Setting off on a cross-country motoring trip, Bob Dylan's entourage drove through the Holland Tunnel and onto the New Jersey Turnpike on the morning of February 2nd, 1964 -- Dylan himself, Daily Mirror writer Pete Karman, mindguards Paul Clayton and Victor Maimudes, the latter behind the wheel. Dylan had put his three companions on the books of Ashes & Sand, the holding company Albert Grossman had set up to protect the newly-successful singer's financial interests. All expenses were to be paid but apparently only Maimudes, who was officially Dylan's road manager, was on salary.

The car was filled with used clothing that Dylan had collected for the striking miners in Kentucky. And Dylan's typewriter. "Gonna write all along the way." he said.

That first night they stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Clayton had a house. The drive down had been uneventful, which is surprising considering they were all stoned. Clayton high on pills. Dylan and others on grass. As soon as they arrived Dylan called Suze back in New York, then he and his companions spent the night playing Monopoly, drinking wine, smoking to maintain the high edge of psychic excitement.

They went into town the next day, wandering the streets in the downtown area, dropping into a bar for a couple of drinks and moving on again. "Hey, man," Dylan shouted as they passed a record shop. "Gotta see if the new album's out yet. Wanna pass 'em around to people." They shuffled into the shop. "Got the new Dylan album?" Dylan asked. The girl behind the counter looked up. Lord help her, that's Bob Dylan, that man there with the funny cap, surrounded by a bunch of freaks. She stumbled out into the aisle, to a bin labeled "Dylan" and pulled out a copy of The Times They Are A-Changin'. "How many you got?" Dylan asked. The girl counted them out. Ten of them. "I'll take them all," Dylan said.

He leaned against the counter, under a large poster with his picture on it, signing traveler's checks, and the word flashed through the store. "That's Bob Dylan." "Where?" "Over there." Four or five kids moved closer, suppressing moans and squeals. Dylan looked around at them, and his guard moved in around him. "Man," Dylan said, "there's a lot of people in here. Let's split." He hustled out to the street, followed by several of the customers. "They're closin' in on us," Dylan said. "Let's move." They began to trot, the kids catching up, then to gallop, into the car, roll up the windows, race away. "Man, that was close," Dylan said. "They almost got me."

Later that morning they were on the road again, Clayton driving. Dylan studying the map: "Hendersonville, North Carolina," he said. "You gotta take this highway" -- shoving the map in front of Clayton -- "and right outside Hendersonville is where he has his place, Flat Rock. That's where he lives." They entered Flat Rock late that afternoon, pulled up to a gas station -- Dylan jumped out of the car. "Where's Carl Sandburg's place?" he asked the tall gangling mountain man in coveralls. "You know, the poet." The mountain man considered that for a while, "You mean Sandburg the goat farmer?" he asked.

"No. I mean Sandburg the poet."

"Don't know about no poet. There's a Sandburg has a goat farm. Wrote a book on Lincoln. Little guy. Littler than you, even. If that's the one, take this road two miles up there, turn left after the little bridge, can't miss it if you're sober."

Stoned, they didn't miss it. They pulled up to the farm house and knocked on the door. A small, bearded, wizened man came out.

"You're Carl Sandburg," Dylan said, not asking. "I'm Bob Dylan. I'm a poet, too."

"How nice," Sandburg said, his smile saying another kid who wants to be a poet. But he tried to be gracious and said. "Come, sit a while." Mrs. Sandburg joined them, smiling but not saying anything.

"I've written some songs, Mr. Sandburg," Dylan said. "I know Woody Guthrie, he's very sick in a hospital, he talked about you a lot. Got some songs here I'd appreciate you listening to." He handed Sandburg one of the albums and the poet took it and said, "That's wonderful," but it was clear he was simply being polite. They chatted awhile. Dylan rambling on about folk music, and his own songs and poems, subtly telling Sandburg he was a young poet and Sandburg should recognize him because he recognized Sandburg as an older poet. And Sandburg smiled at this scruffy kid promoting his album, hyping himself as a poet. Sandburg polite but not particularly interested.

After about ten minutes Dylan said, "Well, gotta go. Nice meeting you," and he turned and skipped down the steps and into the car. His entourage piled in after him and they drove off, quickly, Dylan slouching down in the front seat, very quiet, staring straight ahead. Someone handed him a joint and he puffed deeply and said nothing. He was obviously annoyed at his encounter with Sandburg, hurt that the poet had never heard of him.

They entered Hazard, Kentucky, in Harlan County, coal-mining country, the next day. The first stop was the post office, to look for a thick envelope sent them from New York in care of Dylan, general delivery. The envelope was there. It contained a quantity of marijuana, sent by friends; all along their route similar envelopes filled with grass would be waiting for them in similar post office buildings.

Dylan drove. He was a bad driver, erratic, and his companions tried to keep him away from the wheel. He found the mine union headquarters and Hamish Sinclair, an organizer, Bob had met on his earlier trip South, greeted him but half-heartedly, clearly distracted. "Got a whole bunch of clothes in the car for your people that need 'em." Dylan said, and Sinclair was pleased. But he was very busy. There was trouble in the coal fields and several miners had been arrested. Sinclair was on the phone for an hour, then had to run out to the mines, and Dylan was getting depressed. "I know he's got problems, but shit..."

Dylan stalked out, and the four of them piled into the car again. As they drove into the countryside beyond Hazard, past mine towers and slag heaps, they came across a man trudging along the side of the road. "Pick him up," Dylan said. "He's a miner. Look how black he is." The man was a white man but his pasty face and rough hands were streaked with coal dust and sweat.

"Can we buy ya a drink?" Dylan asked. The miner agreed and directed them to a bar up the road, where they ordered drinks. "This guy's groovy," Dylan said. "Real miner." He turned to the man. "Been a miner long?" he asked. The man nodded. They threw questions at him -- Ever been in a cave-in? Gotta shop at a company store? Company cops ever beat you? -- stereotyping him as The Miner, grooving on being with a real miner, not seeing him as a man with a wife and kids, struggling to get along. And after a while they left him, drinking alone at the bar, and climbed back into the station wagon.

A feeling began to come over Karman that none of it was quite real. Dylan was looking for sensations, without involving his intellect, and Karman couldn't understand that this is the way his mind works. Dylan had seldom been articulate, but now he barely verbalized his impressions at all. His whole trip was more feeling than logical thinking -- This is where it's at, it's what's happening, oh, wow!

And when he did talk, it was to work out some poetic images, testing their reactions: "Time don't exit, it's an illusion, the other side of Dali's clocks." And: "Know where God is? The river, that's God. The river's right where you're standing, and it's up in the mountains, and it's down the bend, and into the sea. All at the same instant. Very same instant. If there's a God, the river's Him."

As Victor drove away from Hazard, Dylan climbed into the back of his station wagon, put the portable typewriter on his lap, and began to write. Later Karman got a look at the page: "Chimes of Freedom" was the title, a poem that would later become a song, perhaps Dylan's description of an actual mystical experience.

They drove through the night, completely stoned. At the Atlanta post office in the morning they picked up another batch of dope and replenished the dwindling supply in the jar, and Dylan gave a concert that night at Emory University, a black college. A number of Dylan's friends from SNCC were there, and afterwards a select group of people returned with him to his motel room -- kids in the civil rights movement, enough groupies to make everyone feel welcome, to take the edge off the hard travelin', and plenty to drink and smoke. Dylan called Suze, to tell her the concert went off well, and they hung around for a couple of days, filling up on the pleasures.

Through Mississippi later, and Louisiana, driving at top speed, the dope jar on the dash board and not caring about Southern cops. Clayton leaned out the window in one town, as they flew past three or four young rednecks sitting in front of a store, and shouted: "Muthfuckers!" Putting down everything they saw, deliberately courting danger.

New Orleans was alive with tourists in town for Mardi Gras week. Dylan found their motel where there was only one room available for the four of them, and they quickly headed for the Latin Quarter. "Gotta find the black bars," Dylan said. "That's where it's happening." He led them into one place and they got thrown out by the bartender who didn't want trouble with white cops. In a second place they had a couple of drinks, talked with black patrons, and were thrown out when a cop came by and wanted to know if they were part of a desegregation movement. And into another place, Dylan enchanted by the owner, a huge man in woman's clothes, a transvestite who called himself Wanda. And then off to the streets again.

There were a dozen people trailing them by this time, who had to see what this Pied Piper was up to. A white street singer and poet, Joe B. Stuart, became part of the entourage for a while. Everybody flying high, floating through the town, Dylan at the head of a freak carnival procession.

Out in front of one bar they came across a young while street singer who was busking -- playing for the coins of passersby -- his guitar work and singing style a fusion of Leadbelly and Guthrie. "Hey," Dylan said. "Can I borrow your guitar?" The singer handed it over and Dylan began to sing a couple of things off his first album. "Man," the kid exclaimed, "you sound just like Bob Dylan." Bob's face was impassive. "Saw Dylan once," he said. "A place in the Village. He's all right, I guess."

They returned to their motel room and Dylan was talking in elliptic, flashing images: "No one's free, even the birds are chained to the sky." And saying: "Rimbaud's where it's at. That's the kind of stuff means something. That's the kind of writing I'm gonna do."

The guy's freaky, Karman thought. He asked: "You moving away from social protest stuff?" His voice sounded disapproving, and disappointed.

"You becoming a critic?" Dylan snapped.

"Hell, I only know your protest songs mean something to a lot of people..."

"Hell with 'em," Dylan said. He went to the typewriter and banged out a few lines, then turned to Karman. "Even the birds are chained to the sky," he repeated.

"You're only saying that 'cause you're stoned," Karman said, and walked out.

They had to race out of town after a couple of days, racing through Louisiana toward Denver, where Dylan had a concert that he would miss if they didn't hurry. "Drive, Pablo, drive," he shouted at Clayton from the back of the wagon where he sat with his typewriter, working on "Chimes of Freedom" again.

But on entering Dallas, Dylan had an urge: "Let's go see where Kennedy was killed." They drove around, looking for the Texas Book Depository and Dealey Plaza, four months after the murder, lost in downtown Dallas. "Where's Dealey Plaza?" Dylan asked, leaning out the window, and no one knew, four people, and five, and six, and none of them knew the place. At least, that's what they said. The seventh man they asked answered: "You mean where they shot that bastard Kennedy?" Dylan didn't answer, and the Texas gave them directions. For about a half hour they wandered around the murder scene, Dylan grim and silent, and then back in the car and on their way, and all of them shouting out the windows, condemning all Texans as assassins.

They made it to the Denver Folk Lore Center, the local freak haven, with several hours to spare. Harry Tuft, the young operator of the place, apologetically told Dylan the concert had not sold too well, only about half the tickets gone. Dylan didn't react at first. He hung around, enjoying the hang-loose feel of the place and the kids. Then: "Hey, tell you what. Let's cancel the concert in the big hall and do it right here. I'd rather a small place, anyway." Empty seats: the performer's nightmare.

But the concert was a success, Dylan getting it on and living up to the audience's expectations. For weeks there had been rumors that he would not come, that he had been killed, or gone insane, destroyed by a System-conspiracy. On stage his appearance seemed to justify these fears, his fragile body, his wounded voice. James Dean's death, now Kennedy's, had done that to this generation; they were certain their leaders, their heroes, would be taken from them. Dylan -- because he was like a broken-winged sparrow -- appeared the most defenseless, the most vulnerable.

Karman had some straight friends in Denver and he went to visit them for a couple of hours and they blew his mind, he says. They were so warmly normal and average and stable, white Dylan and his group seemed on the edge of some dark cataclysm, totally unreal, always stoned, speaking in unintelligible parables. Karman felt as if Dylan was backing him into a padded cell.

They all were, in fact, almost thrown in jail. Karman was behind the wheel as they drove through the mountains in western Colorado and, as they were climbing one very steep hill along a narrow two-lane road, they were caught behind a funeral procession.

"Pass the goddamn thing," Victor shouted, from the seat directly behind the driver.

"That's illegal," Karman said. "You're not supposed to pass a funeral."

They argued a bit, Victor growing more insistent, Pete standing his ground. Suddenly, Victor threw a leg between Pete's shoulder and the door, shoved Pete to the passenger side, and jumped behind the wheel. He gunned the accelerator and the car shot out of lane, on a blind curve, swinging around the last car in the procession, past one big limousine after another.

The station wagon finally pulled abreast of the hearse. "Okay, we made it..." Victor started to say and Dylan shouted: "Cops!" At the front of the procession a state police cruiser paced the way, its dome light gently revolving, and before Victor could slip back behind the hearse the trooper spotted him and waved him to pull over. The funeral procession ground to a halt.

"The stash!" Dylan shouted. "Hide the dope!" Karman grabbed the marijuana jar from the dash board, bobbled it like a nervous first-year quarterback, and passed it back. Dylan shoved it under a rear seat.

The cop walked over to the driver's side and if they were all high a moment ago, they were now as sober as they'd ever be. "The registration," the trooper said, in a soft Western drawl. Dylan pulled it out of his pocket and handed it over. Ashes & Sand was listed as the owner. The cop glared at the four freaky-looking guys in a brand new car and not one of them could safely be identified as Ashes & Sand.

"What are you people doing?" the cop asked.

"We're a group," Dylan said, holding up his guitar. "Like the Kingston Trio, but there's four of us. We sing." He couldn't say he was Bob Dylan because the cop probably had never heard of Bob Dylan, but a group like the Kingston Trio might work. Dylan strummed a few chords and sang. Clayton joined him. The other two remained silent, for fear of giving it away. And the cop finally said; "OK, get on out of here. And be careful." Victor drove off, slowly. Dylan leaned his head back. "Stop at the next gas station, Victor boy. I got something to do."

They stayed over in Reno for a couple of days, gambling. Karman losing all his money, and then they pushed on towards San Francisco. Dylan had a concert in the Berkeley Community Theater and it had been sold out for weeks in advance. The undergraduates at the university and kids from as far north as Oregon and as far south as San Diego had joined the pilgrimage.

"By this time I was disillusioned, my mind was being blown," Karman recalls. "Dylan was a very strange character. His notion of reality was like nothing else I'd ever experienced. I sort of was gettin' the idea I was crazy. I was beginning to feel crazy when they were crazy, Victor a freaky nut and Dylan very weird and Clayton always high on pills, and I just had to break away from them."

Karman had friends in San Francisco and he went to see them the night before the concert. They reinforced his feeling that some kind of insanity had struck the wandering minstrel and his entourage. But Karman was completely out of money, having dropped his last cent at the gambling tables, and he decided to stick it out to the end. A few hours before the concert he asked Victor for a pair of tickets, for his friends. "What are you talking about?" Victor demanded. "We got no tickets to spare for friends."

"For Christ sakes, they're my friends," Karman said. "Of course you've got tickets. There's always plenty of tickets for the performer to pass around to friends."

"Sure," Victor said. "But his friends. Not your friends."

Dylan came in at that point and listened to the argument for a moment. Then he broke in: "What do ya want out of me, Peter?"

"I don't want anything out of you," Karman said. "I just asked for a couple of tickets for friends and I'm getting hassled."

"You want tickets, right?" Dylan asked. "Then ya want something out of me."

"I've never asked you for any..."

"I brought ya to a party for Peter, Paul and Mary." Dylan shot back. Karman remembered it, of course. A birthday party for Peter Yarrow, a couple of months earlier, and Karman had been in a down mood and had stayed out of everyone's way and Dylan was bringing it up now for the first time: "I take ya to a party and ya act cool and ya sulk all night, in front of my friends. Ya ignored all my friends."

"What are you talking about?" Karman asked. "If it bothered you back then, why didn't you say so? Funny time to be bringing it up."

"Ya ignored my friends," Dylan insisted. "And now ya want tickets for your friends. Very strange. You trying to use me, Peter?"

Karman's brain fell like it was being wrenched around inside his skull. "I'm beginning to think I'm crazy," he shouted, "when it's really you guys who are crazy. You're all out of your minds. I'm going back to New York before I get as crazy as you guys are."

The concert was one of those memorable events that is still talked about in the San Francisco area. Dylan was never so attuned to an audience, his kind of audience, the hippest, most radical and aware college students in the country, and he held them the way few entertainers ever hold an audience, few Holy Roller gospel preachers either, for that matter. And when he came back after intermission and introduced Joan Baez -- a stunning surprise -- it electrified the audience. Dick Farina, who had been divorced by Carolyn Hester and had since married Joan's sister, Mimi, wrote: "Had a literary audience been confronted by Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay the mood of aesthetic anxiety might have been the same."

When the concert was ended, Dylan, Clayton, Maimudes, and a new member of the group, Bob Neuwirth -- a folk singer who replaced Karman -- drove down to Baez's home in Carmel. Farina, who was there with Mimi later recalled that Dylan brought French fried almonds, glazed walnuts, bleached cashews, dried figs, oranges and prunes. Joan's mother, visiting from Paris, cooked a beef stew. They all sat around later talking about old friends back East, in Harvard Square and the Village, a gathering that wasn't much out of the ordinary, except that it was the King and Queen -- and by now that's what the fan magazines were calling them. They played some old Everly Brothers records. Clayton sang some of the whaling and sea songs in which he specialized and a few Appalachian folk songs, and only once did anyone mention Dylan's music. "You know, Bobby," Joan said, "I'm thinking about recording a whole album of your songs." Dylan replied: "Sure thing." That's all.

Suze was very upset by the time Bob returned to New York after his six-week absence. Toward the end of his trip he hadn't bothered calling her at all. He had tried to keep her from seeing people and holding down a job, as has been pointed out, and yet he was gone for more than a month and had stopped calling her. When he returned it was as if he had slipped downstairs for a pack of cigarettes. And he seemed a lot meaner now.

Jack Elliott: "When he got famous around then, he got kinda mean. He was very quick, very sarcastic, dealt with people like a boxer, parrying blows and remarks and skipping out in a hurry. Which was good. Dylan's way was the only way not to hurt yourself. These people just hang on and bore you to smithereens. It's an energy drum. You have to shut the door on fans and groupies, even if it means running little numbers on them."

But Dylan began to run some of his numbers on friends, using them as targets. Carla Rotolo: "As things got worse and worse for him in terms of demands on him, he got tighter and nastier. He'd tell people he's got the truth, he was going to show everybody everything, tell them he had the truth about it all. That's were he started using bayonets on people. He could look at you and pick out a weakness and suddenly grab it and use it on you. Which is what he did with everybody. He'd find their vulnerable spots, and just demolish them. At that time he was vicious to everyone."

Sue Zuckerman: "Once we all went down to little Chinese restaurant near Carla's place on Avenue B. Bob, Pete, Suze and myself and a friend from college. We were talking about politics and history and Bob wouldn't let anyone get a word in edgewise. But what he was doing was just fabricating what he called facts. It was about history, and forces of history, and he was trying to talk about the things he felt emotionally but he insisted they were facts. He couldn't back anything up, but he insisted they were facts and everybody should know them. He wasn't letting anybody else speak, his whole attitude was that nobody else had anything to say on anything, and after a while Suze got up and left the restaurant kind of upset. His attitude wasn't pretty. He used to say, 'Dave Van Ronk always kids me that I never read any books but I know more than...' and that kind of thing."

Carla: "I used to stay in the Limelight till four in the morning because I didn't want to go home. I'd come in and see them sitting in the room with the TV set, or a lot of people around, and there was no privacy, absolutely none. I felt I was some kind of freak. I began to think I was crazy because he had a way of telling you, 'You're full of shit, you're this and that.' And even my head was blown. I thought I was flipping out. Once I said to him. 'Hey, man, again, let me take your place on Fourth Street and we can swap apartments and everybody'll be happy,' and he started coming on like the song he wrote about it all, 'Ballad in Plain D,' about my being lousy for this reason, and rotten for that reason. And a parasite. How could he call me a parasite when for a long time I was the only one with a job? But it was just devastating, the way he could twist somebody's words back on themselves and make them feel he was right and they were wrong."

Suze's sister and her closest friend may not be the most objective witness available (especially since Dylan used his sharpest hooks on Carla in "Plain D," getting revenge on her as he was to get revenge on so many others in his songs) but their collections of Dylan's "viciousness," are corroborated by practically everyone who had contact with him at the time: Baez, Elliott, Ochs, Van Ronk, Dave Cohen, among them. It was not constant, Bob was frequently warm and funny and almost open with his nearest friends, but on many occasions when his mood swung to a dark, savage side, he ran his numbers on everyone.

For Suze and Bob, it all came to a head in March, during an argument that was more heated than any before. Dylan's version is in "Ballad in Plain D." Suze, he writes, was caught in the middle of an argument he had with Carla, the "parasite" sister. But what actually happened was between Bob and Suze, who broke down completely. Bob left the apartment and Suze once more went to live with her mother in New Jersey. It was the final break between them, although Bob attempted to get Suze to return to marry him for almost another year.

"He took it badly, very badly," one friend recalls. "He used to come around the apartment and pound on the door and shout, 'Let me in,' but Carla wouldn't open the door. Suze came back to live with Carla in a couple of weeks and Dylan kept coming around, but she didn't want to have anything to do with him. In a couple of months, she'd see him occasionally and spend time with him and their friends, but she refused to go back to him. It was too late. It was over. He'd lost her by then, although he couldn't realize that for a long time. He kept asking her to come back, but for Suze it was all over."

[Excerpt From Issue 104 — March 16, 1972]