The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  Mitch had trouble understanding why some tapes were under lock and key. He wondered if the owners believed they had been ordained to decide what recordings should not be shared. It was as if Bob Dylan himself had appeared through the marijuana haze one night and whispered, You shall not circulate! Mitch thought some of them were on a power trip. “Some people think if you have a secret Dylan recording you have some mojo. What are you, nuts? That’s not power.”

  But it was hard to make judgments. Mitch had his own secrets. When he helped someone rescue a fragile recording, the owner sometimes agreed to let him keep a copy. But that didn’t give him the right to share the recording with others. He didn’t talk about the secret tapes he had. It would only create problems for himself, or for the person who shared the tape with him. “People could be embarrassed,” he said. “They could lose a job.” Keeping secrets was simple: Just don’t tell anyone, no matter how much you trust them.

  He took other precautions. If someone shared a sensitive tape, he never labeled it properly. If someday he were to receive a recording of Dylan playing Paris on May 24, 1966, he instead might call it Dean Martin, Chicago, 6/12/82. The key to this encryption did not exist outside Mitch’s brain. And should he forget what was what? “If you have sixteen kids,” he would ask, “do you ever forget their names?”

  The awed visitor was right. There was mojo in Mitch’s little apartment. But there was always room for more magic. Recordings of other ancient performances still had not surfaced. The official vaults still held reels and reels of unreleased music Dylan recorded in studios over his lifetime. All of it hadn’t leaked out yet. And old Dylan friends and acquaintances still had hidden tapes in their basements and attics and shoe boxes. Mitch knew for a fact: More music was locked up, waiting to be liberated.

  4

  Dylan was a scruffy kid with holes in his pants in the spring of 1960 when he played a little pizza joint in St. Paul called the Purple Onion. Technically speaking, he was a freshman at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, but he was spending more time honing his music than studying.

  One day a teenager hanging around the Twin Cities folk scene struck up a conversation with him. He asked her if she had a tape recorder. He said he had never heard what his voice sounded like on tape. The girl told the young singer that her father owned a reel-to-reel and promised to make arrangements to borrow it. She still lived at home, and asking her father—a St. Paul policeman—would have meant uncomfortable questions about what was going on. So she enlisted her older sister, Karen, to get the machine, bring Dylan over to her attic apartment, and record some songs after his next gig at the Purple Onion.

  Everyone sat on the floor of Karen’s apartment as he sang and played into a microphone that was slung over the side of a chair. She played each song back for him. It took half the night. At dawn, she dropped him in Dinkytown on the edge of campus. She kept the tape.

  In 1978, when Dylan was back in St. Paul for a show, Karen called the paper to tell them about her chance meeting with Dylan. A journalist listened to the tape, reporting that it ran for about an hour and included twenty-seven songs “full of darkness and sorrowful tales.” Dylan did “Roving Gambler” and “Delia” and “Blue Yodel No. 8” and “Go Down You Murderers.”

  This was the most prized of artifacts, a true landmark. It was believed to be the earliest recording of Dylan. In a few weeks, collectors began to write and call. Karen ignored an inquiry from California, another from New York. She parried with a man in Ohio who wanted to buy the tape, but feared it was a hoax. On the early tapes that circulated at the time, Dylan had a harsh voice, but on the St. Paul tape he sounded angelic. (The man wrote a piece in a fanzine questioning its authenticity, which some blame for scuttling a deal to buy it from Karen.)

  Then a Dylan fan in St. Paul called and said he had a friend coming into town. Could they visit and hear the tape? His friend, Brian Stibal, ran a Dylan fan magazine, and he wanted to write about the recording. The man sounded friendly and earnest, and Karen liked the idea of sharing the tape with others who would appreciate it, so she invited them over.

  Stibal had been well-known in Dylan fan circles since creating Talkin’ Bob Zimmerman’s Blues in 1975 as an undergraduate at Boston University. It was believed to be the first Dylan fanzine, and for a buck, subscribers got guest columns, tour itineraries, and “Recent Developments in Dylanology.” At the time Stibal arrived in St. Paul to hear the tape, his interest in Dylan was fully aflame.

  Karen and her husband had been thinking about the windfall their tape might bring if they were to sell it, and Karen’s husband was suspicious of the two Dylan fans. He insisted they listen to the tape in the kitchen, where he noisily did the dishes. Karen turned the volume down low and played only snippets of the songs. Then the men went on their way. It would take many years before Karen realized that her husband’s suspicions were well founded: The Dylan nuts had a hidden recorder.

  Collectors couldn’t believe how awful the resulting artifact sounded. The thing was notoriously bad. It came to be called the “armpit tape.” (Stibal said his friend had actually hidden the recorder in a jacket pocket, but it was the more evocative nickname that stuck.) Anyway, the sound hardly mattered. This was a rarity, and it circulated for decades.

  When she found out, Karen was incensed. “The only pleasure I got from the thing was playing it for somebody,” she said, “and all they did was rip me off.”

  But the full tape, uncut and pristine, remained locked away for the next three decades. Karen had hoped to sell it for $10,000 or more. The most anybody offered was half that. As the years passed, a number of earlier Dylan tapes had surfaced, making hers less momentous. Apparently, Dylan’s appeal to the girl in St. Paul had been a come-on line. Almost four years before, he’d gone into a record store with friends and recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and “Earth Angel,” and he had made other tapes with musicians in Hibbing.

  But collectors still considered it an important artifact, and in 2011 Mitch called Karen, now retired and living in St. Paul. He told her what he did. He earnestly explained why it was important to have the fragile tape preserved. It could be argued that it was the first recording of Bob Dylan, not the neophyte named Bob Zimmerman. Mitch told her he could help her, quietly, if she wanted.

  Karen listened and stood her ground. The conversation didn’t go anywhere. The night in St. Paul was a warm memory, but the tape had become a curse. She had made up her mind. She wasn’t going to sell it to anyone. She was going to give it to the Minnesota Historical Society. It would be worth more to her as a deduction on her tax return anyway. If somebody wanted to hear it in all its glory, they’d have to trek to Minneapolis.

  Mitch shrugged. He could wait.

  4

  WOMEN AND GOD

  In 1994, a Dylan fan from outside Chicago named Michelle Engert stumbled onto a priceless opportunity. She got the chance to spend more than a month immersed in the most legendary of Dylan artifacts, a small red notebook in which the singer had written drafts of the tortured love songs that would appear on his acclaimed 1975 record, Blood on the Tracks.

  Four years earlier, Michelle had graduated from high school—not a minute too soon—and rather than going to college like her friends, she moved to a place of her own. She just didn’t feel like being told what to do anymore. In the summer of 1990, at seventeen, she found a calling of sorts: She started following the Dylan tour. It was during a break from the road that she met Joel Bernstein, a guitar tech for Dylan during the tours of the 1970s, but better known at the time as the archivist for Neil Young. Michelle walked up to him at one of Young’s concerts in Chicago, and they got to talking. They stayed in contact, and a year and a half later he invited her to come to his home off Haight Street in San Francisco and work on the notebook.

  Bernstein was helping a wealthy financier, George Hecksher, manage his large collection of Dylan manuscripts. Around the s
ame time Michelle hit the road, Hecksher bought his first Dylan piece, handwritten lyrics to 1969’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You.” Within a few years he had acquired hundreds of pages—songs and poems and fragments. He quickly accumulated the largest cache of original Dylan documents in the world, barring the singer’s own private papers. Hecksher bought lyrics to more than ninety songs, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Masters of War.” He bought Dylan’s early copy of Bound for Glory and his Woody Guthrie songbook. He bought an illustrated diary that Dylan kept during his comeback tour with the Band in 1974. And he bought the red notebook. He was not particular. He arrived on the scene and swept up everything he could find. Three dozen artifacts came from one antiquarian bookshop in Beverly Hills, Biblioctopus. When the dealer visited Hecksher’s home later to see what the man had gathered, he was shocked. “This is the single greatest collection of anything I’ve ever seen in private hands,” he said. “A thousand years from now, that collection will be revered as greater than any.”

  In the early 1990s, only a few people knew about the little Blood on the Tracks notebook. They heard a murky tale about how the artifact ended up out in the world: It was said to have been stolen from Dylan, and then bought and sold several times among collectors. Later, when word about it spread, a journalist likened the artifact to a missing Dead Sea Scroll, lamented its apparent disappearance, and begged for whoever had it to please forward him a copy. (Hecksher later donated the notebook, and many of his Dylan papers, to the Morgan Library in Manhattan; access was restricted until Dylan’s death.)

  From the way the notebook was creased, it looked as though Dylan carried it around in his back pocket. The words were barely legible. Phrases were crossed out, and words and fragments were jotted here and there, up and down the page at times, in ways that made it difficult to follow. The lyrics were not always identical to what he had sung on the record, and the differences were not easy to make out. The notebook also included songs that had never been released, or perhaps never even recorded.

  Bernstein had the idea to decipher and transcribe it so they wouldn’t have to struggle to read the thing. It was obvious Michelle was the person for the job. She could recite the lyrics to every song without a hiccup. “Those songs are absolutely inked in me. I know them all.” Hecksher agreed to leave the notebook with her at Bernstein’s, and she flew out to California. Though the financier promised to pay her for her time, she would have done it for nothing.

  She couldn’t believe her luck. Blood on the Tracks was a masterpiece, as nakedly personal a record as Dylan ever wrote. She settled in to work at Bernstein’s house, which looked like a satellite office of Neil Young’s archive. The notebook was fragile, the paper frayed along the spiral. She worked on it cautiously, washing her hands before starting, touching only the edges of pages, trying to keep it under plastic as she studied the words. She made a map of each page in longhand, then Bernstein typed her transcriptions into a computer.

  Later, she would feel strange about the time she spent as an interloper in Dylan’s private space. Michelle wondered whether people should be going into trash cans and hotel rooms and taking what Dylan left behind, and whether fans should legitimize that mischief by reading it, studying it, copying it, publishing it. Dylan delivered a record; wasn’t that enough for fans? Poking around in the scrap heap felt disrespectful. But at the time, Michelle had no misgivings about it. She was too enthralled. She was plunging into the record’s creation with pages the author had kept in his pocket during those painful days in the summer of 1974.

  Dylan had married on November 22, 1965, in a private civil ceremony on Long Island. The wedding was a secret, just as the relationship had been. Sara Lownds, dark-haired and beautiful, was a former Bunny in the Playboy Club previously married to a fashion photographer. She was also smart, and apparently not awed by Dylan’s fame. Steeped in Eastern spirituality, she became a grounding influence on a mercurial man. Dylan was hard on people who tried to get close to him. He had a vicious streak, a way of finding someone’s sensitive underbelly and cruelly attacking it. “I worshipped Sara as a goddess who not only could calm the storm,” said Al Aronowitz, a writer who was familiar with Dylan’s squalls, “but who also could turn Bob into a human being.”

  Sara and Dylan had four children together and tried to settle down. Dylan hated how fame had cost him his privacy and his freedom. He hated how he was condemned to live an abnormal life. Whenever he went anywhere, the vibe instantly changed. Rooms fell silent; people got weird. He hated that people stalked him on the street. So he and Sara fled Woodstock and Manhattan in search of new hideouts. Dylan bought the farm in Minnesota and a hilltop property in Malibu where they began to build a copper-domed mansion for the family.

  The domestic experiment lasted eight years. But the itinerant musician had not disappeared. Dylan fled the conventional life at nineteen, and he could not settle down at thirty-two. His family idyll began to fall apart. In early 1974, he returned to the big-time rock ’n’ roll life for a month and a half, a noisy reunion tour with the Band that drew enthusiastic crowds. Soon, his marriage was splintering. He struck up with a woman from Columbia Records whom he met one night in Sausalito toward the end of the tour, and he spent the summer of 1974 at the farm with her. Ellen Bernstein was twenty-four, and, she said, flattered. She played housewife. She cooked, his kids played. He would disappear into a study upstairs early in the morning and write, appearing later in the day. He pulled out the notebook and played her the songs, which he seemed to have copied from scraps and various drafts. To Ellen, he seemed relaxed on the farm, where he had an art studio and the kids could ride ponies and his brother had his own house down the driveway. The property backed up against a river and a thick stand of trees, like the corner booth in a bar where you could see anybody coming at you for miles. His wife never came up in conversation.

  But nineteen years later, as Michelle trained a magnifying glass on the pages of the red notepad, she found a window into Dylan’s writing studio, where his life seemed far more complicated. There, he was consumed by the ruins of his romances past and present: his deteriorating marriage, the lost love from those early days in New York, the effervescent but obviously temporary affair with the woman in the house that very summer. Bitterness and melancholy and remorse filled the pages.

  Eight of the songs on the record appeared in the notebook in various stages of construction, along with nine other compositions. Most striking were page after page of work on “Idiot Wind.” The performance on the album is fuming and unforgiving, beyond intense. People are out to get him. Nobody he meets knows how to act around him; their thinking is twisted. And suddenly it seems his “sweet lady” doesn’t know him either. She’s an idiot like everybody else. She lies. She hurts him. He envisions the day she is dead. This is unalloyed rage.

  But the early versions Michelle transcribed were something else entirely. These had moments of poignancy. There was room for regret. Deciphering the jumbled pages, she found the singer addressing a lover as if in a letter. He wonders whether he ever really knew her. It seemed now that she had been wearing a mask all this time: “I never saw your face.” He figures it’s hopeless, it’s over, he’s lost her for good. But he’s reluctant to end it once and for all. He wants to call her but he hasn’t. He imagines the annoyance of “trying to talk through wire.” He knows he would need some “lame excuse,” and anyway, “I knew what we were going to say, but I hadn’t memorized my part of the speech.” The verses underwent change after change on the page. One read, “We didn’t talk for days and days, and when the rains came the words were gone.” The drafts amazed Michelle: “This could have been a twenty-minute song.”

  At the end of the summer, Dylan headed to New York to record the songs. After the record company had run test pressings but before the record was released, Dylan went into a studio in Minneapolis and re-recorded parts of it with a band, includi
ng a song that would make his growing list of classics: “Tangled Up in Blue.” When the album appeared in 1975, it was followed almost immediately by a bootleg with the songs recorded during the New York sessions. The fans who heard both debated which was better. Many of them thought the resigned, acoustic “Idiot Wind” from New York trumped the howl of protest from Minneapolis.

  All in all, Blood on the Tracks overwhelmed Dylan’s followers. They loved it with an intensity that scared Dylan a little. It seemed odd that his suffering could give others such pleasure. “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album,” he said in a 1975 interview with Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary for a radio show she hosted. “It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, you know, people enjoying that type of pain.”

  “Maybe the word enjoy is the wrong word,” she replied. “You’re moved. I was moved by the album.”

  This became a record his audience put on when it fit—when they were lovesick or pissed about a girlfriend or longing for a man they had lost. It got to be pathetic, music critic Lester Bangs decided. He recalled at first dismissing “Idiot Wind” as “ridiculously spiteful” and the record as an “absurdly pretentious mess.” But he kept playing it. Sometimes he even thought it was amazing. Then he would realize he was just drunk. “I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with,” Bangs wrote. “We would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album, playing it over and over, wallowing in Dylan’s wretched reflection of my own confusion.” By 1976, the year after its release, Bangs decided that Blood on the Tracks was “an emotional twilight zone,” “an instrument of self-abuse,” “a crying towel.” It couldn’t help him.