The Dylanologists (8 page)

The way Mitch saw it, there was really only one college in New York for a kid like him in 1968. New Paltz, not far from Woodstock, was earning a reputation as a sort of Berkeley of the east, a mecca for hippies—“freaks,” as they called themselves. There, alternative studies were ascendant: Students could take a primitive-literature course that concluded with the class tripping on mushrooms. (Or was that peyote?) The best way of standing out was to act normal. New Paltz was an enclave where the real world did not intrude very often.

The town is tucked between the Hudson River and the Shawan­gunks, a deeply wooded mountain ridge that draws hikers and climbers. In the 1960s, back-to-nature hippies camped out in the woods, where they stripped down, got high, and let days pass swimming naked. Mitch lived with a group of people who survived their college years on cheap vegetables, apples swiped from orchards, bags of brown rice, and a few bucks. They looked like dirt freaks because they
were
; it was no fashion statement. Mitch had the thought that they were all like broccoli on the leaf. “Everybody bloomed.” The ­locals—­by and large rednecks and farmers and stolid conservatives­—didn't much like these kids.

But New Paltz also harbored an indigenous creative community and a thriving film, art, music, and literary scene. Students fell in love with the place and stayed put after they graduated. There were writers and painters and video artists living up in the woods. You could run into beat poets at P&G's, the bar at one end of the thoroughfare. Down the street at the Homestead, another drinking spot, you'd find music around the clock, chess games in the back, a lot of hippie chicks. A former middleweight boxer with long hair and a broken nose worked the door; he was said to be running from the Mafia. Students treated downtown like a big outdoor living room. An impromptu “happening” might break out anywhere people gathered: A musician would start playing, or a couple of kids would stand up and perform a bit of improv.

Mitch contributed to the underground literary journals and comics. He wrote poetry, and once did a reading with Ray Bremser, a beat legend who would recite verse while lying on his back. Mitch was also inspired by Mikhail Horowitz, a wild genius of a writer who would do things like take a bath on the college quad and declare it performance art. Mitch put together a chapbook and sneaked into a school printing room to run off copies. The title,
Optimistic Lemming,
grew out of his view of a warped world. He sold the books door-to-door, one dollar apiece, at nearby colleges, hiding his desperation and trying to charm people. It took chutzpah. Sales peaked when his friend, a future
Playboy
model, went into a roomful of men and made the pitch.

Some genius at New Paltz, a future lawyer, figured out how to commandeer the student activity fee to pay for real bands, and Mitch and the rest of the concert committee brought in the Band, the Who, Joe Cocker, and the New York Dolls. Jefferson Airplane played a campus lawn known as the Tripping Fields while students ate mescaline Jell-O and danced in the mud. The college had just the man on staff to deal with bad trips—William Abruzzi, festival physician at Woodstock in 1969.

Mitch worked Woodstock, and some of the other music festivals that followed, including Watkins Glen. The day after Halloween in 1973, he stuck his thumb out. He had a teaching degree but no driver's license. (He never did get one.) It seemed insane for him to teach kids when he hadn't seen anything of the world yet. He set off to live life. New Paltz friends had scattered across the country. They were safe houses for Mitch, places where he could hunker down for a while until the itch to travel returned. He was in no rush to get to the other end of the road. “We had our own world,” he said.

The plan at first was to travel to California, where friends were supporting themselves by, of all things, playing the horses. But hitching brought detours. He ended up at the Astrodome doing security at Millennium '73, the three-day festival led by an Indian guru who promised that one thousand years of peace would greet those who accepted his special knowledge. Later that month Mitch shared Thanksgiving dinner with a group of people who believed that the imminent arrival of Comet Kohoutek heralded doomsday for the United States.

He visited a college friend in the desert outside Phoenix whose postcollege life revolved around motorcycles and guns. He hitched to Basalt, Colorado, in a snowstorm and ran into New Paltz friends playing pool in a bar, prompting him to stop and hang out for a while. Dylan and the Band played in Denver in 1974, and somebody called up one of Dylan's Woodstock acquaintances, who located free tickets for them. Mitch made a lot of road friends. They were as close as brothers and sisters for however long the journey lasted. When it was over, they never saw each other again.

He hung around for a while in San Francisco, where several friends had a few houses in the Lower Haight, and New Paltz alumni would come and go. They had a regular dinner they called “communion,” at which they would take off their shoes and eat their rice and vegetables in silence. They were feeding their bodies and their souls.

For a while he had a job working fairs and festivals, sleeping in tents alongside itinerant midway curiosities, the bearded ladies and “world's greatest face contortionists.” His employer sold clothes, blankets, bags, and puppets imported from Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. (The Afghan socks were particularly big sellers.) That grew into a job with a shop in Boulder, Colorado, which was how he ended up in Kabul in the spring of 1978. Mitch was buying fabric and meeting with tailors when suddenly he found a notice on the door of his guest house. Politely it asked him to depart before May 4. It was clear something was going down. The streets were tense. Within days, the progressive Afghan president would be killed in a military coup, and blood would be shed all over the capital as his supporters were purged.

Mitch's friends flew to Kathmandu, fourteen hundred miles away in Nepal. Mitch decided to take the scenic route. As usual, he wanted to see the country, meet some people, accumulate stories. He traveled through the Khyber Pass, across Pakistan, and into New Delhi, where he caught a slow ride on a painted bus to the ancient city at the edge of the Himalayas.

Not knowing exactly where his friends were, he loitered around a square in front of the royal palace. Every town has a street that draws freaks. Mitch figured this was as likely a place as any to spot one of his friends.

Days passed. He sat there waiting. He split a hotel room with a junkie. Finally, he spotted one of his friends, who led Mitch up to a house on the edge of the city.

There was a problem. On the bus trip from New Delhi, he started feeling pins and needles in his stomach. Whatever he ate passed straight through. Now in Nepal, he grew deathly ill. His friends were alarmed. Someone took him in the sidecar of a motorcycle to see a traditional Hindu doctor. But when alternative medicine didn't cure him, they decided he needed to get out.

His father was called, and a flight to Kabul was arranged so he could retrieve his belongings before returning to New York City.

He recuperated and moved to the Village. He turned thirty, and he got off the road. For one thing, hitchhiking had become more dangerous, and besides, you could only live a nomad's life for so long. A close friend was hit by a car and killed; another died in a plane crash. The deaths traumatized Mitch and his tight circle of friends. “Our sense of invulnerability was shattered,” one of them said. They all began to settle down, Mitch included. He found a job with an archiving company. He got married and took out a mortgage. But something always felt off. “I've never felt like part of the real world,” he told me one afternoon. “Right now, talking to you, I feel like a charlatan in the real world. Am I grown up? Am I settled? The mother ship could come down and offer me a better deal and I'm out of here.”

He laughed after he said that. But I wasn't entirely sure he was joking.

3

The motorcycle wreck in 1966 created a vacuum. Dylan disappeared. Concerts were canceled. His long-awaited book was shelved indefinitely. Then, with psychedelia spreading across the country, he reappeared in 1967 with the quiet
John Wesley Harding
, filled with allegories and soaked in the biblical. The old liberals and newer rock fans who made up his fan base weren't sure what to make of 1969's
Nashville Skyline
, which was as country as its title. Their hip hero sounded like a fat and happy country rube during an interview with Jann Wenner in
Rolling Stone
. In 1970, he accepted an honorary degree from Princeton, which was strange, and released
Self Portrait
, which nearly everyone hated. On one track, Dylan harmonized with himself on a cover of Paul Simon's “The Boxer.” Dylan stopped touring for nearly eight years, and to the conspiratorial, it was an intentional effort to muddy his reputation and claw back the privacy and freedom and creative space he had lost in his rise to fame. (Years later in his memoir, he would write that fans who smelled a plot were correct.
Self Portrait
was part of an effort to transmit “deviating signals” and make his image “something a bit more confusing.” But it was the sort of confession that only made people wonder if he was still messing with their minds.)

In the middle of this, a glimmer of the old Dylan reappeared on unmarked vinyl sold in plain white gatefolds. Mitch was in line for a concert in the summer of 1969 when he saw somebody hawking this “new” Dylan LP. He coughed up a few bucks and walked away with
Great White Wonder
. He went over to a friend's place and put the needle down on the first commercial bootleg of the rock era. They heard songs from a tape Dylan made in Minneapolis during a triumphant return in December 1961, and alternate takes from later recording sessions. Among these were songs Dylan taped with the Band at Big Pink in the year following the wreck. The musicians had put down more than a hundred tracks of rootsy Americana, fourteen of which were distributed as publishers' demos for other artists to record.
Rolling Stone
caught wind, and in a 1968 cover story lobbied for the release of “The Missing Bob Dylan Album.” It would take seven years for the basement tapes to be officially released, but in the meantime, seven tracks ended up on
Great White Wonder
. The bootleg album was a revelation for serious fans. Not only was there more music—demos, abandoned live albums, forgotten early concerts, and “outtakes” from recording sessions—but if you were lucky and industrious, you might be able to actually hear it.

The hunt for secret Dylan recordings had begun years earlier. Among the first to begin turning over rocks were Sandy Gant, a computer programmer in New York, and A.J. Weberman, the man who would go on to create the Dylan Liberation Front. Gant, an aficionado of sax giant Charlie Parker, was steeped in the world of unofficial, unreleased jazz recordings. Once he discovered Dylan, it was only natural for him to start searching for lost tapes. Want ads were placed in the
Village Voice
. Friends shared what they had. Reviewers and writers who were friendly with Dylan quietly passed recordings along to the collectors. The biggest hurdle was that a lot of the material floating around were tapes of tapes of tapes, and sounded like it. Gant did what he could to find pristine copies, and he quickly built a reputation as the premier Dylan collector of the late 1960s and 1970s. He also searched for accurate information about the recordings, and he compiled one of the first unofficial discographies, in 1968, a green-bar computer printout he sold for a dollar or two through advertisements in music magazines. It was known as the Cog.

Great White Wonder
drew hoards of fans into the hunt. At the same time, it complicated matters. Tape owners got skittish. They didn't want to share their material, fearing that bootleggers would get inferior copies of the tapes, chop them up, and sell them. Hours of great music went into lockdown. Dylan hated the unauthorized releases. “I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth,” he protested. “Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know . . . it's like the phone is tapped . . . and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you that was taken from underneath your bed.” Why did people think it was kosher to circulate songs leaked from the studio? “It's like taking a painting by Manet or Picasso,” Dylan said in
Rolling Stone
in 2006, “goin' to his house and lookin' at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘Picasso fans.'”

The way traders looked at it, they were “liberating” recordings. They were fans swapping tapes, not bootleggers selling them. The music wanted to be free. For a while, until the cease-and-desist letter arrived from Dylan's office, Weberman touted himself “Director of Dubbing Services” at his “Dylan Archive” on Bleecker Street in the Village. He would copy whatever you wanted from the Gant discography. All he asked for was enough to pay for blanks and postage. Some people didn't even ask for that much; they would fill entire boxes of blank tapes with music, free, for someone they'd only just met. It was a form of evangelism—spreading the good news to the faithful.

In 1974, Dylan returned to the road with the Band for his first tour since those contentious English shows in 1966. New tapers got the chance to run their recorders and capture material. Finally, they had leverage to trade for the most exceptional recordings from the 1960s, all the ones they had not been able to acquire with polite questions and pestering and guilt trips.

The more tapes they got, the more they obsessed over uncovering the rest. The aim was to be complete, to own everything, every concert, every studio outtake, every known tape floating around anywhere in the world. Some completists were not satisfied until they owned every taper's recording of a particular concert. Sometimes money was thrown around to buy a tape on the market, but a lot of music came to hand by simple networking. People wrote letters to fans in every city where Dylan toured. They worked their contacts at television stations and record companies to get tapes pulled from vaults. They hit up musicians who played with Dylan, who might have rehearsals or demos. One collector befriended a disc jockey who put him in touch with a Woodstock musician who had recordings, and he came away with two sought-after tapes, Dylan sessions with Johnny Cash in 1969 and George Harrison in 1970. These were gold at the time, and they helped him shake loose two cherished tapes a music writer had locked away in his vault.