Bob Dylan Was ‘Very Paranoid’ While Appearing on ‘SNL’ According to Eric Idle

Timothée Chalamet will be pulling double duty on Saturday Night Live this weekend, as both host and musical guest. Since the actor’s music career so far only consists of playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, seemingly he will be performing on SNL as Dylan. Sadly, he’s a month too late to do a snarling cover of “Must Be Santa.”

But long before Chalamet was booked on the show (or for that matter, even born), Bob Dylan himself appeared on SNL for the first and last time in October of 1979. Dylan performed three songs from his Christian-themed album Slow Train Coming.

The host of the episode was Eric Idle, who claimed to be ill. The Monty Python star performed his monologue from a stretcher, following a cold open in which Buck Henry asks Lorne Michaels to put him in as the host instead. In a Reddit AMA, Idle revealed that it wasn’t just a joke; he really was feeling sick.  

Surprisingly, there isn’t much info about Dylan’s lone appearance on SNL. But Idle did write about the experience in his memoir Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography. He noted that he thought that Dylan’s album was “brilliant,” but Dylan himself was “very paranoid.” 

The Python went on to recount how Dylan used Idle’s then-girlfriend, now wife, to scout out any potential threats. “He’d get off the elevator at the Essex House hotel on our floor,” Idle wrote, “and then stay with me while he asked Tania to go up one flight of stairs and make sure there was no one outside his door. There never was.”

One time, after there were no threatening strangers lurking outside of Dylan’s room, Idle tried his hand at a joke: “We can arrange for someone if you like…” Dylan didn’t laugh. 

Idle also recalled that when he appeared in a Traveling Wilburys music video years later, Dylan had an uncanny ability to block him from the camera: “I leaned right; Dylan leaned right. I leaned left; he leaned left. He was preternaturally aware of where I was behind him and determined to stay in front. He seemed to have extrasensory vision. I was impressed and gave up. Hey, it was their video.”

While Dylan never again guested on Saturday Night Live, the show hasn’t been totally Dylan-free in the ensuing years. A number of sketches have lampooned the legendary singer/future Dharma & Greg star. In fact, years before A Complete Unknown, SNL dramatized the meeting between Dylan and an ailing Woody Guthrie. It was just one year after the Idle/Dylan show, and it starred feature player Patrick Weathers as Dylan and host David Carradine as the elder folk singer. Carradine had played Guthrie in the film Bound For Glory — a role that, incidentally, was first offered to Dylan.

More recently, Dylan superfan James Austin Johnson, who briefly appears in A Complete Unknown, has been bringing new levels of accuracy to Dylan-themed sketches, including deep-cut references to Dylan’s love of Moby Dick author Herman Melville and admiration for the work of Guns ‘N Roses bassist Duff McKagan.

We’ll have to wait and see if Timothée Chalamet is dedicated to the role enough to send spies to his hotel room door.