The Dylanologists (20 page)

In the weeks after that broadside, many fans said that Dylan was right, but he surely wasn't talking about
them
in particular. So many said it that Andy decided to create a checklist to help Dylan's ­followers determine whether “old grumpy chops” (his words) considered them a “so-called connoisseur”:

Have you seen a lot of concerts?

Fought your way up to the front?

Bought or listened to bootlegs?

Written about Dylan?

Then face facts: He was talking about you. “He's every right to say what he does,” Andy wrote. “Every artist says it. Basically, you see, they don't understand us. They've got this fantastic gift for looking at the world and coming up with something creative, and we puzzle about how they do it. And of course to them it's not a puzzle. It just comes.”

Dylan had been going on about this for decades. Every time he encouraged people to try to figure out the songs, he would turn around and bash them.

He would say, “It's up to you to figure out who's who. A lot of times it's you talking to you.” If he sings in the first person, “I” could be Dylan himself, or it could be the God who created him, Dylan said. Or it could be another person. “When I say ‘I' right now, I don't know who I'm talking about.” Then he would reverse course and protest the intellectualization of his work. “They are songs meant to be sung. I don't know if they are meant to be discussed around the coffee table.”

In one interview he'd say, “People can learn everything about me through my songs—if they know where to look.” In another he would complain about biographical readings of his albums. His repertoire was so “wide-ranging” that “you'd have to be a madman” to use it to learn anything concrete about his life. He complained about people who saw his deteriorating marriage reflected in
Blood on the Tracks
. On “You're a Big Girl Now,” the singer has just had a conversation with his lover and is dealing with the painful realization that he's lost her forever. “Well,” Dylan said about that song, “I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn't be about anybody else
but
my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are.”

People should just give up already, Dylan said. “What I've done, what I'm doing, nobody else does or has done. When I'm dead and gone maybe people will realize that, and then figure it out. I don't think anything I've done has been evenly mildly hinted at. There's all these interpreters around, but they're not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody's come close.”

2

One day in 1993, Dylan materialized on Camden High Street in London. Usually, Dylan wandered around in hoodies and sunglasses, sometimes in the middle of the night, but on this July day he went to a busy boulevard and was dressed to be noticed: He wore a black coat, leather gloves, and a top hat, and he swung a crook-handle umbrella. He spoke to passersby, signed autographs, threw an arm around a pedestrian for a photograph. He sat for tea at an outdoor table. There was a reason for all of this unlikely behavior: Cameras were following him around for a music video.

Word spread, and someone called Andy, who jumped into a cab and found Dylan sitting in a restaurant called Fluke's Cradle. Andy sat down at a nearby table, his heart racing. He felt ridiculous. He walked over to the bar and ordered a drink. He had two copies of
Homer
with him, and though he swore he'd never pester Dylan if he saw him in public, he wanted his hero to sign them. Dylan's security man, Jim Callaghan, knew Andy from the road, and after a few minutes he gave him the word: Now or never.

Andy approached, and the table went silent.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dylan,” Andy said.

Dylan looked at him. “Yeah?”

Andy went to mush. (“I am dead,” he would write later. “I want the ground to swallow me up and never let me out again.”) He managed to hand his magazine over and Dylan signed it and Andy thanked him. Walking back to the front of the restaurant, Andy placed himself in a chair that everyone would have to pass—single file—on the way out, and placed his other copy of
Homer
on the table. Just as Andy planned, Dylan stopped, picked it up, and started flipping through the pages. He made a remark about the Warmline, listed on the inside cover, and laughed. He read a few more pages. When he started to go, Andy told him to keep it, and graciously, Dylan did. He gave his fan a squeeze on the shoulder and walked to a waiting car. As it pulled away, Andy caught a glimpse of Dylan still reading his fanzine.

He was dumbfounded. How could it have gone so well? Everybody knew the stories of Dylan's truculence. Andy was prepared for
I hate you
, or words to that effect. “Every fan he has met,” Andy says, “he has hated.”

The meeting added fuel to Andy's obsession. He continued following the tour relentlessly and wrote a book analyzing the concerts year by year. He took a new post at British Telecom that involved travel all over Europe, and he found that the firm had offices virtually everywhere Dylan played. He planned business trips around the tour. At perhaps the apex of his mania, he flew halfway around the world for the sole purpose of hearing that Holy Grail recording, the one on which Dylan plays
Street-Legal
at a piano in his rehearsal space.

Then something happened. Andy's passion cooled and reversed direction. His feelings for Dylan spiraled from love to doubt to deep disillusionment. “I was adrift on a raft of negativity.”

The reversal took some time. Four years after Andy's momentous encounter, Dylan was hospitalized with severe chest pains and diagnosed with histoplasmosis, a fungal infection that can cause inflammation of the lining around the heart. He spent a week in the hospital, but he recovered and soon resumed touring. As it happened,
Time Out of Mind
was released soon after. Though he had written and recorded it before the ailment, its dark musings sounded like Dylan had written it on hospital stationery.

The health scare and the new record seemed to reignite media interest, as if writers, in preparing obituaries, realized Dylan had reached the age at which he ought to be treated as a living legend. At the same time, Dylan's office had been working to introduce the singer to the next generation and remind the world of the Bob Dylan myth. A Martin Scorsese documentary cast Dylan as an archetypal American character. A scrapbook re-created his 1960s glory. Pristine recordings of fabled concerts were officially released, bringing the Dylan of 1964, 1966, and 1975 back to life.

At the dawn of the new century, he suddenly seemed to be everywhere. The iconoclast who complained “everybody's singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something” went a bit corporate himself. He showed up in a TV ad driving a Cadillac Escalade through a desolate landscape. (“What's life without the occasional detour?” he asked.) He licensed a song to Pepsi for a Super Bowl ad with Will.i.am, and stalked a supermodel in Venice for Victoria's Secret. Official Dylan watches ($1,500) and hand-signed Hohner harmonicas in ebony boxes ($5,000) went on sale. He hosted a one-hundred-episode radio show on XM. He started producing paintings, exhibiting them in galleries, and selling the signed prints for thousands of dollars.

Despite the increased exposure, the world did not get closer to seeing the man behind the mask. Dylan's manager conducted the interviews that Scorsese used; the director never even met with the singer in the course of making his film.
60 Minutes
got a sit-down with Dylan, but not the customary chance to follow the star around with its cameras as he went about his life. He had always been both ambitious and paranoid; now he'd figured out how to be omnipresent and invisible at once. Confidants who knew whether there was a new woman in Dylan's life, for instance, weren't telling the world about it.

Amid all of this manufactured hubbub, Dylan kept making music. After 2001's
“Love and Theft,”
he released two albums cut from the same mold,
Modern Times
(2006) and
Together Through Life
(2009). Both of them tapped history, old folk and blues, literature and theater. Both were produced by “Jack Frost,” Dylan's alter ego. He was done with guys in the control room getting in the way.

For Andy, it felt like the air was slowly escaping from the balloon. He fell for
“Love and Theft,”
hard, but he thought
Modern Times
was marred by its “unfounded portentousness.” Was Dylan just faking it? He hated to be critical, but when Cook and Warmuth revealed the borrowing in
Chronicles
, Andy couldn't shake the feeling that Dylan was cheating, and possibly breaking the law. With
Together Through Life
, Andy was officially off the bandwagon. The new songs “sounded so generic and so blandly banal that I felt I was just suffering my way through listening to them, when really I should have been doing something else.”

There had always been a current of negativity running through Andy's fan network. He and his fellow Dylan nuts would sit down over beers and argue about which albums were the worst, not which were the best. But suddenly, in the second half of the 2000s, he was becoming repulsed by his musical hero.

Dylan's voice was broken. His advancing age, decades of smoking, the twenty-five hundred shows since 1988—all of it had taken a toll. Dylan had never had broad range; now he had almost no tone onstage. It was straight bark. It would have been okay, Andy thought, had it not prompted Dylan to deploy a battery of new mannerisms: “upsinging,” or garnishing the end of every line with a high note; reciting songs staccato-style; relying on “throat-clearing to cover up forgotten words and lines, a long growl to indicate that ‘there used to be something I wanted to say here but now this noise will suffice.'”

Dylan used to seem so authentic. He made Andy believe in him completely. He made audiences think he was singing from the heart, that this was not just another gig. Andy was savvy enough to understand that Dylan had been putting on a brilliant stage act all along. He had always been faking it. But now the vocal cords were so damaged that the production fell apart. It was like watching a play in which the acting and stagecraft weren't good enough to let the audience lose itself in the illusion. All he saw now was a careless, hollow performer.

Andy had discovered Dylan as a teen, and he always felt as if Dylan was a big brother. His disillusionment felt like the end of a relationship, a flesh-and-blood one. It seemed like the closest thing to a divorce he had ever experienced. “I was lost,” Andy wrote. It seemed permanent.

When he wrote about his defection in the
ISIS
fanzine, he found himself on the defensive from the faithful. He could understand the ill will. “We invest so much in our Dylan experience that it takes on almost religious overtones,” he wrote. “Those who still believe turn on the apostate as an evil heretic who should be silenced by whatever means necessary, the more painful the better.”

But he was not alone. All over England you could find passionate fans who were upset with Dylan. On a Friday night at the Ship & Mitre, a bar in downtown Liverpool, Christopher Hockenhull, the city's resident Dylan authority, started in on the singer before he'd finished his first pint of ale. “I don't like this voice,” he said. “It's gotten worse and worse and worse. And the standard of the shows. For the first time in my life, Dylan is predictable. Can you find any other time in the last thirty-odd years when you could use the word
predictable
about Dylan? And the band is no better than a band I could take you to see in any pub. What's this keyboard about? It's
dreadful
.” He took a swallow of his beer and continued. “You've got to be objective. It's horrible organ. It's like a
child
up there with the organ you buy for a child.”

Hockenhull, like Andy Muir, had the credentials to complain. He was a card-carrying Dylan man for decades: founder of a fanzine,
Fourth Time Around
; a collector serious enough to have rarities land in his lap; inhabitant of an office crammed with books and bootlegs and fanzines. He still loved Dylan's music. He still performed the songs when he played at a bar near his home. But he was bewildered by what the man was doing these days.

A measure of Dylan's appeal had always been that he was not a massively popular mainstream star. He was literary, eccentric, an acquired taste, a cult figure. He sold a lot of records, but he was no Michael Jackson. It used to be that not doing ads was part of Dylan's authenticity. He was above all that. Now it seemed that Dylan was becoming a brand. “The whole thing has become basically a Bob Dylan PLC,” Hockenhull griped at the bar. “Would you have ever thought you would have seen a Bob Dylan cigarette lighter and mouse mats, all that crap? It's just so corporate. Well-oiled.”

Michael Gray, the
Song and Dance Man
author, said that when a Dylan tape came into the house in years past, he would listen right away. Now a friend would send him a tape and he might listen to a track or two, if that. Sadly, fixing a broken doorknob might be more interesting. This was a man who had written millions of words about Dylan, who traveled the world speaking about him, who (for a fee) hosted fans to his house in a tiny village in the south of France to talk Dylan. He acknowledged the extraordinary greatness of Dylan's music. “I have long accepted that when you enter the Dylan world,” he once wrote, “you sign up for life.” But the last time that he sensed he was in the presence of greatness was in 2000. He didn't want to sound like some old man recalling the great days gone by. But decades ago, an entire show could blow the fans away. Then people would only rave about three or four songs. When it got to the point that fans were singling out a lone phrase as evidence that Dylan still had it, Gray found himself wondering,
What about the other ninety minutes of sludge?