Music icon Bob Dylan won The Nobel Prize for Literature this week, a truly amazing accomplishment. Dylan was the first musician to win the prize and the first American to win the prize in Literature since 1993.

Bob Dylan is and will always be Bruce Springsteen’s hero. Bruce referred to Dylan in his new auto-biography Born to Run as “the father of my country”. Bruce summed it up this way; “he inspired me and gave me hope…he asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen year old: ‘How does it feel to be on your own’?”

Bruce goes on in a short passage from his book to say: “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time that I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived”.

Bruce showed tremendous passion while performing Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom in a 1988 Amnesty International concert that I attended. In my opinion it remains one of the best covers that Bruce ever performed.

Bob Dylan had an interesting run in a few years back on a very rainy night in Long Branch, NJ. Bob was staying at The Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch and heard that Bruce’s house, the one where he wrote Born to Run was close by. So Dylan ventures out looking for the house, it’s raining hard, and he thinks he finds the house and is looking into the windows to check out the house.

A passing Long Branch police officer sees Dylan peeking into the windows, she stops him asks him for ID, which he never has, puts him in the back of her police cruiser and starts to interrogate him. He says he’s Bob Dylan, the 20 something police officer says to her dispatcher, she never heard of Bob Dylan. After heading back to the Ocean Place it was confirmed that indeed he was Bob Dylan. Turns out Bob was one block short of where Bruce’s house was. Welcome to New Jersey Bob!

Bruce had the opportunity to perform “The Times They Are A-Changin” for Dylan when he received the Kennedy Center Honors.  Bruce writes “We were alone together for a brief moment walking down a back stairwell when he thanked me for being there and said “if there’s anything I can ever do for you….”I thought “ are you kidding me? And answered “It’s already been done.”

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