Living with Legends

A nice story about Bob Dylan in the October 6, 2005 issue of The Toronto Star (subscription required) quotes our esteemed proprietor, Stanley Bard.  Seems that Bob was the perfect tenant. I bet he even paid his rent on time.

The Chelsea is full of art made by grateful tenants, and its management is clearly proud that it has housed the likes of writer Mark Twain, Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe. Chelsea owner Stanley Bard, 71, fondly remembers the years Bob Dylan lived here in the 1960s.

Bard smiles when he talks of Dylan, who didn’t paint on his walls like Janis Joplin, blare his guitar at night like Jimi Hendrix, have scores of groupies like the Grateful Dead, or find a stabbed body on his bathroom floor, like Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols.

Much of Dylan’s stay at the Chelsea was a sad and introspective time, as his marriage to his first wife Sara was ending.

"He stayed to himself and he was a gentleman," Bard recalls.