Bob Dylan on Jimmy Carter: "A kindred spirit to me of a rare kind"

1974-01-21/2, Omni, Atlanta, GA

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Photo via San Francisco Art Exchange

In 2020, Bob Dylan, not a talking head you see pop up in many music documentaries, appeared in the Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President. “He’s a kindred spirit to me of a rare kind,” Dylan said of Carter. “The kind of man you don’t meet every day, and you’re lucky to meet if you ever do.”

Carter, for his part, called Dylan “one of my best friends.”

Their relationship began 50 years ago today, after the first of two Tour ‘74 shows in Atlanta. Carter, then the Georgia Governor and three years almost to the day from being inaugurated as President, invited Bob and The Band to visit his house. Rolling Stone wrote at the time: 

Carter, a Democrat who entertains 1976 vice-presidential hopes, sent Dylan a hand-written invitation last December, promising that any gathering would not be open to the press. “It was not an effusive note,” Carter said later. Dylan accepted, through tour-producer Bill Graham, with a special request for some real down-home cuisine.

At the show, Graham had told Carter that Dylan had been impressed by the fact that Carter had traveled to Israel in 1972. Paul West, the local reporter who wrote that Rolling Stone story, emailed in after the inaugural entry of this 1974 series ran. He told me about what happened after his article ran. It relates to that paragraph I just quoted.

I was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, covering the state legislature, when I wrote the Rolling Stone piece. I bumped into Carter's son Chip near the state Capitol right after it ran. "Dad didn't like your story," he said. I didn't ask Chip why and he didn't say. Probably it was because the article said Carter was running for vice president. Of course, he wasn't; he was running for president. But nobody, even in Georgia, seriously believed at that point that an obscure, one-term southern governor could get nominated, much less elected. So, the thinking went, Carter must have been running for president in order to get picked for the ticket by the ultimate nominee. It wasn't the last time Jimmy would prove the doubters wrong.

The visit, West reported in his original article, was in fact Chip’s idea. Chip was a Dylan superfan who even travelled to Woodstock in 1968 to shake the man’s hand. In the documentary, Carter explained, “When I was governor, my sons were living in the governor’s mansion with me. Bob Dylan’s music permeated the governor’s mansion. My sons and I were brought closer together through Bob Dylan’s songs. Chip knew every lyric of every Bob Dylan song that had ever been written.”