If you told the average music fan, “Bob Dylan is making a cameo on a TV show, and he even has a few lines,” they might well be expecting an artsy period drama where he’s sitting in the corner of a shadowy bar. They most certainly wouldn’t predict him to awkwardly smile his way through an episode of the sanitized opposites-attract ABC sitcom Dharma & Greg, which ran from 1997 to 2002. But yes, that bizarrely ill-fitting pairing came to life during the episode “Play Lady Play,” which aired October 12, 1999. It’s certainly one of the weirdest moments in Dylan’s career—no small feat.
The abrupt guest spot feels reverse-engineered into the show, only tangentially related to the rest of the plot—as if the writers thought, “Hey, it would be fun to have Bob Dylan be in an episode” and then worked backwards from there. But here’s the set-up: Dharma (Jenna Elfman) plays drums in a teenage kid’s garage band until she’s kicked out by one of their moms (Jane Lynch). With the episode almost over, Dharma tells Greg (Thomas Gibson), “I have a chance to audition for another band!” And that group happens to be…Dylan’s.
The last few minutes show Eflman’s character bashing on the kit as Dylan’s crew, also featuring famed producer T Bone Burnett on guitar, work through some gritty electric blues. The real-life Elfman looks thrilled to even be in the room, often grinning ear to ear with the expression of “I can’t believe this is happening.” She even gets in some seemingly improvised banter with the musician, asking him if he wants her to play any other grooves. At one point, she breaks into a hi-hat-heavy pattern and asks, “That’s kinda too funky for your style, right?” Dylan is a great sport throughout the bit, looking sheepish but trying to keep the scene together. At the end, she asks, “So can I play with you guys? Did I get the job?” He responds, “Well, we don’t know yet” and denies her request to audition further. He does, however, agree to help the drums back in her van.
That leaves us with the obvious question: Why? Well, according to Ray Padgett’s exhaustive Dylan newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s, the seemingly random connection was made through one of the show’s writers, Eddie Gorodetsky, who was “friendly with Dylan” and went on to produce the artist’s satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. “The show made the ask, Bob’s manager asked for tapes of a couple episodes, and a month later he agreed,” Padgett wrote.
In a 2017 interview with Harry Connick Jr., Elfman—an enormous fan who admits she “lost [her] virginity to a Bob Dylan song”—geeked out about the whole experience, saying it all came about after she started playing drums for fun at home. “I told the producers, ‘Hey, guys, I’m sort of playing drums right now—if you ever want to incorporate that into an episode, that would be fun! Next thing I know, they’re getting Bob Dylan and T Bone Burnett to come to the set for me to riff with.”
Elfman says she’d never played drums in public before and “didn’t even know what [she was] doing,” other than being able to keep a steady pulse. “Thank god [I wasn’t nervous]. I didn’t know enough to be nervous. And it’s not like I was aspiring to be a musician where I took myself so seriously on the subject…They come in and sit down. I sit down. It wasn’t scripted or anything. I just started playing rhythms…Traveling Wilbury melodies are starting to come out. I’m like, ‘I’m playing Traveling Wilburys right now!’ I love drums; I love music; I love rhythm; and I love Bob Dylan. And then I totally messed up and [improvised] some funny line, and it made him giggle. I was like, ‘I made Bob Dylan giggle!”
