by David Kinney
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
The 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 Britannicas, 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.”
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.