The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  What must it be like to be Dylan, music writer Paul Williams once wondered, and carry around “the half-formed dreams of millions on your back”? Dylan always had been afraid of his followers, and Williams could understand why. “Their relationship with him is so intense, they expect so much, and more than once over the years they’ve turned really nasty when he chose to deliver something other than their notion of who ‘Bob Dylan’ should be.” Williams wrote that in the aftermath of the first gospel concerts in 1979, but he just as easily could have said it after Another Side in 1964, Newport in 1966, Nashville Skyline in 1969, Live Aid in 1985, or London in 2009. So many controversies. So much disappointment. Dylan acted entirely unfazed: “Oh, I let you down? Big deal,” he said once. “Find somebody else.” More than one fan really did wish he had died in the motorcycle wreck in 1966. It would have been better that way. He’d have been frozen in his glory. Instead he got old. He kept putting out new records and doing shows. He kept confounding.

  The audience always wants to see the real Bob Dylan. Whoever that is. As if that would even be possible. After he traveled in the Rolling Thunder caravan with Dylan in 1975, playwright Sam Shepard wrote that “fans are more dangerous than a man with a weapon because they’re after something invisible. Some imagined ‘something.’ At least with a gun you know what you’re facing.”

  Dylan preferred to keep the myth alive. He preferred to leave people wondering. He preferred the mask. You could even argue that Dylan considered the mask the point of the whole enterprise. “There’s nothing to figure out,” said a musician I met at Zimmy’s. “Same thing with the Mona Lisa smile. She was smiling because everybody’s trying to figure out why she was smiling.”

  In 1978, music critic Jonathan Cott tried to ask Dylan about some of the new songs on Street-Legal, and the singer batted around the questions briefly before finally balking. “I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you,” he said. “Those questions can be answered dozens of different ways, and I’m sure they’re all legitimate. Everybody sees in the mirror what he sees. No two people see the same thing.”

  Maybe that was the point of the stage mirrors. Maybe, for the thousandth time, Dylan was saying, Stop expecting answers from me. You should come up with them for yourself. The point of the songs wasn’t what they said about him. The point was what they said to you.

  Maybe. Or maybe not; no explanation was forthcoming, anyway.

  The mirrors were one more mystery for the tribe. Before his followers figured out why they were there, they would be gone.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every new work about Dylan stands on the shoulders of the many volumes that came before. This book is no exception. To complement my reporting on the lives of Dylan’s followers, I consulted hundreds of sources about the man: books, fanzines, films, newspapers, magazines, and blogs. What follows is not a comprehensive bibliography, but a selection of sources I relied on most.

  The most thorough and informative biography is Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades; a third edition was published in 2011. ­Others include Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan (1971); Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home (1986); Bob Spitz’s Dylan (1989); and Howard Sounes’s Down the Highway (2001). Dylan’s own words can be found in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, as well as Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, edited by Jonathan Cott, and Every Mind Polluting Word, a massive fan-produced assemblage of his interviews over the years for magazines and newspapers. Dylan’s songs are compiled in Lyrics; newer compositions are posted on bobdylan.com.

  Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota by Dave Engel; Highway 61 Revisited, edited by Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss; and Positively Main Street by Toby Thompson shed light on Dylan and Hibbing. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home is the authorized look at Dylan’s early years. A Simple Twist of Fate by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard delves into Blood on the Tracks. Heylin’s Revolution in the Air and Still on the Road take ­readers through Dylan’s musical career song by song. The spiritual elements of Dylan’s work are considered in Dylan—What Happened? by Paul Williams; Dylan Redeemed by Stephen H. Webb; Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet by Seth Rogovoy; The Gospel According to Bob Dylan and Tangled Up in the Bible by Michael Gilmour; and Restless Pilgrim by Scott M. Marshall.

  Highlighting the evolution in thinking about Dylan over the years are Bob Dylan: The Early Years, edited by Craig McGregor; The Bob Dylan Companion, edited by Carl Benson; The Dylan Companion, edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman; and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010. Michael Gray’s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is a helpful aid to researchers. Stephen Scobie’s clear-eyed Alias: Bob Dylan Revisited; Andrew Muir’s Troubadour; Mike Marqusee’s Wicked Messenger; and Dylan at Play, edited by Nina Goss and Nick Smart, offer new ways of thinking about songs, as do two classics of Dylan studies, Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin and Gray’s Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan.

  Heylin’s Bootleg tells the story of the underground record industry, and his Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions is a helpful source about Dylan’s studio work through 1994. More information about sessions and performances can be found in Glen Dundas’s Tangled and Michael Krogsgaard’s Positively Bob Dylan. Olaf Bjorner tracks Dylan’s work online at www.bjorner.com/bob.htm.

  Other accounts about or by Dylan’s fans include: On the Road with Bob Dylan by Larry “Ratso” Sloman; My Life in Garbology by A.J. Weberman; The Ballad of Bob Dylan by Daniel Mark Epstein; Razor’s Edge: Bob Dylan and the Never Ending Tour by Andrew Muir; Encounters with Bob Dylan: If You See Him, Say Hello, edited by Tracy Johnson; Touched by the Hand of Bob by Dave Henderson; Confessions of a Dylanomaniac by Marcel Levesque; Bobcat Nation by Adam Selzer; How Does It Feel: Reflections on Bob Dylan, edited by Joe Ladwig; and two documentary films, How Many Roads, produced by Jos de Putter, and The Ballad of A.J. Weberman by James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfe. Fanzines and journals past and present—the Telegraph; the Bridge; Judas!; Homer, the slut; Freewheelin’; ISIS; Look Back; On the Tracks; and Montague Street: The Art of Bob Dylan—transport readers into hidden corners of Dylan obsession. Articles from the Telegraph are anthologized in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, edited by John Bauldie, and All Across the Telegraph, edited by Bauldie and Gray. ISIS: A Bob Dylan Anthology and Bob Dylan Anthology Volume 2: 20 Years of ISIS are edited by Derek Barker.

  Of the dozens of Dylan Internet sites, Expecting Rain (expectingrain.com), ISIS (bobdylanisis.com), and the examiner.com Bob Dylan blog by Harold Lepidus are the best places for up-to-the-­minute Dylan news, while BobLinks (boblinks.com), the Never Ending Pool (theneverendingpool.org), and John Baldwin’s Desolation Row Information Service keep the world current on road news. The archives of rec.music.dylan are filled with nuggets of intel. EDLIS Café on Facebook brings some anarchy to Dylan fandom.

  While the book draws frequently on this vast library of all things Dylan, certain details come from other sources not cited in the text. In chapter one, I relied on interviews by the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, and Good Morning America to describe Dylan’s encounter with police in New Jersey, and the Winnipeg Free Press for details about his visit to Neil Young’s childhood home. I found a description of Dylan at Sun Studio on the A.V. Club website. In chapter two, I turned to the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation and Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street for background on the neighborhood. Some details about the Forest Hills show in 1965 came from Daniel Kramer’s Bob Dylan, Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, and the Village Voice. Detail on Woody Guthrie comes from Ed Cray’s Ramblin’ Man. Weberman’s thinking is drawn from his books, Dylan to English Dictionary and RightWing Bob.

  In chapter three, I drew from a profile of Bob Fass in the New Yorker, and from pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time about 1970s spiritual movements. I also relied on a Village Voice interview with Sandy Gant. In chapter
four, details of George Hecksher’s collection came from Morgan Library press releases. A Ron Rosenbaum piece in the New York Observer described the obsession with the Blood on the Tracks notebook. In chapter five, I used details found in Bauldie’s Diary of a Bobcat, an Adrian Deevoy story in Q magazine, and pieces about an accused serial killer in the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle.

  In chapter six, I referenced postings on rec.music.dylan and Eyolf Østrem’s website, dylanchords.info. I used details from a Wall Street Journal story about Chris Johnson and a New Yorker piece about yakuza. In describing the debate about Dylan’s borrowings, I relied on an essay by Robert Polito for the Poetry Foundation and quoted from a paper delivered at a conference in Austria by Stephen Scobie, Plagiarism, Bob, Jean-Luc, and Me. Details about the Cramps came from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Plazm magazine. Joni Mitchell’s comments were drawn from an interview transcript posted on jonimitchell.com. Larry Charles’s comments appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

  In chapter seven, I drew on the Biograph liner notes, a Michael Gray review in the Daily Telegraph, and a piece by Wes Stace in the Times Literary Supplement. In chapter eight, I used details from the Columbus Dispatch, Rolling Stone, and a blog called Word Riot.

  • • •

  The central figures in this book put up with countless phone calls, visits, and e-mails from me, and I’m grateful to all of them for their time and their trust. In particular, Mitch Blank and Glen Dundas generously helped this book in more ways than I can count. They opened doors, shared material, confirmed details, and became invaluable advocates.

  Many others helped me navigate this subculture. Bob Levinson introduced me to my first crop of fans through his Dylan class in New York. Jeff Friedman, Larry Hanson, Clinton Heylin, Andrew Muir, Stephen Scobie, Wes Stace, Lucas Stensland, and John Stokes shared old fanzines and other materials.

  I spoke to more people than I ever could have included in the final cast. For every story in the book I had ten more I wanted to include. Don LaSala invited me into Big Pink for a beer. Christopher Ricks gave me a private class in Dylan studies. C. P. Lee showed me the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Unfortunately, those and many other scenes didn’t find a home in these pages. But every interview helped color the book. Thanks to Scott Alarik, Ian Alderson, Wyatt Alexander, Stephen Hazan Arnoff, John Baldwin, Gordon Ball, Eugen Banauch, Renardo Barden, Derek Barker, Frank Beacham, Sarah Beatty, Christian Behrens, Janena Benjamin, Ray Benson, Bob Bettendorf, Bill Biersach, Damon Bramblett, Aaron Brown, John Bushey, Hans Peter Bushoff, Jean-Martin Büttner, Leslie Carole, Bill Carpenter, Andy Carroll, Daniel Cavicchi, Christine Consolvo, Edward Cook, Chris Cooper, Roy Cougle, Becky Dalton, Pat Dean, Butch Dener, Arie de Reus, Madge Dundas, Olivier Durand, Monte Edwardson, Jonathan Eig, Al Eldridge, Jack Evans, Lisa Finnie, Susan Fino, Jim Fox, Gregg French, Nelson French, Eleanor Friedberger, Benedict Giamo, Joel Gilbert, Stu Gilbert, Michael Gilmour, Jeff Gold, Andy Goldstein, Michael Gray, Keith Gubitz, Colin Hall, Heather Haroldson, Brian Hassett, Benjamin Hedin, Dennis Hengeveld, Mark Hime, Sissel Høisæter, Mikhail Horowitz, John Howells, Gary Ivan, ­Masato Kato, John Keis, Roy Kelly, Terry Kelly, Joe and Mary Keyes, Dan Klute, Nick Kostopoulos, Michael Krogsgaard, Seth Kulick, Kenn Kweder, Jim LaClair, Elliott Landy, Kim Larsen, John Lattanzio, David Leaver, Dan Leighton, Harold Lepidus, Jonathan Lethem, Mary Pauline Lowry, Alex Lubet, Martin MacKinnon, Angel Marolt, Bev Martin, Zainab McCoy, Dennis McDougal, Simon Montgomery, Jules Moore, Karen Moynihan, Elliott Murphy, Jan Murray, Abe Nahum, Josh Nelson, Tom Noonan, John Nye, James O’Brien, Barry Ollman, Richard Oppenheimer, Andrea ­Orlandi, Barb Pagliocca, Tom Palaima, Susan Paraventi, Paul Penn, Mel Prussack, Walter Raubicheck, Dave Rave, Ike Reilly, Martin and Teodora Ricketts, George Rothe, Kait Runevitch, Carole Sass, Mike Sawatzky, Caroline Schwarz, Hans Seeger, John Sipowicz, Brian Slattery, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Al Small, Nick Smart, Ross Smith, Howard Sounes, Bob Stacy, Nat Stensland, Thomas Storch, Mike Sutton, Thom Swiss, Richard Thomas, Toby Thompson, David Tracer, Mike and Pam Turnbull, David Vidmar, Glenn ­Warmuth, Stephen Webb, Rob Whitehouse, John Wraith, Paul Wultz, Amy Young, Larry Yudelson, and all those shady types who only wanted to help on the sly.

  Several people read drafts and saved me from errors major and minor: Tom Moon, Craig McCoy, Mark Sutton, Mick Gold, Bill Reynolds, Harry Green, Jonathan Schuppe, Jeanne Villahermosa, and Geoff Ross.

  My agent, Larry Weissman, made it happen again, and with Sarah Self put together the film deal for The Big One that gave me breathing room to take on this project. For the second time, my editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, saved me from myself. This book would be far weaker if not for his keen eye, his patience, and his unflagging enthusiasm. Thanks also to Jonathan Karp, Anne Tate Pearce, Richard Rhorer, Dana Trocker, Ed Winstead, Maggie Higby, and the staff at Simon & Schuster.

  I’m grateful to Cindy Tobisman and Nicole Pearl, Gene La Fond, Chris Hockenhull, and the Dundases for putting me up on the road, and to Big One fans Graham, Stephen, and Michael Stiles for much-needed invitations to fish and watch baseball.

  I owe my parents for everything, and my brother, Jim, for leaving that copy of Biograph behind, and my kids, Jane and Owen, for putting up with more Bob Dylan than is recommended by pediatricians. I couldn’t have done a book like this without my wife, Monica. Whatever doubts she harbored about where the project was heading as it stretched from one year into several (and many thousands of miles), she kept them mostly to herself. If she had ever told me what she was really thinking, I might never have had the nerve to finish.

  DAVID KINNEY is the author of The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, his writing has appeared in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He lives near Philadelphia and may be reached at DavidKinney.net.

  Also by the author

  The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish

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  Designed by Jill Putorti

  Jacket design by Gail Anderson and Joe Newton

  Jacket photographs: Bob Dylan © Daniel Kramer/Camera Press

  Background © George Kalinsky Associates LLC

  Author photograph © Marjan Osman Gartland

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013008574

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2692-6

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2694-0 (ebook)