Tangled up in blue: Cops don’t recognize Bob Dylan

No, no, no, it IS me, babe: A 24-year-old police officer at a Jersey Shore town stopped a suspicious-looking man wandering around the neighborhood in the rain and asked his name. Bob Dylan, he said. So the officer asked for ID. “I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley told the Associated Press.

Jerry DeMarco

08/15/2009 3:44 a.m.

Dylan, 68, was in town last month as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at the Lakewood Blue Claws baseball stadium that night when neighbors called police to report a scruffy-looking vagabond in the neighborhood. As it turned out, Dylan wasn’t carrying ID.

So cops had to load Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman into the back of the patrol car and bring him to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the tour staff vouched for him.

Wooley recounted the following exchange:

Officer Kristie Buble: “What is your name, sir?”

Dylan: “Bob Dylan.”

Officer: “OK, what are you doing here?”

Dylan: “I’m on tour.”

But it gets better. Her backup, also 24, didn’t know one of America’s greatest songwriters from Adam Sandler.

Ironically, one of Dylan’s biggest fans, Bruce Springsteen, did a photo shoot 35 years ago near the scene of the stop for his second album, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.” Springsteen also has been known to frequent the nearby Windmill, a hot dog joint on Ocean Avenue.

Buble told ABC News: “We got a call for a suspicious person. 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.”

“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.

“We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

Click here to follow Daily Voice Paramus and receive free news updates.