Fact-Checking Chevy Chase’s Claim That He Slept With Bob Dylan
The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown was recently nominated for eight Academy Awards. But just think of how many more nominations it would have gotten had the filmmakers included a scene in which Dylan shares a bed with the future star of Caddyshack.
As odd as it may sound, this scene wasn’t totally off the table, seeing as how Chase once claimed to have spent the night with the legendary musician.
During an episode of the short-lived Netflix talk show Norm Macdonald Has a Show, the late comedian, and Bob Dylan superfan, asked Chase if he had any good Dylan stories. His response was more than a little surprising: “I slept with him.”
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Chase went on to explain that he was attending Bard College at the time, just across the river from his hometown of Woodstock, New York. “He comes over, and he’s trying to teach himself the piano,” Chase said of Dylan. “We had a stand up piano (at Bard) that was out of tune. And we’re all in our rooms studying, and you can hear him (playing the piano). Just awful.”
Chase went on to explain that he actually told Dylan to knock it off: “Finally we went down, I said, ‘Bob, please, we’re studying.’ He got a little mopey. And he went and sat by the fireplace, and he took his guitar out. Within literally five minutes, the whole place was in that room. Everybody just wanted to hear him play and sing.”
But at the end of the night, Dylan didn’t have a place to stay. “So he got into bed with me,” Chase said. “I mean, like a single bed. All night. He was wearing a jean shirt, and jean pants. They all smelled like an ashtray.”
When Chase came to the end of the story, Macdonald had just one takeaway:
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Is any of this true? Hard to say. After all, it isn’t the first time that Chase has claimed to have been intimate with a music legend. For starters, Chase’s suggestion that Dylan was teaching himself to play the piano is a little suspicious, because Dylan had already taught himself to play the piano when he was a kid, before he even took up the guitar. He was no guy from Shine, but his piano playing wouldn’t have been unlistenable.
Chase graduated from Bard in 1967, and transferred there in his second year of college, which would mean that he was there beginning around 1964. Well, Dylan began periodically living in Woodstock as early as 1963. And there is a famous legend involving Dylan and Bard College; it’s long been rumored that Dylan’s line “the pump don't work ‘cause the vandals took the handle” that concludes 1965’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” was a reference to a real water pump at Bard.
The pump sits outside of the school’s publications building, which in the ‘60s, it was a “rooming house/bar/restaurant” called Adolph’s, where Dylan was supposedly a “frequent patron.”
Of course, none of this backs up Chase’s story, but I did happen to stumble upon a 2016 alumni interview with someone from the same graduating class as Chase. He specifically recalled that Dylan “used to come on campus and give impromptu concerts,” including at Sottery Hall and Ward Manor, the dorm where Chase lived along with his Steely Dan buddies. But Dylan wasn’t just giving free shows out of the goodness of his heart. “Frankly, he was looking for girls,” the former Bard student stated.
So much of what Chase said was true — except the parts about him telling Dylan to shut up, and later spooning together, cannot be verified at this time.
