Val Kilmer’s awkward encounter with Bob Dylan: “I felt like an idiot afterwards”
With the number of award shows and star-studded events that celebrities can attend, you wouldn’t think that they’d ever get starstruck. Yet, that’s often not the case, with huge stars also finding themselves nervous to talk to other famous faces, like Val Kilmer, who ended up regretting an encounter he had with Bob Dylan.
Kilmer, who rose to prominence in the late 1980s with movies like Top Gun and Willow, is also a huge music fan. The actor even portrayed the legendary musician Jim Morrison in The Doors, which required him to perform all of his own singing – something that impressed many fans because, to give him credit, he sounded strikingly similar to the ‘Riders on the Storm’ singer. However, besides The Doors, Kilmer also loves Dylan, citing ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ as one of his favourite tracks by the Minnesota-born folk icon.
“What it did to me is it sort of broke the mold, like Bob Dylan did with lots and lots of kinds of songs,” he told KCRW, emphasising how the musician doesn’t strive for ultimate perfection with each recording, which he likes. “It’s always live and it feels like it’s probably stream of conscious and it kind of represents a beat generation so it kind of represents art to me and poets,” he said.
Kilmer was able to meet Dylan after finding out the singer was a big fan of his film Tombstone, which was released in 1993. The actor’s performance as Doc Holliday was widely praised, with the role spawning some memorable quotes that Dylan was interested in hearing Kilmer deliver in the flesh. “I found out he was in New York so I called my friend and I said you know, I’d love to meet him, is there any chance and he says, ‘I don’t know, I’ll find out.’ And the next call I got I thought was going to be my friend, but it wasn’t, it was Bob,” Kilmer began explaining.
After hitting it off on the phone, Kilmer invited the musician to his house, unsure if he was experiencing a “hoax”. But lo and behold, Dylan actually did turn up, although Kilmer now wishes he’d acted differently. “He shows up and sits down, and he wants to talk about Tombstone, but I just can’t, you know, nor can I talk about any of his stuff. Eventually he says, ‘ain’t you going to say anything about that movie?’ and I said, ‘do some ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and I’ll…’ That’s what I said to him, basically, I said no.”
The actor added: “I get like that sometimes. So I turned him down and, I thought, ‘no one turns this guy down’. Anyway, I felt like an idiot afterwards, well, yeah I could have said a few lines. They’re fun lines too, like people still ask me to say lines and now I’ll tell any schmo in the airport, I’ll say ‘I’m your huckleberry,’ but I wouldn’t say it Bob Dylan!”
Perhaps the nerves of being around a man regarded as one of the greatest living musicians became too much for Kilmer, but he eventually found a way to rectify the somewhat awkward encounter. “I felt so bad about it,” he explained, “So what I did was, I recorded ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ but as Doc Holliday and I put in all of the big lines from the movie into the song and made him a little tape.”
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