Music legend Bob Dylan got arrested yesterday in Long Branch, New Jersey by a 22-year-old police officer. His crime?
It was in 1965 that Dylan wrote Like A Rolling Stone, with its line: ‘How does it feel to be on your own, a complete unknown?’
He found out while staying at the Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch. Before taking part in a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, he decided to take a stroll through the town’s Latin quarter.
‘Residents called to complain there was an old scruffy man acting suspiciously,’ said officer Spencer. ‘It was an odd request because it was mid-afternoon. But it’s an ethnic Latin area and the residents felt he didn’t fit in.’
The old white guy didn’t fit in with the Latin neighborhood. So the cop acted. Stupidly, some might say.
Police were called in a quiet seaside town after he was spotted freewheelin’ down the street and apparently acting suspiciously. A 22-year-old female officer demanded to see his identification papers.
He assumed she would at least recognise the name if not the face. But she ordered him into the back of her car and took him to his hotel to check his story.
Then she radioed her older colleagues at the police station to ask if anyone knew who Bob Dylan was.
‘I’m afraid we all fell about laughing,’ said Craig Spencer, a senior officer in Long Branch, New Jersey. ‘If it was me, I’d have been demanding his autograph, not his ID.’
Bob Dylan’s birth name is Robert Zimmerman.
Update: Darn it, this happened in 2009. Still pretty funny though.
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