The Dylanologists (7 page)

The tribe took up the duty with relish. The pot and LSD and whatever else they were on surely didn't discourage flights of fancy. They began producing reams of song analysis. They intellectualized his lyrics, elevated them to the level of literature, subjected them to exegesis like sacred text. They tried to crack the codes. They searched for clues in whatever they could gather about his private life. They compared notes with their friends, argued and theorized and disagreed. “Hungry for a sign,”
Rolling Stone
critic Paul Nelson wrote once, “the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they'd sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they'd find it—and it really would be significant.”

One man would outdo the rest, a wild-haired, whacked-out yippie pothead and consummate self-promoter named Alan Jules Web­erman. Dropping acid while listening to
Bringing It All Back Home,
he determined that the songs were operating on multiple levels, and he resolved to interpret them. “I spent hours and hours listening to Dylan, taking Ritalin, LSD, mescaline, smoking joint after joint trying to figure it out,” he said. He brought some academic discipline to the task of analyzing Dylan's writing. He drew up a chronology and set it alongside the songs. He built a concordance on an early punch-card computer. He memorized every song, liner note, and poem like some hippie hafiz.

After working at this for a while, he tried a new tactic. Dylan had moved into a house on MacDougal Street right down the block from the Café Wha?, where he got his start a lifetime earlier. One day, Web­erman decided to go through the trash bins outside and search for “a piece of paper that contained a translation of his hieroglyphical poems,” a clue that would help him unlock the secret codes that he was sure Dylan's songs held. Instead he found uncompleted letters, fan mail torn into tiny pieces, dirty diapers, and dog shit.

Weberman seemed to harbor as much hatred for his hero as love. It was the early 1970s, but he was still angry about what had happened years earlier when Dylan stopped writing topical protest songs. To Weberman, the man had frittered away his moral capital. He had never even spoken out against Vietnam! Weberman concluded that the singer was strung out on heroin. He founded an organization called the Dylan Liberation Front and printed up buttons reading
FREE BOB DYLAN.

He had begun teaching a Dylan class, and one day he brought the students by the house for a field trip. “Hey Bobby! Please crawl out your window,” Weberman shouted at the house. Just as he started demonstrating his “garbology,” Dylan materialized across the street. “It looked like smoke was coming out of his head,” the unhinged fan wrote later. The two men went for a walk, sat on a stoop, and had a long and remarkable conversation. Overjoyed, Weberman prepared a piece on his lucky encounter for the underground press. He had to reconstruct the discussion from memory, so he called Dylan's office and asked him to read it and check the quotes, real and imagined.

Dylan reviewed the draft, then called Weberman, who had a recorder running. It was a hilarious discussion about a half-­remembered conversation. They argued over the draft. At certain points, Dylan seemed to be intently micromanaging the article. At other moments, he seemed to be just cruelly toying with the fan. Among the things Weberman recalled Dylan saying in their talk on the street was the cryptic sentiment that he “might gain a soul” if he let Weberman get into his life. Dylan denied saying this. Or did he just regret saying it? It was hard to tell. These were two men who liked their facts slippery.

“I know that's what happened,” Dylan told Weberman about the remark, “but that ain't what happened, man.”

“That's what you said. So fucking quotable, man!”

“It's, uh—doesn't even sound like me.”

Weberman didn't tell Dylan he was taping until halfway through the second conversation. “Hang on for a second, Bob, I want to turn the cassette over,” he said. When he did, Dylan lost it, predictably. “I ain't never gonna call you again, man. Never, ever, fucking again.” And yet he stayed on the line and worked on the piece some more. They traded attacks. Weberman called him a millionaire sellout whose songs weren't any good anymore. Dylan said he would write a song about Weberman called “Pig”—“you go through garbage like a pig”—but he didn't want to give him the pleasure of hearing it. He said he was going to make up his own buttons with a picture of Weberman's face affixed to a pig's body. “It's okay, man,” he told his stalker. “You'll live through it.”

Weberman defended the Dylanological analysis he pioneered and named. “As long as you don't come up with another system that's more complicated and makes more sense, as far as I'm concerned mine stands. My system stands. You see what I mean?”

“No,” Dylan replied.

The conversation ended, the story ran, and later in 1971 Weberman staged a birthday party/DLF protest at Dylan's doorstep. Hundreds of people showed up. Someone brought a cake topped with hypodermic needles. The next time the Dylanologist stopped by the house, Dylan's wife angrily chased him off. Walking home, Weberman suddenly encountered his hero. Dylan was very angry. The singer landed some punches, slammed Weberman's head on the sidewalk, tore off his DLF button, and rode away on his bicycle, the fan later alleged.

Weberman would go on to overturn the trash cans of Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. He wrote about his discoveries, converted some of the trash into original art, and earned a measure of fame in the pages of
Rolling Stone
and
Esquire
. After their fight, Dylan moved west, and Weberman dropped Dylan for a while. He wrote a book about Kennedy assassination theories.

Then, in the early 1980s, a visitor appeared: John Bauldie, a teacher, writer, and Dylan fan from England. Bauldie had recently launched a fanzine called the
Telegraph
. The first issue was a few pages photocopied, folded, and stapled at the spine. On the cover it reproduced a note he had received from another Dylan disciple: “That's the odd thing about Dylan; he reduces me almost to the level of a screaming groupie, anxious for details about what he eats for breakfast and for the latest photograph of him and, at the same time inspires me to a contemplation of the most crucial questions about life and Art . . .”

Bauldie made a trip to New York and went to see Weberman with a friend. The three of them spoke for a while at a dog park, then Weberman invited them back to his apartment. It was eye-opening. They passed through an armored lobby with steel doors, a video camera, and tear-gas canisters. Weberman was decked out in camouflage and had a shotgun in the cupboard. “Nobody will get me in here,” he remarked. They all sat there in Weberman's living room, surrounded by boxes of papers, clippings, and photos. As they looked through it all, Weberman said suddenly, “You want this stuff? Take it. I'm all through with it.” They took it, but Bauldie was deeply unsettled. The original Dylanologist acted like a crazy man, and Bauldie wondered what that said about his own Dylan habit. “He scared me,” Bauldie wrote later.

He returned from America to find a letter penned by a thoughtful librarian and poet named Roy Kelly asking pointed questions about the
Telegraph
. Wasn't this a bit pathetic? Dylan took his enthusiasm for words and music, and created new songs. What were we doing with what he gave us? All this pseudoacademic research seemed silly. Why couldn't they find something better to do with their time? Kelly felt foolish reading the stuff and ashamed by his fannishness. “Is no one seized by the absurdity?”

Bauldie published the letter, and it triggered a frank discussion of fandom. His readers were of two minds. One argued that it was Dylan's inspired performances that fed the cult of personality. This fan wanted the concert listings because he wanted every recording; he didn't want to miss a single “illuminative flash of genius.” At the same time, “I know that, put together, my habits add up to something more than reasonable interest. What they add up to is more like a weakness, a compulsive need.” But as long as he could still separate the trivial from the important, he wouldn't feel like he had lost his grip on reality.

Another correspondent took a darker view. The
Telegraph
was launched after a series of Dylan fan conventions in England. The writer found the events to be equal parts fun and “spooky.” For a long time he struggled to figure out the right description for the Dylan fan community, and then it came to him. They were like inmates in an asylum, but they didn't know it because they were all suffering from the same pathetic mental illness. These fans were “struggling to come to grips with the grotesqueness of real life.” While most listeners took what they could take from Dylan's music and moved on with their lives, obsessed fans continued “to draw and suck and crave far beyond the boundaries of good sense.” They listened to Dylan sing and talk about how wrongheaded it is to lead a life of lifelessness, and then they went on with their conventional lives.

The self-flagellation went back and forth for a few issues, but Bauldie got over his crisis of confidence quickly and the
Telegraph
continued on, evolving into a glossy publication filled with interviews, bits of biography, and its own brand of song criticism. Bauldie grew into a central figure in fan circles until his death at age forty-seven in a helicopter crash.

In 2000, Weberman was busted for money laundering, and while in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn he returned to his old obsession. He used the time inside to work out new and complicated theories about Dylan's lyrics. He had never let go of the idea that there was a decipherable system to the lyrics, even the songs that sounded like streams of consciousness. “It borders on being a code,” he explained. Weberman decided he could translate Dylan's words using a complex analytical system, a science that could “never be fully explained or demystified.” He described his findings in a 536-page
Dylan to English Dictionary
, in which Weberman argued that in Dylan's language
Texas
might mean “Europe,”
match
could be a code word for “Klansmen,”
phone
sometimes stands for “radio”—“it could go on almost
ad infinitum,
” he insisted.

Reading Weberman brought to mind the workshop of the paranoid schizophrenic scientist John Nash in
A Beautiful Mind
, the walls plastered with newspapers, words from disassociated articles circled and connected by a thousand red lines, a lunatic's web of meaning.

“Why are Dylan fans the worst?” an interviewer once asked music writer Greil Marcus. He didn't mean
all
Dylan fans. He meant obsessives like Weberman.

“I don't know the answer to that. There's no question you're right,” Marcus said. “Hm. Not just the worst—they're the stupidest. I think it's because something in Dylan's writing leads people to believe that there is a secret behind every song. And if you unlock that secret then you'll understand the meaning of life. Like every song is this treasure chest, and nothing is what it seems.”

Weberman knew other fans reviled him. He thought it was because they didn't want to admit they were wrong. They didn't want to acknowledge that they had missed what he had found. Like his other conclusions, this one missed the mark. The reason he repulsed other obsessed fans was that they feared he was just a crazier version of them.

Over the years, Weberman theorized that in addition to being a junkie, Dylan had contracted HIV. Contradicting everything that had been written about the man, Weberman concluded that Dylan was a conservative, a racist, and a Holocaust denier. After his many decades of analysis, he had decided that the transcendent song Dylan wrote in the Village in the spring of 1962, “Blowin' in the Wind,” was actually a racist rant in code. Dylan's unspoken question was what to do about blacks demanding civil rights, and his answer was to “let 'em blow . . . in the wind,” or, in other words, to lynch them. “Nobody's going to believe that in a million years,” Weberman told me. “Yet it's true. That's it, man. That's where the guy is coming from.”

Even he, A.J. Weberman, father of the Dylanologists, could barely believe what his long search had uncovered. “I wasted my fucking life on this shit.”

3

THOSE WHO SEARCH

T
he man liked to talk. He would smile and tell weird, wonderful stories about people he met in Woodstock and Afghanistan, in the Dylan universe and just around the block in Greenwich Village. But Mitch Blank, one of the world's preeminent collectors of Dylan material, didn't get where he was by having loose lips. When he spoke, some great percentage of his mental energy went toward protecting his reputation as someone who could keep secrets—or, as he would put it, a man whose “hipness credentials are still in order and can be trusted in a ruthless society.” When some sensitive matter came up, he fell into a language of thinly veiled hypotheticals and plausible deniability. He would not name names. He himself
might
have done this or
might
have heard that. He would use a lot of words to say something, all the while cultivating the air of a man who knew things he could never say without putting his carefully constructed state of affairs in jeopardy. “Understand,” he acknowledged once, “that when I say anything, it isn't far from the truth.” Mitch Blank was something of a legend among those who followed Dylan.

On a Saturday afternoon in his apartment, rain slapping against the windows, he hitched himself up on the arm of a couch and held forth. Guests were over. Nina Goss and Charlie Haeussler, the Hibbing pilgrims from Brooklyn, had arrived at his doorstep for the same reason everyone else did. They needed something, and he had it.

Mitch's place was on the top floor of a redbrick four-story walk-up in the Village, around the corner from the tavern Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan frequented a half century ago. He'd bought it in the 1980s when real estate was cheaper. That's the only reason he could live in a zip code so ridiculously expensive that Jennifer Aniston had moved in. Like many visitors, Nina and Charlie were goggle-eyed. They could spend a week in this room and not be done digesting its contents. Something claimed every last inch. Binders strained shelves, boxes were stacked in piles on the floor, autographed artifacts hung on the walls. In a glass case behind them rested a harmonica holder Dylan used years ago, and the case sat atop piles of crates holding milk bottles from Max Yasgur's farm, authentic Woodstock artifacts that Mitch salvaged in a moment of great foresight, for they are worth something now. Hanging on the wall in the corner was a copy of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
from 1963, the one with the singer walking arm in arm with his girlfriend up Jones Street, a few blocks south. It's signed by Dylan.

Nina and Charlie sat politely, hands in laps, resisting the urge to manhandle his fabulous artifacts. In a moment, as if to put them at ease, Mitch stood up. “Let's go walk around the apartment and see what's going on,” he said. They hadn't asked for a tour. But people visit Mitch all the time, and everyone wanted the tour. One awed visitor marveled, “There's mojo in that apartment.”

He padded in stockinged feet toward the kitchen. He had a bushy Vandyke and wire-frame glasses. In the 1970s he had a massive nimbus of hair, but now his curls were orderly and gray. “Please excuse the bomb that's gone off in here,” he warned his visitors. They walked past a full-size sign that someone stole from Highway 61 in honor of Dylan's most famous record. They passed a button that read
BOB DYLAN FOR US PRESIDENT 2008
, and a belt buckle from a long-ago Dylan tour. They passed by Superman statuettes, concert posters, pictures of his friends, assorted dulcimers, and shelves of cassette tapes. They passed multivolume reference books, lined up like
Britannica
s, that detailed the particulars of Dylan's recording sessions. Perched above his bed were rows of baseballs that had been autographed by musicians and poets.

But those artifacts were only window dressing. Nina and Charlie were guests of the Blank Archives, the beating heart of which was music and paper. It was preserved on vinyl, cassette tape, DAT, CD, and DVD, and protected in plastic sleeves tucked inside labeled binders­. Mitch had underground recordings, newspapers, magazines, concert programs, business cards, and copies of letters, draft lyrics, and manuscripts—thousands of pieces of tape and paper having to do with Dylan, the counterculture, the Village folk scene, and whatever else that had, at one time or another, captured Mitch's fancy.

He cherished the music above everything else in his apartment. Mitch was a member of a small brotherhood of collectors across the globe engaged in what he liked to think of as archaeology. “I like to find pieces of material that are not part of the known universe,” he said. “I rescue material that's in danger of becoming obsolete and destroyed off the planet.” The soldiers in this army were after the songs that got away. They were hunting for the equivalent of a lost Shakespeare manuscript, a sketchbook by Vincent van Gogh, or a forgotten Mozart symphony. Of course, they were also driven by a more immediate desire. They wanted to listen to the stuff, and they couldn't download it from iTunes.

Mitch put himself in the position to be the man to call if you had a valuable open reel so old and fragile that even trying to play it might cause it to disintegrate. Discreetly, he took the tapes to technicians who could transfer the music to digital formats before it was too late. He was also called in to collect rare tapes that were about to be thrown out by their owners or by next of kin, people who really didn't know what they had in their house, or who didn't care and just really wanted to be rid of the stuff.

He and a group of volunteers salvaged thousands of recordings made by Bob Fass, a legendary disc jockey at WBAI, the New York public radio station. He archived a batch of tapes owned by banjo player and radio host Billy Faier, and several hundred hours of open reels recorded for
Broadside
, the folk song publication. A friend, Jeff Friedman, agreed to listen to everything, because recordings were sometimes mislabeled or unlabeled or in the wrong boxes, and they didn't know where they might find a lost gem. If it required sifting through tons of material for just fifteen minutes of something rare and wonderful, it was worth it. Listening to one of the
Broadside
reels, Jeff heard Dylan and a woman play a couple of songs in the middle of a taped letter sent to Pete and Toshi Seeger. Some music they salvaged found its way into a university research library collection and onto archival releases.

Mitch had spent a lifetime building bridges with people in and around the music scene. Musicians would call and ask if he had a certain record, and as an aside, they'd ask what recordings he had of
them
. He struck up a rapport with Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, and helped with a series of Dylan archival projects, which won him the immortality that comes with having his name appear in small print on the CD sleeves. His credit line for helping with Martin Scorsese's authorized documentary
No Direction Home
was inspired by a line in “She Belongs to Me” on
Bringing It All Back Home
: hypnotist collector. As Mitch liked to say, employing another Dylan quote, he couldn't help it if he was lucky.

The harvest of Mitch's work was crammed into his tiny apartment. It looked precarious. His mattress was a lifeboat on an ocean of trunks and suitcases. CDs sat piled in stacks on the floor, on his desk, on a big square coffee table. But given his day job—a photo researcher at Getty Images—he brought a professional's care to his collection. He had a system. He knew how to find whatever someone wanted.

He told people he was afflicted with the collector's disease. He insisted he didn't take it so seriously that it crowded out the rest of his life. He had a lot of friends, and they weren't all Dylan people. He came to the conclusion early on in life that he could justify having all of this stuff only if he shared it, or at least shared whatever he could without sacrificing those hipness credentials, and every weekend, his apartment was abuzz with friends and acquaintances and people sent by people, all of them looking for something. “I've obsessed for you,” he liked to say. “That'll be the motto of my company: ‘Let Me Obsess for You.'”

Nina and Charlie didn't want much. They had come because they were launching a new Dylan journal, and the first issue would examine a record from 1989 called
Oh Mercy
. On the cover of that album was a photo of a mural on a building at Fifty-third Street and Ninth Avenue, in Hell's Kitchen, and Mitch, as they knew he would, had a videotaped interview with the artist. He slid the tape into the machine, pushed play, and then went about his business. On the television, the painter talked about how he would die happy because, in a stroke of total serendipity, his art had been seen by the masses.

They lingered for a while watching some of his other videos. Then they made their way to the door. Mitch wished them luck with the journal. “Don't follow leaders,” he said, quoting “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by way of good-bye. “You know the rest.”

Sometimes Mitch thought that his friends were right. Sometimes he thought he needed to turn people down more often. He didn't mean Nina and Charlie. But some of these people! Mitch's friends knew him to be slightly neurotic, and he lived in a neighborhood famous for its eccentrics. But some of these people were bizarre even by Mitch's standards. It was like they woke up in the morning, ate breakfast cereal sprinkled with lead paint chips, then picked up the phone and dialed his number.

He told one story quite a lot. Now, Mitch liked to exaggerate. (“Everybody lies,” he said.) But this one, he said, really happened. A man from the Netherlands was visiting. Showing him around the apartment, Mitch pointed out that he had the music stand from the piano at Big Pink, the famous Woodstock house where Dylan and the Band recorded in 1967. Mitch lived up there when the musicians moved away, and because he knew the right somebody, he managed to get the piano, an out-of-tune upright. After years on the road, he was left with only the music rack.

The man's eyes grew wide. If it's not too much, he asked, could he have just one screw from the piano?

Mitch shrugged. This acquaintance had an impressive collection of material, and who was Mitch to judge anyway? He got a screwdriver, removed the screw, and handed it over. What would the man do with it? Wear it on a necklace like a totem from some dark religious cult? Mitch didn't know, and he didn't care. Whatever made him happy.

After his guest left, Mitch said, he found another screw, went back to the bedroom with his screwdriver, and replaced it. Just in case it happened again.

2

There's one Dylan song in particular that Mitch cherishes. On “Bob Dylan's Dream,” written in 1963 for
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
, the singer recounts falling asleep on a train and dreaming of his former life, when he laughed and sang and told stories with friends living carefree, uncomplicated lives. He would pay a small fortune “if our lives could be like that,” Dylan sings, but he knows nothing can bring back those times and those people. The song always transports Mitch to a cabin in upstate New York and the warm feelings he had listening to Dylan bootlegs by a fireplace surrounded by some of his closest friends.

“Nostalgia is a mild form of depression,” Mitch says, quoting an aphorism of yippie hero Abbie Hoffman's. Maybe Mitch had been vaguely dispirited since the world changed and he got off the road, since the promise of the 1960s faded and, to his way of thinking, the planet got jaded and greedy again. Maybe that was one reason he spent so much of his time delving into the music from the era that formed him. It brought back a time that seems magical to him today.

Growing up, Manhattan was right across the East River, a subway trip away, but Mitch usually couldn't spare the fifteen cents it cost to get there. He lived in Long Island City public housing. It was a tough neighborhood and he was a nerdy Jewish kid collecting stamps and baseball cards and devouring
Mad
magazines and
Classics Illustrated
; he had his eyeglasses broken by thugs on the street. He was a kid with a sensitive antenna. He swept up all of the scary electromagnetic transmissions in the air. The pall that descended after Kennedy's murder felt like communal post-traumatic stress disorder, and he internalized it. He still recalls the joy he felt seventy-nine days later when he watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Just like that, it was all right to have fun again. Ten days later he turned fourteen. Already his life was outlined by dread realities and the joy of music.

At home, the record collection didn't go beyond show tunes and the odd obscene Yiddish comedy that was played only after the kids went to bed. An uncle who performed in off-Broadway theaters showed him a first glimpse of a more interesting world. A girl with a guitar played him songs from Joan Baez's first record; just talking about it, Mitch could still smell the cedar rushing out of the instrument case when she lifted the lid. Like others of his generation, he lay under the covers at night with his transistor radio and tuned in to the world. He discovered WBAI and
Radio Unnameable
, the pioneering free-form show that piped the counterculture into the ears of whoever was awake in the early hours. You could hear pranks, off-the-cuff live music performances, interviews, bizarre calls, and political speeches. Bob Fass was the host, and he signed on each show by saying, “Good morning, cabal.”

Cabal
: They were all secret plotters, meeting in the dead of the night, scheming about revolution and talking openly about marijuana. Long before anyone dreamed of flash mobs, Fass moved masses with his honeyed voice. He compelled his listeners to dance, sing, toke up, and hand out flowers at the airport (the Fly-In), or in Central Park's Sheep Meadow (a sort of East Coast Be-In). When frequent guest Abbie Hoffman and his cohorts came up with a name for their radicalized gang of pro-pot, anti–Vietnam War pranksters—the yippies—they were listening to
Radio Unnameable.
Dylan himself went on with Fass now and then. The program kept the Mitches of the world from going insane amid existential anxieties global (nuclear annihilation) and personal (the draft). The host sounded like some crazy uncle carrying on about things you were not supposed to hear, and the show ushered Mitch into a trippy era. “How did I know people were going to get together on Sheep Meadow to dance around a giant banana?” he asked. “Because I heard it on WBAI.”