Bob Dylan graduated from his small role on BBC Television to a bona fide Hollywood production with the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The folk-rock icon composed the movie score, including famous tracks like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”. He also spent time in front of the camera as Alias—a brief foray into acting that led to Dylan picking up some hilariously unserious habits. While we’d say we tip our hats to Dylan for pulling off this stunt, if we had to guess, the film crew was hip to the songwriter’s tricks.
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When you’re Bob Dylan, you get a pass for being “quirky.”
The Many Hats of ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’
When we think of Bob Dylan, images of a stony, stoic songwriter with a furrowed brow generally come to mind. But every once in a while, a story about Dylan will surface that reveals just how un-seriously he takes himself most of the time. One anecdote came from Rita Coolidge during a 2023 interview with The Church Studio. The singer was dating Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid star Kris Kristofferson at the time, and she also played the small role of Maria. Because she had a bit more downtime than her leading man partner, Coolidge ended up spending a lot of time with Dylan’s then-wife, Sarah Dylan, and their five children.
Coolidge recalled one “quirky” habit of Dylan’s she discovered while spending time with his family. “Bob would go to work every day, and the nature of his character, he would go into the wardrobe truck and decide what hat he was going to wear that day. And then the next scene, if he was able to get another hat, he would. He had a thing. One day, I was at the house. Sara said, ‘Let me show you something.’”
“We walked in. She opened the door,” Coolidge continued. “The closet was stacked this high with hats. Bob was wearing his hats home. He’d go to work the next morning, and [director Sam] Peckinpah would go, ‘Where’s the hat you had last night?’ [Coolidge shrugs.] ‘Don’t have it anymore.’ They were all in his closet. Bob was quirky.”
Other Stars Had Different Adjectives for Bob Dylan on Set
Bob Dylan stealing his hats from the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid seems to encapsulate his sly, eccentric behavior—and his ability to get away with it with a starpower-filled shrug. Interestingly, other stars had different ways of describing Dylan on the set of the 1973 Western film. Country star Willie Nelson visited the set to spend time with Kristofferson and company shortly after the “Crazy” singer’s marriage to Connie Koepke.
“Dylan was a little shy, scared to death,” Nelson recalled, per Joe Nick Patoski’s biography, Willie Nelson: An Epic Life. “They had him jumpin’ and runnin’ on them horses, and he ain’t no cowboy.”
Scary horse stunts aside, the after-shooting hangs sounded like a great time. In a 2014 interview with Classic Rock, Kristofferson said, “[Dylan and I] spent a lot of time chatting in our trailers, and I told him about my friend Willie Nelson. I asked Bob, ‘Why isn’t Willie famous? He’s a genius.’ So, the next day, Bob calls Willie up and gets him to come down to the set, and he made him play his old Martin guitar for ten hours straight. They ended up doing all these old Django Reinhardt tunes. It was fabulous.”
Photo by MGM Studios/Courtesy of Getty Images
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