can cross oceans, perhaps they may also cross that lesser boundary which divides the living from the historically inconvenienced.” (It should be noted that Valentino was 14 when Twain died in 1910.)
There’s also a seven-page short story entitled “Bull Rider,” supposedly written by a “Marty Lombard.” “The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at me,” it begins. “I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the spine cracked like an old man’s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don’t fix with food. They said there was a rodeo in town… one of those blinking, half-real places where men go to get thrown and call it glory.”
Audio essays like Last Testament of Frank James and Aaron Burr: On the Art of Survival are also posted, weeks after Dylan posted snippets on his Instagram page. The audio, at least, seems to have been generated by AI.
Needless to say, we have some questions: What exactly does “curated by Bob Dylan” mean here? Is he both Marty Lombard and Herbert Foster? Is there really an audience for a nearly hour-long audio essay in the voice of Wild Bill Hickok? Was AI used to write any of this text? Who are his collaborators on this project? Why isn’t his official website linking to this? Will he ever post something even tangentially related to his actual music? Wouldn’t his rabid fanbase prefer to pay a monthly charge for concert downloads and studio outtakes as opposed to this… esoteric content?
We’ll continue to monitor the Patreon and see if we can answer any of these questions. In the meantime, Dylan is six shows into an extensive United States tour. Early shows were marred by audio problems related to the placement of his microphone, but they finally seem to have been worked out. The set is still built around songs from Dylan’s 2020 LP Rough and Rowdy Ways, but there have been a few surprises, including the 1989 Oh Mercy cut “Man in the Long Black Coat” and Eddie Cochran’s 1958 classic “Nervous Breakdown.” There’s not a single song in the set that pre-dates Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident, but he does play “All Along The Watchtower.”
The tour continues Monday night at the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan, Illinois. During his downtime, maybe Dylan will break out his typewriter, embody the spirit of Marty Lombard, and give us another “unsent letter” between two historical figures who never actually met.
