Remembering When Bob Dylan Popped up Out of Nowhere on a Sitcom in 1999

When you try to predict what Bob Dylan is going to do next, you’ll most likely make a fool out of yourself. He has made a career out of making the move that’s least expected, often confounding his fans in the process.

Still, even by Dylan’s standards, appearing out of the blue on a sitcom in 1999 stands out in terms of counterintuitive career moves. Yet there he was on ABC playing his music and interacting with a comedienne.

Dylan and Dharma

In terms of his career status, Bob Dylan was in a really good place in 1999. Two years earlier, he returned from a writing slump and a serious illness to deliver Time Out Of Mind. That universally praised record won him Album of the Year at the Grammys.

In other words, he didn’t need to do anything drastic to try to get the public in his corner. Yet on October 12, 1999, Dylan showed up, pretty much out of nowhere, on the 1999 sitcom Dharma & Greg. And many Dylan followers were scratching their heads about how and why this happened.

After all, Dharma & Greg, while a popular enough sitcom, wasn’t exactly the peak of coolness in pop culture. The show, starring Jenna Elfman as a free-spirited hippie and Thomas Gibson as the strait-laced fellow she impulsively married, was plodding along in its third season when it received the gift of Bob. What sorcery produced this event?

Bob Comes Through

Dylan’s appearance on Dharma & Greg was simply a matter of a friend calling in a favor. Elfman had recently bought a set of drums and had learned to play a little bit. She soon began begging the show’s producers to let her display her newfound skills on the show.

Hence, the writers concocted an episode wherein her character, fed up with her husband’s stuffiness, joins a teen garage band. When that scenario inevitably falls through, she announces to her hubby that she found a new gig. That gig turns out to be with Bob Dylan’s band.

Dylan just so happened to be good friends with Eddie Gorodetsky, a writer on the show. When Gorodetsky asked, Dylan accepted. With the help of legendary T Bone Burnett, a band of music pros was assembled to appear in the scene, which closed out the episode.

The Lost Session

In keeping with Dylan’s adventurous spirit, the scene didn’t include any scripted dialogue. Producers simply told Elfman to improvise between songs and otherwise just jam with the musicians on whatever they wanted to play. Out of a session of about two hours, a little bit more than three minutes were used in the episode.

As part of his deal for appearing, Dylan requested that he be given the tapes of the entire session, aside from what was used from the show. He later returned them to Elfman, who still has them in her possession and hasn’t yet released them as an addition to Dylan’s Bootleg Series (although we can dream).

As far as we can tell, that was the only time that Dylan ever appeared as a sitcom. But the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t ever be surprised by his whims. Even if that means he pops up some weeknight, guitar in hand, cracking one-liners with a laugh track guffawing behind him.

(Photo by Goedefroit Music/Getty Images)