Tangled Up in Bob

On Boblinks, one notes that a lot of the good Bob Web pages have already been claimed. Breadcrumbsins is taken. Foggyruinsoftime is taken. So is cowboyangelsings, powergreedandcorruptableseed, fantasticcollectionofstamps, and expectingrain.com. The latter is maintained by the genial Karl Erik Andersen, who works in the national library in a small Norwegian town astride the Arctic Circle and is happy to tell you how he rigged up a wireless system so he can listen to Bob while he shovels snow, which is most of the time. Still, with more than 500 Bob song titles to choose from, many site names remain. As of this writing, such desirable addresses as huntedlikeacrocodile.com, bleachersoutinthesun.com, IstayedupallnightintheChelseaHotelwritingSadEyed-
LadyoftheLowlandsforyou.com,
Iputmyfingerstotheglassbowedmyheadandcried.com and hitthatdrummerwithapiethatsmells.com are all available.

So many quotations, so many conclusions written on the wall, I needed not remind myself as I went out walking through Greenwich Village a few days ago. Dylan can spend the rest of his life inside whatever gated Eden in Malibu, but the Village will always be the mystic Mississippi Delta of Dylanology — Bob Ground Zero.

Over there, downstairs at 116 MacDougal, where a bar called The Wreck Room is now, that was the Gaslight. Dylan sang "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" there, before Dave Van Ronk did "Cocaine Blues." Upstairs was the Kettle of Fish, the bar where Dylan hung with the despondent Phil Ochs and once brought the Supremes, blowing blowsy folkie minds. Around the corner was the sainted Gerde's Folk City. Across Washington Square Park, now outfitted with surveillance cameras by Rudy Giuliani, was the Hotel Earle, currently renovated for tourists but then scruffy and bleak, $19 a week, home to Bob back in 1962.

That was a whole other Dylanological epoch, I thought, strolling, most positively, to the West 4th Street subway station to take the ever-adventurous D train uptown to 59th Street. I was on the way to talk to my old acquaintance A.J. Weberman, who is both the inventor of the term Dylanology and the discipline's most reviled figure.

As students of primeval D-ology know, A.J., who quit college in 1968 to create the first computer-generated Dylan Word Concordance, is most famous for going through Bob's garbage. This "garbology" action was part of a full-scale assault launched by the Dylan Liberation Front, a bunch of Yippie pot smokers who thought Dylan, the most angel-headed head of the generation, had fallen prey to a Manchurian Candidate-style government plot to hook him to sensibility-deadening hard dope. These findings were based on A.J.'s highly idiosyncratic interpretations of "Dylan's secret language," a code that, once cracked, revealed words like "rain" and "chicken" (as in "the sun is not yellow — it's chicken!") to actually mean "heroin." It was Dylan's addiction that led the poet to make sappy records like Nashville Skyline and New Morning when his great gift could have been better used speaking out against Vietnam, A.J. contended. "Dylan's brain belongs to the People, not the Pigs!" was among the fervent cries back in 1970, as A.J. led the forty or so smelly hippies in his Dylanology class to Bob's home at 94 MacDougal Street, where they screamed for Dylan to "crawl out yer window" and answer charges that he had been co-opted. After an unsolicited DLF-inspired block party for Dylan's thirtieth birthday, which resulted in the NYPD shutting down Bleecker Street, and a long series of hectoring phone calls (the tapes were compiled on a Folkways Records release entitled Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman, now a major Bob collectible), Dylan struck back.

Three decades later, A.J., now fifty-five, his once-wild mane receded to silver fringe (but still talking very fast), recalls the incident, one of the more colorful in the often drearily hagiographic Dylanological chronicles: "I'd agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker. . . . I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan's wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever fucked with his wife, he'd beat the shit out of me. A couple of days later, I'm on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me.