Side hustle: Bob Dylan bizarrely launches Patreon page
With Bob Dylan, it’s impossible to guess what he will do next, and it has been that way throughout his entire career.
In recent years, Dylan has been using social media more and more, but still, few would have foreseen that he was on the cusp of setting up a Patreon for him to sell historical fan-fiction to fans at $5 per month.
The Patreon page, titled Lectures From the Grave, was promoted by Dylan across his social media channels on March 29th, and currently has just shy of 300 fans signed up as paid members.
The first post, made on February 24th, was archivial performance of Mahalia Jackson performing live, before he began sharing short stories last week as part of its soft launch before promoting the project.
According to Pitchfork, Dylan’s later posts include audio essays about former Vice President Aaron Burr, outlaw Frank James, and Wild Bill, which the publication states “appear to be read out loud by an AI voice”.
Intriguingly, the letters have also been published under different pen names, such as Herbert Foster, who is credited with the fan fiction letter sent to Rudolph Valentino by Mark Twain.
Meanwhile, Marty Lombard is credited with writing The Bull Rider. A passage of the piece reads, “The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at me. I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the spine cracked like an old man’s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don’t fix with food.”
While it isn’t known just how involved in the Patreon page that Dylan is, he seemingly wouldn’t promote it across his social media channels and link to it from his Instagram bio if it didn’t have his seal of approval.
Dylan will have time on his hands to add new short stories to his Patreon while he’s on the road across North America this year.
His current batch of dates will see him visit Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisana, before it concludes in Texas in early May.
Last week, he quietly unveiled a new set of dates for the summer, which he didn’t announce on social media like his Patreon, which will also see him joined on the road by Lucinda Williams and the John Doe Folk Trio.
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