BLUE-EYED GIRL

n the evening of May 24, 1966, his 25th birthday, Bob Dylan was due to play his first concert in Paris. But there was a slight hitch: he was refusing to take to the stage of the Olympia theatre unless Françoise Hardy came to see him immediately. Though he’d never met her, he’d already penned a Beat poem tribute to her on the sleeve of his fourth album, (“for francoise hardy/at the seine’s edge/a giant shadow/of notre-dame/seeks t’ grab my foot/sorbonne students/whirl by on thin bicycles…”) Hardy obliged, and the gig went ahead. Later, she went with Johnny Hallyday to a gathering at Dylan’s suite at the Hotel Georges-Cinq, where Dylan beckoned her into his bedroom, placed an advance copy of on a turntable, and played her two songs: and . “His meaning could not have been clearer,” she later told . “But I was too busy listening intently to the songs, which sounded entirely different to anything I