The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  Four years on, “Love and Theft” went even further. The album was the logical conclusion of a musical career spent repurposing—a true mother lode of quotation. The title apparently came from academia, a book about blackface minstrelsy by an English ­professor at the University of Virginia. Just as the minstrels twisted black culture out of shape, so Dylan was now doing with what he was recycling. More studious fans, who didn’t listen to new Dylan songs so much as dissect them, noticed a line from bluesman Robert Johnson, a bit of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” a snippet of Woody Guthrie, and a quote from W.C. Fields. (“It ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast.”) Somebody spotted Virgil. Admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald caught dialogue cribbed from The Great Gatsby: “ ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” Like the quotation marks around the record’s title, his pilfering of that exchange between Fitzgerald’s Nick ­Carraway and Jay Gatsby was a neatly nested in-joke. What with the antiquated musical styles and the borrowed words, everything about “Love and Theft” had to do with the past making claims on the present.

  But two years after the record’s release, Dylan’s audience learned that his use of other material on “Love and Theft” was more wide-ranging and peculiar than it had first appeared. That summer, an English schoolteacher from Dylan’s native Minnesota was poking around in a bookstore in Fukuoka, a teeming harbor city in southern Japan. He picked up an oral history of Asian mobsters, Confessions of a Yakuza, by Junichi Saga. It told the stories of the country’s elaborately tattooed gangsters, men who live by their own code. (If they do something dishonorable, for one thing, they cannot just issue an abject apology; they must cut off a pinky.) On the book’s first page, a mobster proclaims, “My old man would sit there like a feudal lord.”

  Reading this, the teacher, Chris Johnson, felt a rush of recognition. The words may as well have been highlighted, he said later. Johnson had listened dozens of times to the “Love and Theft” song “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” which is not unlike having an incoherent conversation with a crazy man you meet sitting on a bench in front of a general store, a man who insists on sharing an unexpurgated picture of the cumulus drifting through his mind. He wishes he could be with his second cousin, now and forever. He is “listening for footsteps” but he doesn’t hear anything. Don’t screw with him or he’ll kill you right dead, understand? “My old man,” he grumbles, “he’s like some feudal lawd.”

  One match could be coincidence, but Johnson was intrigued, and he brought the book home. By the time he reached the last page, he had discovered more than a dozen likenesses, on “Floater” and other songs. His surprising find merited a story in the Wall Street Journal, with the newspaper raising the specter of wrongdoing by noting the recent exposure of plagiarism by historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. But Saga felt flattered that Dylan had read his words, and his publisher only wanted a blurb from the musician for the next printing. Sales of the book jumped.

  The discovery raised so many questions. It was one thing for Dylan to reuse ancient melodies, folk lyrics, and blues riffs. But taking random lines from an unknown book published halfway around the globe—that seemed like appropriation of a different magnitude. Were there other such thefts? Was Dylan trying to get away with them, or did he expect fans and scholars to catch on? Above all: Why?

  In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a music fan named Scott Warmuth read about the yakuza discovery, and he was astounded. Over the next decade, he would spend a lot of free time trying to answer the vexing questions about Dylan’s borrowings. A rabbit hole seemed to open that summer in 2003 and swallow Scott up. On “Love and Theft,” Dylan recycled lines from so many different places that one writer guessed every word of it would eventually be traced back to another source. But it was not just that record. The more Scott dug into the writing of Late Dylan—post-1997 songs, the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous, the 2004 memoir Chronicles—the more he thought the game went even deeper than anyone had realized.

  2

  In October 1961, Dylan visited the Folklore Center, a small storefront in Greenwich Village that was the hub of the folk music revival in the city. The man who ran the shop, Izzy Young, was arranging for Dylan to play the Carnegie Chapter Hall, and needing a proper program to give attendees the night of the show, he asked the young singer to come in for a short interview. Dylan, twenty that spring, was about to sign a deal with Columbia Records, and they got to talking about what he would play when he went in for his first professional recording session. His early repertoire was mostly borrowed blues and folk and old spirituals; the handful of “originals” he’d written at the time were straight from the Guthrie mold. He told Young he had about twenty songs ready to put down on tape. “Some stuff I’ve written. Some stuff I’ve discovered and some stuff I stole,” he said. “That’s about it.”

  Fifty years on, when he was an old man with six hundred songs to his credit, he could have said much the same, and it would have been just as true.

  One of his first originals was “Song to Woody,” a tribute to Guthrie built on the chassis of one of his hero’s songs, “1913 Massacre.” His next three records borrowed traditional lyrics and melodies for songs that would be instant classics, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Girl from the North Country,” and “Masters of War.” It was no secret. Any musician in the Village folk scene knew the old songs that Dylan used as templates. That was how it was done. These songs had been passed on through the ages. They were there, free, for the taking. That was the folk tradition. Guthrie had told Dylan his secret: Just take some song and start messing around with it, and soon enough you’ll have your own. Many times Dylan didn’t even do that much. He let the original melody and some of the words show through like old layers of paint on a weathered house.

  Soon, Dylan was incorporating other material. Michael Gray, whose Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan examined Dylan’s songwriting in granular detail, conducted an exhaustive analysis of the musician’s use of pre–World War II blues lyrics. Studying a concordance of commercial blues records from 1920–42, Gray found that 1960s Dylan, so hip with his sunglasses, so mysteriously avant-garde, had been performing with “the cloak of the blues around him.” His roots were antique, rural, Southern. The signs were all there for anyone paying attention. In that photo on the cover of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, the piles of records sitting around Dylan included Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. He named his next LP after the thoroughfare connecting the fountainhead of the blues to the north: Highway 61 runs from the Mississippi Delta through Clarksdale and Memphis and clear up through Dylan’s birthplace, Duluth, Minnesota. That Revisited should’ve been a clue about what was at work.

  When Gray looked over the blues concordance after listening to Dylan records hundreds of times, he had the strangest experience. “To put it wrong way first, I kept coming across bits of Bob Dylan,” he said. “I came to realize Dylan was a closet blues freak.” Dylan took ancient blues lines and sneaked them into songs, sometimes word for word, sometimes with a twist. Gray found the line “Sugar for sugar, salt for salt . . . it’s gonna be your own damned fault,” from Dylan’s “Crash on the Levee” (1967), on a song that Rabbit Brown had recorded in 1927 and included on a popular folk music anthology. It had first sounded to Gray like drug slang, or “Dylanesque playful weirdness.” Dylan used “mama” to mean “lover” (not “mother”) like the blues singers did. “Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident,” a positively Dylanesque verse from “Pledging My Time” on Blonde on Blonde, echoed something Skip James, Robert Johnson, and Blind Willie McTell sang more than thirty years prior. The harmonica opening is like Jimmy Reed circa 1957. The melody is the same as the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sitting on Top of the World” and Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.” Dylan “takes from the blues because he loves it,” Gray wrote presciently in a book published a year before “Love and Thef
t” went on sale, “and then makes of it something his own.”

  Dylan wasn’t doing anything blues and folk singers hadn’t always done. Songs were handed down and passed around, mutating as they went, half remembered, patched together with spare parts. Stock phrases migrated from one song to another. Sometimes the new lyrics made sense; sometimes they became non sequiturs.

  Gray studied literary criticism in college, and in his book he also plumbed Dylan’s borrowings from poetry and fiction. The exquisite line in Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” about wanting to lay with his lover once again came from a poem written five hundred years earlier. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” didn’t just have the same ironic spirit as Robert Browning, but also some of the same line endings. It struck Gray that a century before Dylan rhymed “sandals,” “scandals,” and “handles,” the English poet had done so. It said something about Dylan’s mash-up methods that the song also mimicked Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”

  “I like to think of it as deepening a resonance,” Gray said. He saw Dylan taking things from the entire back catalog of human culture, and regenerating them. He was finding the innate poetry of a line and releasing it. “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else. You can’t make something from nothing.”

  Dylan didn’t say much about this publicly, even on the occasions when he was asked. He did say once that when he read poems, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, he heard guitar accompaniment. “I always keep thinking, What kind of song would this be?” The reports of his appropriations circulated in fanzines and dense, small-press studies. They were too picayune for mainstream publications. In 1985, Dylan came out with Empire Burlesque, a record beloved by no one, given its gloopy sound, but subjected to the fans’ fine-toothed combs nonetheless. They found extensive borrowings from classic films like Key Largo and The Hustler. John Bauldie, editor of the Telegraph fanzine, got a chance to quiz Dylan about it at a London press conference in 1986. He asked Dylan whether he had seen The Maltese Falcon before writing the songs. “It was full of lines that sounded as though you could have written them,” he said.

  The singer played dumb. “I might have seen it. Were there lines from the movie in there?”

  “Lots of them,” Bauldie answered.

  “Were there really?”

  “Yeah. Is it one of your favorite films, that?”

  “I don’t remember. Which lines were they?”

  “Do you want a list?”

  But before Bauldie could go through it chapter and verse, others jumped in with their own questions, and Dylan escaped unscathed.

  3

  Scott Warmuth had listened to a little Dylan over the years, but “Love and Theft” made him sit up and pay attention. That fall, as the world convulsed following 9/11, Scott had his own crisis. Doctors had found a mass in his chest, and he suffered through weeks of worry before learning it was a benign tumor. Then he had major surgery and an excruciatingly painful recovery. He couldn’t play guitar, holding a book was uncomfortable, and he didn’t watch television, so he just listened to a lot of music. “Love and Theft” was at the top of his playlist for months. It was “very strong medicine.” There was a line on “Mississippi,” the second track, about how the narrator needs a distraction. Man, how Scott could relate to that. He couldn’t tell you how many times he played it as he lay in his bed. “I couldn’t go anywhere physically, so I would travel to that world,” he said. “I lived there.”

  A decade later, the album was still in regular rotation at Scott’s house, and he was still teasing out its fifty-seven minutes of secrets.

  It seemed that all his life Scott had been unwittingly training for this peculiar job. He grew up in suburban Long Island. When Scott was young, his father worked at a vinyl pressing plant, and one of the perks of the job was that he could bring home LPs. They had everything the Doors recorded, and a pile of Judy Collins, the blues and folk music of the day, Moog synthesizer music, 1960s bubblegum records, space-age pop, Engelbert Humperdinck. At ten, Scott would go to the library, where he had learned how to thread microfilm, and dig into the musical backstories of his favorite records. He didn’t simply listen to The Beatles’ Second Album. He researched the men who wrote the songs. That was how he discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He tracked down their records, too, and then, an archaeologist chiseling through sedimentary layers, followed those singers’ roots back to music they loved and movies they watched. His library card was always maxed out, with most of the books coming from the 700s: music, photography, art, drawing. He was fascinated by special effects in science fiction and horror films.

  If it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert in something, Scott was destined to become a radio disc jockey. When he was old enough to get a cash allowance but too young to drive, he would walk four or five miles to the record shop in the next town. His vinyl filled the shelving that ran the length of a wall in his bedroom. (He now has four thousand records.) He seemed to know everything about every artist, as if he’d memorized the liner notes. “He was the original musical polymath in our neighborhood,” says Tom Gogola, who grew up around the block. Scott wore John Lennon glasses and his dark hair freakishly long. Tom called him “the W.” Scott was the guy who introduced Tom to the obscure and the eccentric. The more bizarre, the better. If not for this friendship, Tom might never have learned about, say, the big-breasted sexploitation flicks of Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! ) or Stiff Little Fingers, the Belfast punk band. Tom remembers Scott going through one musical phase after another. He had an Elvis period, a big Ramones era, even a B-52s episode.

  In high school, Scott was known for being widely read, scarily smart, and wickedly funny, if a little aloof. The guys he ran with called themselves the Friends of the Friendless. He and Tom were enthusiastic teenage tricksters. They found Frank Kafka in the phone book and called him up to ask about The Metamorphosis. (“I just don’t get it!”) Scott would dial up the toll-free evangelical phone lines and pretend that he was in need of their help; his house filled up with their free literature and tapes. For a while, Scott’s gang ran a routine at the local 7-Elevens. One of them would buy a Hostess cherry fruit pie, Scott would come in screaming gibberish like a lunatic and smash it to pieces on the counter, and as the buyer chased him outside, Tom would eat the chunks—Mmmm, that’s good!—and stare at the cashier. They gave it up after one 7-Eleven manager came after them wielding an ax handle spiked with nails.

  Scott had been playing guitar since age eight. Early on, he got together with friends and they recorded themselves playing whatever they could. (He has a tape of them playing the head-banging riff from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” for half an hour.) In high school and college he played in a number of bands: the Vogways, Blind from Wild Turkey, Psychedelicatessen. He was briefly in a hardcore punk band called Six and Violence.

  But on air was where he found his home. His first radio show was on the high school station. For years he volunteered at WUSB, the noncommercial community radio station on the campus of Stony Brook University, where he went to college. After he graduated, he worked his way up to music director and hosted programs, including the Drive-In Show on Friday afternoons. Slipping into a cheesy persona (“Why don’t you get smart and call your old buddy Scott, 632-6901—that’s the number for fun!”), he would play vintage advertisements and old movie trailers between garage bands and surfer rock. He got married and moved to Albuquerque, where his first gig was spinning records and performing at a 1950s restaurant and car museum named YesterDave’s. It looked like the set of the dance scene in Pulp Fiction. Over the years he worked half the stations in town. He did Big Oldies 98.5 and 100.3 the Peak and Sunny 95.1. For a while, he could be heard on three different stations at the same time. He loved the work. He studied music with a fan’s passion and a scholar’s painstaking attention to detail
. He could play you thirty songs that Elvis Presley admired. He could name every singer who recorded, say, “Tequila,” or “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Once, he produced a two-and-a-half-hour radio special on “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen. Most people would consider it a novelty tune; Scott decided to research its origins, place it in a cultural context, and tell the definitive story.

  One of the acts he loved was the Cramps, a “psychobilly” band founded in the 1970s by Lux Interior and his wife, Poison Ivy. Lux was known for stage antics that would make you think twice about getting too close. He might appear in low-rise black leather pants, mascara, and a crucifix—a cross-dressing goth. “It was kind of scary being in the front row,” wrote Henry Rollins, frontman for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. “Lux would find something to swing from—if there were ceiling tiles, they’d all be on the floor by the end of the thing. Lux would somehow find his way out of his pants and be down to a pair of bikini briefs twitching all over the floor.” The Cramps incorporated 1950s kitsch, horror, surfer music, rockabilly, punk. Lux sang lines like “Vampire lesbos are after me!” They once played a mental hospital in Napa.

  Most people didn’t take them very seriously, but Scott was fascinated with how the Cramps fabricated their songs from bits of pop culture—music and art and obscure films. Their rollicking song “Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs” is a comic homage to Marcel Duchamp’s modernist painting. (“Lux is really into Duchamp,” his wife said. “I think if Duchamp hadn’t died in Lux’s lifetime, I’d think that Lux was reincarnated as Duchamp.”) He found another line, “swirling through the vortex,” in a how-to guide for astral projection­—out-of-body experiences. Scott liked the way the Cramps took what they saw and then twisted it. “I liked that it had roots,” he said. “It was thrilling to me. I wanted to know more. So I dove into it.”