“Guaranteed to zig when you think he’ll zag every single time”: Bob Dylan has joined Patreon and is selling his short stories for $5 a month

In the latest baffling move in a career full of them, Bob Dylan has joined Patreon.

Yes, one of the greatest figures of 20th-century music and culture has joined a platform regarded, by most, as offering some sort of residual income stream for struggling writers.

Over the weekend, Dylan’s posted a flyer on his Instagram feed advertising ‘Lectures From The Grave’, an exclusive series on his new Patreon account for which punters are expected to cough up $5 a month for the privilege.

The weirdness didn’t stop there. Since then six posts have appeared. The first was a video of a Mahalia Jackson performance, followed by three posts featuring audio essays seemingly read aloud by... an AI voice. These are about former Vice President Aaron Burr, 19th-century outlaw Frank James, and American folk hero Wild Bill.

There’s also a series entitled ‘Letters Never Sent’, the first of which is a fictional letter written by Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino. Another post is called ‘Bull Rider (short story)’ and tells the tale of a man who tries bull riding at a rodeo.

To reiterate: this is a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, flogging his short stories like a 17-year-old wannabe.

Long-time Dylan fans are undoubtedly used to this sort of stuff. One wrote on Twitter/ X: “Bob Dylan AI history Patreon just confirms he is in the very top percentile of weirdest/most inexplicable people ever born,” whilst another pointed out: “Guaranteed to zig when you think he’ll zag every single time.”

Meanwhile, in other Dylan news, a page of lyrics typed by the man himself is set to go under the hammer in April and is expected to fetch upwards of $40,000.

Bob Dylan, The Band - I'm Not There (Official Audio) - YouTube

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The lyrics are to I’m Not There, one of the songs Dylan recorded with The Band in the summer of 1967. For years the track went unheard and was only finally released in 2007 on the soundtrack to the Todd Haynes film of the same name, which saw a string of actors play this most inscrutable of rock stars.

The lyrics were found inside a paperback of Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Watt, once owned by Sally Grossman, who, as every Dylan fan knows, appeared on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and was the wife of the singer’s manager Albert Grossman. It is thought the book was given to Grossman by Ginsberg himself and is part of her estate that was sold to a book dealer after her death in 2021.