The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  “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 stra
nge. 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.”

  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 sing
le “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.