The Dylanologists (19 page)

“That's bally!” Scott says.
Step right up, folks, and feast your eyes on this!
It was the nonsense shtick outside a sideshow exhibit.

In the movie he made with Larry Charles,
Masked and Anonymous
, Dylan played a failed musical messiah. Reviewing the movie, the
New York Times
marveled about the mythology Dylan had built up around himself since arriving in the city in 1961. “His lifelong foraging in the overgrown pastures of American popular culture has taught him that the true prophet is often indistinguishable from the snake-oil salesman, and his gaunt, weathered frame contains both personas.”

Dylan ruminated about prophets and false prophets three decades earlier in liner notes to 1967's
John Wesley Harding
, the record he released after the motorcycle wreck that amplified his mystique. Dylan lampooned three wise men who search for the key to the songs. “The key is Frank!” the men decide, and they visit an apparently ordinary man named Frank. Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record, they tell Frank, and they have been led to believe that he is the key. “Could you please open it up for us?” they ask.

“And just how far would you like to go in?”

“Not too far but just far enough so's we can say we've been there,” one replies.

Frank puts on a great show for them, tearing off his shirt and punching his fist through a window, and the kings leave happy.

Read Scott's findings about
Chronicles
long enough and you get an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach. You feel like the police detective in the last scene of
The Usual Suspects
. On the trail of Keyser Söze, he spends the entire film questioning a man played by Kevin Spacey who says he worked for the legendary killer. At the end of the film, the detective figures out—just a moment too late—that the man in his office all day
was
Söze, and the mastermind had been concocting an elaborate cover story using words and names and images he found on the office walls.

“I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along,” Dylan wrote in
Chronicles
about Daniel Lanois, who produced
Oh Mercy
and
Time Out of Mind
, “but you can't do that, not unless you like to do puzzles.” This was a little elbow nudge for the attuned reader. Like an illusionist, he was commenting on what he was doing while he was doing it. “It was always right in front of you, blended together,” he wrote elsewhere in the memoir, “but you'd have to pull it apart to make any sense of it.” Dylan also tipped his hand in interviews when the book was released. “
Chronicles
just means—I'm not sure what it means, but it would seem to be some kind of thing where you can make right use of the past,” Dylan said. The tell was so subtle that you'd read right over it if you weren't clued in to the ruse.

If anything exemplified that this memoir was a game for Dylan, it came in a description of a guitar technique Dylan said he learned from blues singer Lonnie Johnson. Musicians who read
Chronicles
puzzled over this “highly controlled system of playing.” It didn't seem to make sense. Then Scott figured out why: It had been cobbled together from parts of
The 48 Laws of Power
by Robert Greene. The book was a Machiavellian tome for the twenty-first century, and some of the advice could have come straight from Dylan's career.

Law 3: “Conceal Your Intentions.”

Law 17: “Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability.”

Law 25: “Re-create Yourself.”

The phrases Dylan used came from a section of
48 Laws
called “The Science of Charlatanism, or How to Create a Cult in Five Easy Steps.” It didn't matter exactly what he took from the chapter. The hidden suggestion that he was reading it—and so closely!—was too rich. “Always in a rush to believe in something, we will manufacture saints and faiths out of nothing,” the chapter read. “Do not let this gullibility go to waste: Make yourself the object of worship. Make people form a cult around you.” Greene wrote that the skilled charlatan should communicate ambiguously. “To emphasize your gathering's quasi-religious nature, talk and act like a prophet. You are not a dictator, after all; you are a priest, a guru, a sage, a shaman.”

Finding something as devious and clever as that was what kept Scott at his desk picking through Dylan's midden field. He couldn't understand those who minimized the pursuit, as if appropriation was just Dylan's writing “style” and there was little point in figuring out what came from where, and how it changed the meaning of the words. Scott was particularly infuriated with Wilentz, the Princeton professor, author, and “historian-in-residence” at Dylan's official website. In
Bob Dylan in America
, Wilentz dismissed the diggers as “censorious sleuths” and minimized Dylan's appropriations. “Discovering a few phrases lifted from Mark Twain and Jack London in a book so engaging, fluid, and generous as
Chronicles
would not have been sufficient grounds for daring to knock a national treasure.” To Scott, it was as if Wilentz were a policeman waving people past a five-car pileup.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along!
“It cuts the conversation short,” Scott says.

Scott was no A.J. Weberman, as some critics claimed. He wasn't looking for an answer key or a master code. He wasn't trying to expose Dylan as a phony. He wasn't on some unholy mission to tear him down. He was having the time of his life working out an elaborately constructed puzzle linking his twin loves, music and books. What he learned made Dylan's work richer. Songs suddenly spoke to the past. The memoir became a hall of mirrors. He was delving into worlds he never knew existed. What, exactly, was wrong with that?

“If you like someone's work,” he once wrote on his blog, “the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.”

P.S., he added: Dylan said that first.

7

“IT'S WORTHLESS”

A
t the British Telecom building in the center of London on a Sunday afternoon, fire alarms were going off.

Alone in the office, Andrew Muir was coming unhinged. “I don't know what to do,” he told his wife on the phone over the ear-splitting noise. “I'm in big, big trouble!” Andy's job—employee computer training at the phone company—occupied maybe three hours a day. He knew he should have been using the extra time to advance his career, but instead he spent it writing and editing a Bob Dylan fan magazine. He ordinarily produced the zine, titled
Homer, the slut
, on a bulky copier set up in the corner of his living room. But after he had published a few issues, the Virgin record store ordered up 750 copies, more than double what Andy had been sending out to subscribers. He would need to run off thirty-five thousand sheets, double-sided. If he had been thinking sensibly, he would have hired a professional printer to do the work. Instead Andy used his day off and half a dozen British Telecom copy machines.

He had been at it since eight in the morning, walking from one copier to the next, collating pages, adding paper, keeping things in order. Then something tripped the alarm. He was completely confused. He didn't smell smoke. He didn't see anything ablaze. Had making thousands of copies somehow generated enough heat to mimic a fire? Andy was too panicked to find out. It was 1992, and the Irish Republican Army had been setting off bombs in the city. He feared that police would storm the premises. He had a more distressing thought as he sprinted around, grabbing pages and putting the office back in order: Would his bosses discover that he had been printing a fanzine on the company dime? He dashed out, alarms still wailing, before anyone showed up. On Monday, nobody said a word.

But he had gotten the message. Clearly, this thing with Dylan was getting out of hand.

Andy was born in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, a coal mining town across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. He had the addict's gene in a country where drinking was a national weakness. Scottish folk music, Glasgow's Rangers Football Club, David Bowie, Philip K. Dick, nineteenth-century Russian literature, Shakespeare, science fiction—all of them had held Andy in their sway at one time or another. If he enjoyed a book, he would track down everything else by that author. So it was a matter of genetics exacerbated by an accident of birth. He became an alcoholic.

Andy had discovered Dylan in high school about the same time he found Sartre and Dostoyevsky, and he raved about
Blood on the Tracks
to anybody who would listen. Some years later, at a party in Helsinki, he met the most extraordinary woman.

“So,” she said, “you're the Dylanologist, are you?”

It was well after midnight, and Andy asked the question he put to every potential love interest. What was her favorite Dylan album?

“
Blonde on Blonde
or
Blood on the Tracks
,” the woman replied, “but I'd hate to pick one and have the other one be second.” Andy was ready to propose right there. They were married two years later.

The first time Andy quit drinking, in his early thirties, he used the resulting burst of energy to start
Homer
. The fanzine's name came from the alcoholic in
Tarantula
, Dylan's difficult book of poetry. “got too drunk last nite. musta drunk too much,” Dylan's Homer writes a friend. “woke up this morning with my mind on freedom & my head feeling like the inside of a prune.” Soon it seemed that twenty hours a day wasn't enough for Andy to do all of the Dylan-related work he wanted. He also ran an information line that subscribers could call for news. He called it the Warmline, because another fanziner had a hotline already. Dylan tapes filled his flat. He got every show within a week of the performance; a week later he got them in better quality. At one point he hollowed out his couch so he could store his tapes inside it. (It later collapsed.) “I was completely crazy,” he said later. “It was my entire life. Every minute of every day was Dylan.” Not that he didn't take his problem seriously, but he once joked that he didn't know what was worse, waking up an alcoholic or waking up as the editor of a Dylan fanzine.

Andy felt strangely compelled to write about Dylan, and in that he was not so different from many compatriots in the United Kingdom. Michael Gray's critical analysis of Dylan's work, the heavily footnoted
Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan
, ran 918 pages. Not one for half measures, Gray then published a 756-page encyclopedia. Clinton Heylin became Dylan's most prolific biographer. Christopher Ricks—elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2004 and knighted in 2009—wrote as appreciatively of Bob Dylan as he had of Tennyson and Milton, and thereby lent legitimacy to the amateur intellectuals going on and on about the man's singular genius.

Even by the fastidious standards of the Dylan world, the Brits were known for a fussy, almost academic approach. They were the first to pull out pads and pens at concerts and Dylan talks. For twenty-eight years, a Brit named Ian Woodward logged and numbered bits of Dylan intel that crossed his desk from newspapers or other fans or his contacts in the music industry. The logs grew into a newsletter, the
Wicked Messenger
, named after the character in the 1967 Dylan song whose mind “multiplied the smallest matter.” At the beginning, it circulated chain-letter style. Later, it became part of the
Telegraph
and then
ISIS
.

Sometimes it seemed that every fan in Britain had launched a fanzine. The editors all knew each other, met at conventions, and gossiped on Internet forums. The community had a hierarchy. Rivalries arose, some unkind words were said. “We are an audience of people who
hate
each other,” Andy Muir told me. The men who ran the zines were essentially competitors. They all ran news stories, bits of trivia, interviews with ancillary Dylan associates, Dylan scholarship—anything Dylan-related they could find. For fans, the publications were a guilty pleasure. They should have come in plain brown wrappers.

Andy wrote and wrote and wrote about Dylan, first in
Homer
, and then, after it folded, in a succession of other journals:
Dignity, ISIS, On the Tracks, Freewheelin'
. He launched another fanzine,
Judas!
He wrote for Nina Goss's
Montague Street
journal. Remarkably, he also found time to write about Shakespeare and football. (He had trouble sleeping when he wasn't drinking.) He spent a lot of time documenting Dylan's sprawling tour; any show he didn't see in person he dissected on tape. But above all Andy became known in Britain's fan fraternity for his unpretentious, clear-eyed criticism, written with wit and the obsessive's grasp of detail.

Pondering “Maggie's Farm,” Dylan's 1965 yelp against working for the man, he noticed how often the people who “grin” in Dylan songs tend to be doing it malevolently. This time, it was Maggie's grinning brother who asks if he's “havin' a good time?” while the narrator is being tortured. “In my gloomier moods,” he wrote, “I feel that any society will, by its very nature, inevitably turn into a ‘Maggie's Farm' that continually tries to entrap and torment the individual spirit of humankind.” Andy sounded upbeat, and he could be quick with a joke, but he was a misanthrope through and through. The way he saw it, humans had been in a precipitous decline since we stopped hunting and gathering. “I hate people,” he told me once. “I'm an angry bastard. There's two of me. You're only seeing one side of me.”

In another dispatch, Andy wrote about sexual imagery in Dylan's 1966 song “Temporary Like Achilles.” The window, hallway, and doors—in one case a “velvet door”—that appear in the song were metaphors for “sexual apertures,” as Andy put it, much as “horseracing, baking, household parts and items, trains and above all cars” were all stand-ins for what was really on blues singers' minds: sex. If you didn't think “raise your window high” was suggestive, ask yourself, why didn't they just use the door? Predictably, readers were horrified.

He studied 1989's
Oh Mercy
and decided that Dylan was singing about both modern times and biblical times. Jesus' age was “superimposed” over our age. A decade after the born-again era, Dylan was still talking about corruption and ultimate judgment and the End of Days. “The last radio is playing,” he sings, and it's the soundtrack to the Second Coming. “It is often difficult to tell in many of these songs if the singer's voice is meant to be portraying Christ himself or Dylan as Everyman on the Christian journey,” Andy wrote.

There was a fine line between erudite criticism and insane interpretation, however, and the zines flirted with it in every issue. The credentialed and the crackpot got even billing. Readers had to be careful. They had to be open to chaos, because there was little settled law in Dylan studies. Mockery awaited anyone who took the songs too seriously or tried too hard to figure out which of Dylan's women were in which song, or searched for the unified Bob Dylan field theory. The specter of A.J. Weberman loomed over any effort to analyze. Tidy, all-encompassing hypotheses fell apart over time. Any fool could find whatever he wanted inside the vast Dylan songbook: drugs, Jesus, Joan Baez. Dylan was once told his lyrics were like the Bible because everything you needed to know was in there somewhere. He started to reply, then he stopped. “Well,” he said. He let a long sarcastic pause linger. “That goes without saying.”

Andy had a soft spot for one of the more fearless armchair correspondents, John Stokes, the man behind the fanzine launched, in part at least, to free up underground tapes from tightfisted collectors.
Freewheelin'
was strictly limited to just twelve subscribers: To get an issue you had to wait for a current member to drop out. The chosen ones shared recordings and contributed an article every month. Stokes, an accountant in Cambridge, insisted the limit was logistical. They all had to print out a dozen copies of their articles and send them to Stokes, who bound and shipped the zine. So it was not set up for mass distribution. But outsiders couldn't help thinking the Freewheelers liked the apostolic symbolism of their exclusive clique.

By design, there could be no editing, so no one could stop Stokes from circulating wildly unconventional ideas. He theorized that in “Series of Dreams,” a song recorded during the
Oh Mercy
sessions and released on the first official
Bootleg Series
, the narrator was having slumbering visions of sexual impotence. Stokes suggested that the umbrella in the song was phallic, and the fact that it was “folded” meant that it didn't work. (Other writers thought Dylan was ruminating about inspiration, or the lack thereof; Gray called Stokes's article “perfectly dreadful.”) Stokes later embarked on a two-year, twenty-three-part series on “Visions of Johanna,” the beloved song from
Blonde on Blonde
, one of those classics that leaves listeners picking up words and turning them this way and that, just to see if they change in the light. On the surface, “Visions” is easily understood. A man is trapped in a relationship with a woman who's just “all right,” but he longs for something more significant, and he can't stop thinking about fantastic, phantasmagoric Johanna. Stokes listened to “Visions of Johanna” and he saw Joan of Arc.
She
had visions. She signed her name “Jehanne.” When Dylan sang that “the ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face,” Stokes couldn't help thinking about the saint being burned alive as a heretic in 1431. Stokes went on for sixty-five thousand words, making his case. But he realized he sounded “quite mad,” and in part twenty-two, he confessed to having second thoughts about his conclusions.

More notoriously, Stokes seemed to suggest that Dylan's
Time Out of Mind
foretold Princess Diana's fatal car accident in Paris, which occurred months after Dylan recorded the album. He identified a number of ties. On the song “Can't Wait,” Stokes swore he heard car horns in the bits of organ at 2:12, 3:20, and 4:55. At the time of her death, Diana's sons were in the Scottish Highlands. Could it be mere coincidence that Dylan sang about his heart being in the Highlands? That these songs were written long before Di's accident made him wonder whether “someone who has been described as a prophet sensed something in the air and, no doubt unwittingly—as all good prophets do—put it into words.”

A few years later, Stokes said his article was misunderstood. He vacillated on the crucial point: He wouldn't say that Dylan had been called by God to speak his truth. Still, who could say? Asked what reaction he got to his articles, Stokes replied, “Ridicule.”

But Andy liked Stokes. He read every piece. “He's an artist in his own right,” he said. His wild musings made Andy laugh and laugh. He couldn't say they were all crazy, and anyway, sometimes Andy himself felt insane spending so much time thinking about this man.

Of all the obsessives who followed Dylan, the interpreters and amateur critics did the most damage to the fans' reputations. The singer reserved his most blunt and direct hatred for them. In 2001, upon the release of
“Love and Theft,”
Dylan complained anew about these supposed know-nothings. He said his songs had been misconstrued and bent out of all recognizable shape. “I don't even know if
I
would understand them if I believed everything that has been written about them by imbeciles who wouldn't know the first thing about writing songs.” He handed down a withering judgment of the Dylan fan world. “These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music . . . I don't feel they know a thing, or have any inkling of who I am and what I'm about. I know they think they do, and yet it's ludicrous, it's humorous, and sad. That such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life, please. It's not something any one person should do about another. You're not serving your own life well. You're wasting your life.”