The Dylanologists (17 page)

A story about the borrowings from Timrod made the
New York Times
, and that prompted Edward Cook, a Dylan fan and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to poke around in
Chronicles
.

The memoir started out as liner notes for reissues of three old records, and in the process it turned into something closer to autobiography. “I got completely carried away in the process of . . . I guess call it, ‘novelistic writing,'” Dylan said. He didn't love the work; as all authors know, when you're writing a book you're not living your life. As he worked on it, he told music journalists that he was struggling. “My retrievable memory, it goes blank on incidents and things that have happened.” So he was gathering stories about his life from others and using them, even if he knew them to be untrue. “I'll take some of the stuff that people
think
is true and I'll build a story around that.” But when the book came out in 2004, Dylan said he had surprised himself. His memory had come back to him. “I found I could visualize what people looked like and what they were wearing and even how particular rooms were furnished.” The memoir “set the record straight,” Dylan told one journalist. He assured another that “when you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.”

Even on the surface,
Chronicles
was an idiosyncratic book. Dylan told the story of arriving in New York and making it big; of dealing with fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s; of losing his way and struggling to record 1989's
Oh Mercy
. When it appeared, critics hailed the book for its candor. But Dylan had skipped over what biographers considered the stations of the cross:
Highway 61 Revisited
, Newport in 1965, the motorcycle accident, his marriage(s), the turmoil that led him to write
Blood on the Tracks
. The stories he chose to tell didn't ring true to people who had followed Dylan's life and career closely. Of course, anyone who expected the master fabulist to play it straight this time had not been paying attention all these years. Still, even considering the elastic rules of the memoir genre,
Chronicles
was notably unreliable.

But it wasn't until 2006 that anyone realized something else: Not all the words were his.

Given the Timrod discoveries in
Modern Times
, Cook decided to check out a few oddly distinctive phrases from a section about a couple who put Dylan up during his early days in the Village. The words had jumped out at Cook earlier when he tried to figure out whether the pair, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, were real or not. (Probably not, he concluded.) When Cook searched the phrases online, he turned up jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's 1946 book,
Really the Blues
, which was about a “white kid who fell in love with black culture.” The book is full of jive, and Mezzrow describes a woman as “a Maltese kitten” and “a solid viper”—a pot smoker. Those were the exact words Dylan used to describe Chloe; he also threw in another bit of Mezzrow jive talk from later in the book, “cool as pie.”

Cook didn't do anything with this information at first. For a week, he didn't tell
anybody
. He just enjoyed the sensation. He had a secret with Dylan. “It would be the only time I would have a Bob Dylan moment,” he said. Cook also wanted to see what else was there. He reread
Chronicles
with a more critical eye and things started to jump out at him, things that looked suspicious. He found a line from Proust, and a phrase lifted from
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. When you find one or two thefts like that, he said, “you suspect
everything
.”

Finally, Cook posted his discoveries on his blog with some critical words. He considered it “pretty close to real plagiarism.” Borrowing material for songs was standard in the folk music world. But he had a problem with Dylan appropriating others' words in his book. “He's being lazy,” he says. “You kind of want someone to earn it if they're going to get praise as a great writer. It ticks me off.”

His piece was the beginning of a reappraisal of
Chronicles
by students of Dylan. The post started circulating among fans, and soon made its way to Scott.

He read it and sighed.

“Great,” he told himself. “Now I've got the next couple of years booked.”

4

Scott once sent me a little riddle, a bite-size taste of what he had been up against. “On page five of
Chronicles: Volume One
our chronic argonaut uses material from a classic work of science fiction in a most interesting way. It is in the first paragraph, see if you can find it.” On the page, Dylan was describing John Hammond, the great-grandson of a Vanderbilt who as a talent scout and record producer had played an instrumental role in the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, and many others, including Dylan. Hammond “had been raised in the upper world, in comfort and ease—but he wasn't satisfied and he had followed his own heart's love, music . . .”

Latching onto that sci-fi phrase, “the upper world,” I got to work. I pulled out “The Chronic Argonauts,” an H.G. Wells short story from 1888, and read it straight through with Dylan in mind. Would he have appreciated this idea of a man lost in time, as Dylan had so often seemed? But there was no mention of “the upper world” there. Next I tapped “H.G. Wells” and “the upper world” into Google and discovered a section of
The Time Machine
. In the book, a man travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers humanity split into two races, the Eloi, a weak, indolent, unintelligent upper-world people, and the Morlocks, an apelike people who live underground and feed on the Eloi. Lamenting how the upper-world Eloi had devolved into ignorant frailty over generations, the time traveler “grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly toward comfort and ease.”

To Scott's thinking, this was Dylan's peculiar and hidden way of expressing contempt for an empty upper-class world, and his respect for a man who could have lived a pointless life of inherited wealth and privilege but instead made something of himself. It took me a couple of hours to unravel—there were other dead ends—and without Scott's hint I would never have thought to look.

Scott came to think Dylan had sprinkled hidden subtexts on nearly every one of the memoir's 293 pages. He compared notes via e-mail with Cook, who continued to dig up references, and soon Scott's working copy of
Chronicles
was filled with marginalia: Jack London on page 173, Henry Miller on page 174, Thomas Wolfe on page 175. They found Dylan recycling from magazines, novels popular and obscure, even the Internet.

One discovery came when Scott poked around in a section of the memoir about
Oh Mercy
that was set in New Orleans, where the album was recorded. It only seemed natural to check the same travel guide he had linked to “Tweedle Dee.” His instincts were right. The guide described “pigeons looking for handouts” and a Cajun band's “chinka-chinka beat.” Ten years later, Dylan used the same words in
Chronicles
.

A while later, Scott found that Dylan mined the March 31, 1961, issue of
Time
while writing about the era when his career took off. Dylan helped himself to descriptions of life in Hanoi and observations about nuclear-bomb “worriers.” One article in the issue about the “Age of Anxiety” noted the prevailing wisdom that anyone could do or become anything, that “housewives can become glamour girls,” that “the slow-witted can become intellectuals,” and that “the indecisive can become leaders of men.” Dylan swiped the line and then appended a gag: “If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen.”

In writing about the topical songs that 1960s folksingers wrote based on stories in the newspapers of the day, Dylan listed headlines from a 1936 John Dos Passos novel, a work that itself used cut-up writing techniques. Dylan secretly paired Mark Twain with
The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
, a 1916 novel by British novelist Sax Rohmer. Shelley verse was in one paragraph, Hemingway in the next.

Dylan's appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts. To portray the bearded, gruff folksinger Dave Van Ronk, a Greenwich Village denizen, Dylan chose the description of a wolf-dog in a Jack London story and melded it with a line about New Yorkers from a city travel guide. Scott found dozens of borrowings from London, and that was telling in and of itself: London had been accused of plagiarism in his time. By weaving these hidden quotations into
Chronicles
, Scott argued, Dylan was acknowledging that he is a product of his influences, that his voice is “an amalgam of the voices of so many others.”

In 2010, Scott's friend Tom Gogola helped him get a piece in the
New Haven Review
, and his ideas began circulating widely in Dylan circles. His blog became a must-read for fans. “
Chronicles: Volume One
is loaded with things to be decoded,” Scott wrote. “I think of it as
The Da Vinci Code
of rock 'n' roll.” But he didn't believe Dylan had written the book in bad faith; he had just hidden another book between the lines. Scott thought Dylan was an artist toying with his audience. He loved it. He presented every find with the joy of a person solving a brain teaser.

A few guys longed for the old days, before everything was a search-engine click away. Peter Stone Brown followed Scott's work closely and he found the discoveries interesting. But he had misgivings about Scott's approach. “With each new Googled discovery,” he wrote, “he seems more and more like a cat waiting behind a door ready to pounce on the next moving object.” Peter would appreciate it more if Scott were reading widely and happened to stumble on the antecedents of Dylan's lyrics in the process. That was how Peter found the subterranean scriptural roots of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” He read the Bible. Fans caught Dylan's musical borrowings because they knew those old folk songs; they owned the records.

Scott acknowledged that search engines made it possible for anybody to track down this stuff, not just scholars well versed in the classics or poetry or some other arcane field of study. But even so, it took time and effort, as the H.G. Wells example demonstrated. It was trickier than people might have imagined. “If it was so easy,” Scott said, “there'd be fifty blogs like mine.”

Some people doubted his conclusions. How did Scott know the matches weren't coincidental? Many apparent borrowings seemed like commonplace phrases. Was it not possible that Dylan had a photographic memory for the things he had read? Couldn't he have a brain that worked differently from ours, one that sponged up choice bits of language, which he then unwittingly spat back out? Doubtful, Scott answered. Neither coincidence nor an overactive memory would explain how seven phrases appeared on pages 203–04 of
Chronicles
that resembled the 1998 book
Confederates in the Attic
by best-selling author Tony Horwitz: “an overhanging porch with support beams that had long ago rotted away”; “oiled ringlets”; “in the trees, a solitary bird warbling”; “moss covered logs”; a bumper sticker that reads “
WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA
”; “hog parts hanging from hooks on walls—hog jowls, hog ears”; and “make you wanna squeal.” (Horwitz was flattered. He only wished Dylan had cribbed lines for a song.)

This was not an exact science. I spent some time poking around on page 153, where Dylan described his epiphany in Locarno, Switzerland. He wrote that as he had struggled to sing that night, he managed to conjure up “some different type of mechanism to jump-start the other techniques that weren't working.” Curious to see what I would find using Scott's approach, I searched “mechanism,” “jump-start,” and “techniques.” Up popped page 27 of
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Singing
. File under: It couldn't be. (Could it?) Scott had a long list of phrases that could have been borrowed but more likely were not.

Some people seemed upset that anybody went searching at all. As if to even look for this stuff was tantamount to questioning the legend. Scott began to feel like he was moving too fast for people, even those who already accepted the idea that Dylan was doing some borrowing. Scott would make a claim, and they would say,
Now you've gone off the deep end
. He shrugged off the doubters. He had spent his life listening to and playing American popular music. He thought maybe he had developed “a freakish ability” to see what other people couldn't.

“I don't think that I'm inventive enough to dream up these impossible claims,” he said.

Eventually people would come around.

5

The drip-drip-drip of discoveries divided Dylan's community of followers. People took sides. Over here, Dylan was lambasted as a thief of intellectual property, a copyright violator, and a plagiarist. Over there, he was doing what artists had done for all time. He was celebrated as a creator of “modernist collages.” He was blurring the lines “between past and present . . . high art and low, scholarly and popular, exotic and familiar,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote in
Bob Dylan in America
. “Dylan created a new magic zone where it was 1933 and 1863 and 2006 all at once, where the full complexity of human nature might still be glimpsed.” He was a conjurer communicating with literary, musical, and cinematic ghosts.

No Dylan fan wrote more eloquently about his disappointment in Dylan than a librarian and poet in England named Roy Kelly. He came of age in the 1960s, so he experienced the albums contemporaneously, unlike someone who had to piece them together later. His manner was friendly if fussy. He'd written all his life, producing lush short stories, formal English poetry, and lengthy pieces with literary ambition for two of the Dylan fanzines, John Bauldie's
Telegraph
and its successor, the
Bridge
. He once wrote a piece about “Ron Bobfan,” a fictional conglomeration of Kelly and Bauldie, sprinkled with bits of every other fan he had known. Looking back on the wonder and genius of Dylan circa 1966, Ron is filled with self-conscious nostalgia and melancholy, a longing for the time when his hero was so original and fresh, when listening to him was so . . . uncomplicated.