Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Hundreds of artists have covered his songs, from Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez to The Beach Boys and Michael Bolton. When people talk about Dylan and songwriting, they almost always talk about his music.
But in 2017, someone finally turned the question around. In an interview posted on Dylan’s official website, he was asked which song written about him was his favorite. His answer was immediate: “Garden Party” by Ricky Nelson.
Dylan and Ricky Nelson: A Long Connection
If you grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you remember Ricky Nelson. Born in 1940, just a year after Dylan, he was a genuine prodigy. He was acting in radio and television shows by age eight.
In 1959, he starred alongside John Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Western classic, Rio Bravo. But it was his music that really made its mark. Nelson recorded 25 albums and placed an astonishing 49 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Eighteen of those broke the top 10. Two went all the way to number one.
Dylan never hid his admiration. In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, he wrote:
“I’d always felt kin to him… He sang his songs calm and steady, like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurling past him. His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood.”
The Night That Inspired the Song
“Garden Party” has a great backstory. Nelson wrote it in 1972, after he had been booed during a performance at Madison Square Garden the year before.
The show was billed as the Rock ‘n Roll Spectacular Volume VII and featured legends like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Nobody is quite sure why the crowd turned on Nelson that night. Some people believe the booing was actually aimed at aggressive police behavior in the venue, not at Nelson himself.
Rather than sulk, Nelson turned the whole experience into a song. He wittily namechecked many musicians in the lyrics, including Dylan, who appears in the line: “(Mr. Hughes) hid in Dylan’s shoes.”
A Hit That Lasted
“Garden Party” was released as a single and climbed to number six on the Billboard pop chart. It has a gentle, unhurried quality that feels timeless.
Dylan clearly felt that too. He even performed the song himself onstage in 2025, more than fifty years after Nelson first recorded it.
Some songs just stay with you. For Bob Dylan, this one always did.