The Dylanologists (6 page)

“Scumbag!” somebody screamed between songs.

“Aw, come on now,” Dylan said.

Peter watched it all in astonishment. “It was insane!” Kids jumped the barricades and scrambled across the tennis court and up onto the stage, with guards stumbling in pursuit. It was hard to tell whether the fans had foul designs or just wanted to dance. They scurried around, ducking security. Later, the musicians said they were scared because they couldn't make out what was happening in the crowd. In the stands, Peter thought there was a real chance of violence.

But the show ended and the masses streamed toward their homes unscathed. Peter hadn't joined in the chorus of discontent. It would have been perfectly understandable if he had thrown in with the traditionalists who felt betrayed by this commercial sound. He loved the folk music he'd grown up hearing. He was upset when he first learned that Dylan was going electric. But the sinking feeling only lasted for a couple of days. He was only fourteen; he couldn't be permanently disillusioned.

What changed his mind were the songs. Listening closely, he could tell it was the same man he had been obsessed with for the past two years. If the words were still uncompromisingly Dylan, what was the problem?

That night in Forest Hills, Dylan dashed backstage and into a station wagon. He sped back to his manager's apartment in Manhattan for an after-party, where he got to talking with a woman who had seen the concert. How did she like it? She demurred. When he pushed, she admitted she didn't much like the new songs. He asked if she'd booed. No, no, nothing like that, she replied. To which Dylan said, Why not? If you didn't like it, you should've booed.

Some days later an interviewer asked what he thought of the catcallers in Queens. “I thought it was great,” he said. “I really did. If I said anything else I'd be a liar.” He loved the confrontations and he wasn't backing down. He had found a way to make the music he wanted to make, and it would take more than jeers for him to go back to what he had been doing before he rolled into Newport. “They can boo till the end of time,” he added. “I know that music is real, more real than the boos.”

4

He had been asked to explain himself before, and he'd tried. A year earlier, he had sat for an interview with writer Nat Hentoff, and the resulting piece in the
New Yorker
elegantly captured Dylan in his early twenties. He was no one-dimensional Guthrie clone, but a young man who was still growing, and evolving, “restless, insatiably hungry for experience, idealistic, but skeptical of neatly defined causes.”

The magazine gave Dylan the space to voice, at length, his idiosyncratic view of the world. Hentoff asked why he stopped writing “finger-pointing songs,” as Dylan called them, and instead had recorded an album almost entirely about women and love and relationships. “I looked around and saw all these people point fingers at the bomb,” he explained. “But the bomb is getting boring, because what's wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. What's wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesn't let them really
speak
, so they just add their confusion to the mess. I mean, they have some kind of vested interest in the way things are now.” There could be no change because people—individuals—were too concerned with their own status.

Dylan said he held the same views on civil rights as the youthful activists, but he couldn't bring himself to join in their work, go south, and carry a picket sign or something like that. “I'm not a part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldn't be able to do anything else but be in ‘the Movement.' I just can't have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow. I just can't make it with
any
organization.”

He said a lot in this vein, to Hentoff and a few other sympathetic writers. But the mainstream press didn't catch on. He was moving too fast. And anyway, these were not the sorts of ideas reporters on deadline could fit into a tidy, uncomplicated newsprint narrative. He thought about the world in fundamentally different ways. He rejected what others took as given. He quickly grew tired of answering questions from reporters who were uninformed by anything more than the media echo chamber, the tabloid journalists and radio hosts who wanted to ask him about folk music and protest songs and how it felt to be the spokesman for the generation. He had moved on.

He upended journalists' assumptions and turned their questions inside out. He dismissed them as a bunch of “hung-up writers” and “frustrated novelists.” He lashed out with humor, anger, sarcasm, and silliness while his entourage of knowing hipsters hooted on the sidelines. “Why should you want to know about me?” he asked one helpless journalist in England. “I don't want to know about you.” He got writers to agree to spoof interviews. Hentoff did one for
Playboy
in 1966. It got to be hard, after a while, to tell what was real and what was not, which was exactly how Dylan wanted it.

In December 1965, four months after Forest Hills, he reacted incredulously to questions at a press conference to promote a pair of concerts in the Los Angeles area.

“I wonder if you could tell me,” one questioner asked, “among folksingers, how many could be characterized as protest singers today?”

“I think there's about a hundred and thirty-six,” Dylan deadpanned. “It's either a hundred and thirty-six or a hundred and forty-two.”

“What does the word
protest
mean to you?”

“It means singing when you really don't want to sing,” he said.

“What are you trying to say in your music? I don't understand
one
of the songs.”

“Well, you shouldn't feel offended or anything,” Dylan said. “I'm not trying to say anything to you.”

“What's the attitude today among your people?”

“
Oh, God,
” Dylan cried. “I don't
know
any of these people.”

Of all the questions, this last one always seemed to flummox him the most.
His
people. How to begin talking about his people? He was not willing to play along. Wasn't anybody listening to the songs? They needed to think for themselves and to wrestle free of the nonsense they had learned in school. “You don't need a weatherman,” he sang, “to know which way the wind blows.” He never sang, “Come along with me and I'll lead the way.”

His fans seemed to grow stranger, needier. “He was paranoid to start,” Village folksinger Dave Van Ronk said. “All of a sudden five million people were pulling at his coat and picking his brain, and he couldn't take it when just five people were doing that. His feeling was that the audience is a lynch mob. What he said was: ‘Look out, they'll kill you.'” Everybody was trying to grab a piece of him. They wanted so much. They wanted to claim him and know him. They wanted to understand what was inside his head. They wanted explanations and facts. People would appear from far-off places—both physical and metaphysical—and ask him questions they told him they'd wondered about for years. Dylan said he found himself thinking, “Wow, man. What else can be in that person's head besides me?” He insisted that he had no message for anyone, that his songs were just “me talking to myself.”

Not long after Newport and Forest Hills, Dylan sat for another conversation with Hentoff, and he ruminated about the responsibility of leaders and the weight they must carry on their shoulders. “You don't fuck around, you know, in other people's lives,” he said. “To try to handle somebody else's life, you really have to, you know, to be a very powerful person.” He didn't want to be that person. He didn't want to feel responsible for anyone but himself. If people wanted to listen, great, but he couldn't save their souls.

Dylan had fled New York City and was spending more time two hours north in Woodstock. He was running from the questions, making himself elusive. It started to dawn on his followers that his public persona—the singer Bob Dylan—was just a character, a myth, a front. The real man hid behind a mask, and he was not going to yank it off and stand naked before them. He didn't
want
to be known. He feared being tied down and categorized. Guthrie had had the same idea. “There ain't no one little certain self that is you,” he wrote. “I'm not some certain self. I'm a lot of selfs. A lot of minds and changes of minds. Moods by the wagon load . . .”

Dylan created personas and then demolished them, denied they had ever existed, and scorned the people who still clung to them. Almost as soon as any one image was lodged in the public's mind, he began to resist. This repeated “self-annihilation” screwed with his fans' heads, critic Ellen Willis wrote at the time. “Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled. Illusion is fine, if quarantined and diagnosed as mild; otherwise it is potentially humiliating (Is he laughing at me? Conning me out of my money?).” The people who couldn't deal with the head games quickly dismounted from the bandwagon. The new passengers who were jumping on board—more every day—could be smug.
They got it
. Until the changeling changed again and suddenly they didn't. Dylan seemed to subscribe to P.T. Barnum's maxim: People
enjoyed
being fooled. “No other performer,” Peter Stone Brown would come to decide, “fucks with his fans like Bob Dylan. There's no doubt about it. He
fucks
with his fans.”

The strategy, if you could call it that, was more than a little ingenious. Controversy sold records. What better way to build your following than to tell people to go away? Dylan kept people off balance. He did the unexpected. He refused to explain himself. How did you create an obsession? You cultivated a mystique. You built something bottomless. The more people dug into the songs, or into the mysteries of his life, the deeper they went; the deeper they went, the more they dug. Everything fed the myth.

Whether he was loved or hated, he couldn't be ignored, and by 1965, Dylan was bigger than ever. But then it got out of hand. “Dylan is LSD set to music,” said Phil Ochs, the folksinger. “One year from now I think it will be very dangerous to Dylan's life to get on the stage. Dylan has become part of so many people's psyches and there are so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now . . . I think he's going to have to quit.”

He spent the first half of 1966 on the road. In England, the crowds were nastier than the young hooligans in Forest Hills.

“Judas!” someone screamed at a show in Manchester.

“I don't believe you. You're a liar,” Dylan replied.

He made it home in one piece. But in July he crashed his motorcycle on a quiet two-lane road in Woodstock. He disappeared. Rumor had it that he had been crippled, or disfigured, or paralyzed.

The wreck gave him a much-needed break from the road, the press, the hysteria, and the drugs. But it only amplified the myth. So much so that some people could not help wondering whether the injuries were exaggerated, or the wreck entirely fabricated, a ploy to advance the narrative and enhance the legend.

As he convalesced, the movement grew into the counterculture and devolved into hippie psychedelia. Dylan was anointed their spiritual leader in absentia. He was hanging around in Woodstock living the clean life. He had married a former Playboy Club Bunny and started having kids. He painted, and played a lot of music in a basement with his band—soon to be the Band—but mostly he stayed out of sight. While “his people” protested the Vietnam War, Dylan kept his opinions private and perversely suggested in one of the few interviews he gave at the time that maybe he was
for
the war.

Pilgrims besieged his Woodstock home. He found fans swimming in his pool and postcoital peaceniks naked in his bed. He came upon a guy in the living room reciting poetry. A mental case strolled in three times. Dylan and his wife once awoke to find the man standing in their bedroom, just watching them. The man who penned “Blowin' in the Wind” began to keep a shotgun by the front door. He envisioned setting fire to these crazy fuckers. “It was very dark and depressing,” he said years later. “And there was no way to respond to all this, you know? It was as if they were suckin' your very blood out. I said, ‘Now wait, these people can't be my fans. They just can't be.'”

Even his former girlfriends, Echo Helstrom from Hibbing and Suze Rotolo from New York, received calls from fans. They would ask what Dylan was really like, as if the man were a god. “There were a lot of weirdos,” Rotolo said. “He attracts weird fans. Poor guy. I don't know how he survived.” Helstrom finally changed her name after one stalker too many. One lunatic called and said he planned to kill Bob so he could take his place. “I've been hiding for years,” Helstrom told me.

In 1969, the entire hippie nation descended on the Catskills for the Woodstock Festival, three days of music and peace and everything else. Or, as Dylan characterized it later, “the sum total of all this bullshit.” Promoters hoped that by staging it practically in Dylan's backyard, he would show up and play. They didn't know Bob Dylan. He made other plans far away: a show-closing performance at a festival on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. The idea was that when “his people” showed up, he would be crossing the ocean. Though a mishap delayed the transatlantic voyage, Dylan still didn't make a surprise appearance before the three hundred thousand people who turned up at Max Yasgur's farm.

Fed up with the scene, Dylan moved his family back to New York City, looking for the anonymity he had lost in 1963. He didn't find it. Instead he came face-to-face with a new breed of fan: the Dylanologist.

5

On
Bringing It All Back Home
,
Highway 61 Revisited
, and
Blonde on Blonde
, released in 1965 and 1966, the songs became more and more surreal, foreshadowing an era that was a lot of things, but above all else deeply strange. The new songs were filled with ambiguity, vague glimpses of unexplained characters. The best ones took on different meanings with each successive listen. His followers wanted to know what they meant. But as Dylan had sung a few years earlier, “I can't think for you, you'll have to decide.”