Bob Dylan tumbled from a Triumph motorcycle on a sunny Friday morning in Woodstock 50 years ago: July 29, 1966. The banged-up singer holed up in the mountains of upstate New York for months afterward, dramatically altering the rocket ride of his career.
It’s the most analysed motorcycle crash in pop-culture history, but details have been as hard to pin down as the meaning of a Dylan lyric. Biographers, reporters and Dylanologists digging into the ’60s period when the singer lived in this arts colony with his young family have uncovered sometimes contradictory information.
Dylan over the years has indicated that he broke a vertebra and was concussed. But without a police report, there is no official record of the crash.
