4 Times Bob Dylan’s Neighbors Likely Regretted Living Near Him: Sewage Smell and Dog Poop
Bob Dylan is a notoriously private celebrity, so fans might welcome the chance to be neighbors with the musician to get more insight into his life. The people who actually have lived near Dylan have come to learn that he’s not always the easiest neighbor, though. He’s even gotten under the skin of another celebrity, Katharine Hepburn. Though being a problematic neighbor is not always Dylan’s fault, some people have even had to complain to the city about him.
When Bob Dylan’s dog used neighbor Katharine Hepburn’s garden as his bathroom
When Dylan lived in New York, one of his neighbors was Hepburn. She didn’t mind Dylan, but she did have a problem with his dog, who seemed to favor her flower bed when he needed to relieve himself.
“Katharine Hepburn lived next door, and Bob’s dog Brutus would s*** in her flowerbed all the time,” Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes wrote in the book Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks, adding, “Brutus seemed to love taking a crap there, and I think it was due to the fertilizer that she was using. Maybe, he wanted to help out or just thought that the flowerbed was the spot for his poop since there was already poop there.”
Hepburn liked Brutus, but every time she came to Dylan’s house, Maymudes knew it was because of a mess in her garden.
“Katharine would come over, looking very well put together, and say, ‘Victor?’ in a sweet voice, and I would instantly know to grab a plastic bag, because Brutus probably left a five-pound turd in her flowers,” he wrote. “The dog could really lay some logs. I think if it was a small dog, she wouldn’t have cared. But with Brutus it was truly a landmine.”
When a Dylanologist dug through his garbage
While living in New York, Dylan also dealt with an overzealous fan. Self-proclaimed Dylanologist Alan J. Weberman made it his mission to learn everything he could about Dylan. For Weberman, this meant he needed to dig through the musician’s garbage to collect artifacts.
“You know, the term garbologist existed — in Australian, it meant a garbage collector — but there was no garbology, which is the study of garbage. So, I invented the word ‘garbology,'” Weberman told Tablet in 2015. “It’s come to mean studying garbage to see what you can know, to increase recycling and understand socioeconomic divides and this and that. I did it just to spy on Dylan, essentially.”
Weberman also spent a great deal of time banging on Dylan’s door, demanding to speak to him. While this was, of course, not Dylan’s fault, a noisy fan digging through the garbage would likely not be a welcome visitor for neighbors. Luckily, Dylan eventually confronted Weberman and told him to stop digging through his trash.
When his holiday decorations looked more like abstract art
Dylan has lived in Malibu for years, and each Christmas, his neighbors wait for him to decorate his yard. According to one neighbor, Merrill Markoe, most of the neighborhood “looks more or less like an outdoor restaurant courtyard at a four-star hotel. The decorating style is consistent because many of the residents hire the same company to wrap their trees and shrubbery for them” (via Vice). Dylan’s yard does not adhere to this style.
Dylan’s decoration looks as though someone haphazardly — perhaps drunkenly — tossed a string of lights at the bushes and hoped they stuck. Year after year, Markoe attempted to analyze the lights.
“Year after year, his annual dispatch in lights was comforting in its consistency while remaining surprising,” she wrote. “Not unlike his songs.”
While many neighbors likely found the lights an eyesore, at least Markoe enjoyed them.
When Bob Dylan’s neighbors couldn’t escape the smell coming from his property
Dylan’s worst neighborly offense occurred in 2009, when nearby residents complained about a foul smell coming from his yard. There was a reeking portable toilet outside a guardhouse on his property, and Dylan refused to remove it.
“It started in September. I’d go into the front yard and get nauseous,” neighbor Cindy Emminger told the LA Times. “I couldn’t figure out at first where the smell was coming from.”
The Emminger family alleged that the city wouldn’t do anything because of Dylan’s fame, despite the fact that the smell was so bad that they had to stop sleeping upstairs.
“It’s worse when it’s misty outside at night,” Cindy said. “We turn on the five fans, but it still gets inside our house. We’re not even using the upstairs now. We sleep downstairs.”
