“He Doesn’t Exist”: How Bob Dylan’s Sense of Identity Was Shaped by Hell’s Angel Memoir

Bob Dylan has been famously elusive for decades, and after reading Hell’s Angel founding member Sonny Barger’s memoir, Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger, the singer-songwriter realized his true identity is also elusive even to himself. Dylan shared his unique perspective in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone—a transcendental diversion that seemed to stump the interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, and frustrate the then-71-year-old Dylan.

That Dylan, the musician argued, was not the same Dylan who wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone” in the 1960s. “When you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person who’s long dead,” Dylan told the noticeably confused Gilmore. “You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist.”

Bob Dylan’s Transfigured Sense of Identity

Halfway through his 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan brought out Sonny Barger’s 2000 memoir and pointed to the co-authors’ names, Keith and Kent Zimmerman. “Do those names ring a bell?” Dylan asked. “Do they look familiar? You wonder, ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ But they do look familiar, don’t they? And there’s two of them there. One’s not enough, right?”

Dylan asked his interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, to read an excerpt from the book. The excerpt described the death of Bobby Zimmerman, a former president of the Berdoo Hell’s Angel. Zimmerman had made a U-turn to collect his muffler, which had just fallen off his bike, when a fellow biker speeding to the front of the pack broadsided him and killed him instantly. “‘We dragged Bobby’s lifeless body to the side of the road,’” Gilmore read. “‘There was nothing we could do but to send somebody on to town for help.’ Poor Bobby.”

For context, Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman. In 1966, he famously got into a severe motorcycle accident in upstate New York. Dylan effectively hid himself from the public while he healed before “returning” with his 1967 release, John Wesley Harding. So, where does Sonny Berger’s former road mate come into play? “It’s called transfiguration,” Dylan explained to Gilmore.

The Singer-Songwriter Isn’t Who You Think

Transfiguration is defined as “a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state.” Although this term is typically found in a religious context, Bob Dylan claimed that the same thing happened to him and his sense of identity in the late 1960s. “I’m not like you. Am I?” Dylan asked his Rolling Stone interviewer. “I’m not like [Bobby Zimmerman], either. I’m not like too many others; I’m only like another person who’s been transfigured.”

“I had a motorcycle accident in 1966,” he continued. “Transfiguration: You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it’s a real concept. Nobody knows who it’s happened to or why. But you get real proof of it here and there. It’s not like something you can dream up and think.”

Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore pushed back on Dylan’s idea of transfiguration, asking if the singer-songwriter believed he had somehow become intrinsically connected to Bobby Zimmerman, who died while riding with the Hell’s Angels. “It is whatever it is,” Dylan opaquely explained. “I couldn’t go back and find Bobby in a million years. Neither could you or anybody else on the face of the Earth. He’s gone.”

Dylan’s sense of transfigured identity, he argued, is what has helped him maintain a decades-long career. “Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it,” he said. “That’s how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.”

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