The Devil and Bob Dylan, by A.J. Weberman (review)

WEBERMAN: And here I am a Dylanologist.

DYLAN: A Dylanologist pig man.

WEBERMAN: In a certain position, in a certain position where I can do a number on a cat who’s become a pig man who’s become a fucking sell out ‘ya dig? Like that’s the way it goes man. You write all these songs some jerk is gonna fucking believe them man and he’s gonna get pissed off when finds out you didn’t believe ‘em or don’t believe them anymore.

DYLAN: I believe ‘em. …

--The Dylan/Weberman tapes, January 1971.

As more than a few observers have noted over the decades, to be a Bob Dylan fan is to hate writer/Yippie activist/researcher/chronicler A.J. Weberman. No one likes the bearer of bad news which is human folly. In the nearly four decades that I’ve been aware of the pioneering sing-songwriter there hasn’t been one moment that the cult surrounding the folk singer didn’t seem detached from reality, unhinged from the facts, even after numerous admissions by their icon of his fallibility never mind what the detractors have unearthed over the years. When did I first notice cracks in the edifice? It was in the early 1980s when I saw D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan, Don’t Look Back (1969) which painted a portrait of a pompous, arrogant nihilist who didn’t appear to believe in anything but money and fame, a real asshole.

Dylan shot a hole through the Elvis print that Andy Warhol gave to him and gave it away thoughtlessly during that period. This guy was a real creep, yet so many idiots I knew loved this prick ignoring what was obvious. Others took note though early on, one of them was in the film, John Lennon, who needs no introduction.

Weberman was no stranger to either man having spent considerable time getting Lennon’s ear as well into Dylan’s garbage, speaking with him on the phone and so on. His foray into “garbology” of the latter apparently began in the fall of 1970 (he has the pictures and the trash to prove it). Weberman and Dylan had many friends in common at the time as he recounts in the new text. In the case of Dylan, there was physical contact when the folk singer rode up on a bicycle behind the then young writer and punched him in the back of the head, yelling at him to keep out of his garbage. The Yippie had pushed it too far after bringing literally hundreds of protesters of the DLF to the front door of his Greenwich Village apartment on Dylan’s birthday demanding he get involved in the politics of the day. As his account goes, he took his licks feeling that he’d earned them. Fair enough. Some of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, Weberman cites literary history going back to the French novelists and poets of the 19^th century, drawing a parallel that’s spot-on. The Yippies have often been called “proto-punks” (or, as the saying went, “A Yippie is a Hippie who got beaten by the cops.”). Looking at Weberman’s actions directed at Bob Dylan it’s hard to argue against it. This is cultural history at its best and the author has made a good contribution to chronicling a lost time in American countercultural history. Dylan’s trash became grist for his mill, say what you want. His fallen idol also earned his licks. You really don’t want to sell a mythology of being a social rebel, a progressive when you’re not willing to live up to, when you only do it for money, something he admitted he was doing to folksinger Joan Baez in the sixties.

Sometimes people like Mr. Weberman—or Baez--will come after you with everything they’ve got once the scales have fallen from their eyes. Hell hath no fury. Dylan is a lie, a Shibboleth for lost people, an ingenuine creature in a false reality in a construct of democracy within an oligarchy, a sick, twisted version of the American dream that’s been copied ad infinitum. This is the horrible truth at the heart of the Dylan myth: Rather than being a genuine radical as Woody Guthrie had been, he was literally the opposite while contending that he was like some kind of dustbowl minstrel, a fabrication.

Ultimately, this was never about money for the author, it was another quest for the truth on his part (with some exceptions that go into the personal). While I and many may not agree with all of his analysis of Dylan’s lyrics his central contentions are rock solid: Bob Dylan has been a fraud the entire span of his career and his fans are delusional people who have projected their wishes onto him. That’s a religion, not unlike Christianity, that Judaic faith created by Jews and appropriated by Anglo-Saxons and other groupings, then perverted as the messages got into the wrong hands. Would you know it, somehow, Weberman was able to obtain mimeographed copies (there had been under 100 copies made, a small run for a select few) of Dylan’s awful unpublished experimental novel, Tarantula which he’d written in 1965-66. Rather than being a sycophantic biographer like so many others, Weberman has taken the path towards uncovering the truth, or his version of it, which has been found to be surprisingly accurate over the intervening years.

In May of 2011, for example, the tapes of the late, sycophantic music critic Robert Shelton which were rummaged through after his death in 1995 yielded the final word on his heroin addiction. This suppressed passage was found in them: "I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. …I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it." This was recorded by Shelton in March 1966 at a tour stopover in Denver. His biography of Dylan, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, is silent on the subject. The music critic was one of the very first to notice the talent of Dylan in 1961. He promptly wrote a review of a performance in the Village and the singer-songwriter was just as quickly signed to a record contract with Colombia. The rest is false history written by liars.

In August 1962, the “schmuck” would sign with Albert Grossman to manage his career becoming one more willing victim of that deceased criminal. Grossman would become infamous as a con artist who ripped-off his talent roster but also for taking out a life insurance policy on Janis Joplin after he’d found she was injecting heroin. According to writer Ellis Amburn’s biography on the singer, Pearl, he’d told her and the rest of Big Brother & the Holding Company upon signing them in 1967 that he wouldn’t tolerate intravenous drug use. Where did he get that notion from? Because of Dylan? Weberman was the first to contend that Dylan was using heroin and has paid the price for telling this truth ever since 1971. Now he’s been proven correct. I believe that Grossman and Shelton constitute Weberman’s “Devil” in his text in an allegorical sense. This is a story about Jewish identity as well as one about the failure of the baby boomer generation to grasp their place in the world, in history, resorting to fraudulent lifestyles and voting accordingly. Many of these fools—too many of them American WASPs, banal reincarnations of conformist lynch mobs--will continue to ignore the truth about Dylan and America to the grave and to our collective peril. Weberman’s ability to grasp all of this underscores a powerful intellect that has yet to be even remotely appreciated, however rough the delivery might be, however painful. The truth is the truth that fools run away from. The Crowd delights in lies.

The Devil and Bob Dylan is interspersed with thematically-linked excerpts throughout from Tarantula and the legendary songs. According to Dylan biographer Bob Spitz, Weberman took the substantial proceeds from his bootlegging of the text and formed the “Dylan Liberation Front” in 1971, part of a multi-pronged assault to pressure the singer-songwriter into participating in progressive causes for a change. Considering the times, one can hardly blame him. Considering all of the lies, one can hardly blame him.

What he found in Dylan’s garbage went straight into the East Village Other and various underground publications during that painful transition from the sixties into the seventies, a time when so many illusions of the counterculture were being smashed. The reaction to Weberman’s revelations by 1971 ranged from explosive to utterly dismissive, and this is where some of the crux of the story comes into play: there are those who are capable of seeing the hard facts and those who are believers in the mythology of Dylan as an icon of an era. They buy into the lies on many fronts. The Yippies are also part of that iconography, albeit in a different sense, a far more transparent one. The main difference was in their sincerity proven by their adherence to social activism well into the 21^st century, something the singer-songwriter ditched decades ago…if he ever truly believed in it at all. According to Weberman’s new book, he never did, a conclusion he seems to have reached before the legendary phone call between him and Dylan in January 1971. Legend has it that avante garde composer John Cage provided him with the means to tap and record the conversation. The entire operation to unmask Dylan should be regarded as an artistic work. The Devil and Bob Dylan is likely the bookending of it, the frame--a conclusion. Others were also ahead of the Crowd and were ignored.

By 1970 John Lennon had reached a point of maturity where he roundly rejected Dylan…as well as an addiction to heroin through snorting it, probably the method that his faltering hero had employed. George Harrison also battled this demon throughout the 1970s and Graham Nash was one more casualty. Harrison also snorted heroin. Was it thanks to Dylan’s influence over them? In his song “God,” Lennon roundly rejects Dylan as a weak man, not a man-god that others had made him and the Beatles into. Who would John Lennon, perhaps the most popular sing-songwriter of that era besides Zimmerman himself, have looked up to enough to have been persuaded to try heroin? That’s right, no one. The myth of Bob Dylan was founded on lies. The lies have begun to come crashing down for good. A.J. Weberman was right all along: you’ve been had and you wanted to be, the talent of the artist aside. Now grow up and get a life.

"Nirvana members dismayed by 'Guitar Hero 5' "

WWW--You know...who gives a shit? He shot himself (or at least that's the story) with a shotgun sixteen years ago because, ultimately, he was a loser, Kurt Cobain. I loved a lot of his songwriting, but if you want to stop being a star, being famous, there are plenty of ways out, and he had the imagination to do it too.

Many careers in entertainment have been sabotaged, take your pick. It's funny: I recall hearing their first album before the hype and just thought they were so-so, just OK, nothing extraordinary. Did I mention that I hate Seattle and its weather and all the rich assholes that populate what was once a blue collar town? I'd do heroin too.

But seriously--so you can "unlock" the avatar of Cobain and have him play other people's songs? Great! Kurt Cobain doing Bob Seger or Ted Nugent songs seems fitting to me since all of them were the death of rock as a mass movement phenomena anyway. Cobain was just that final gurgle, now it's a microcosmic affair when it's real, generally emanating out of garages in crumbling suburbia, less and less a sad spin-off of the American dream. Who cares? The believers, the fanatics, also known as "fans," the etymological source of the term.

And considering that Cobain's estate signed-off on the deal that Activision could use Nirvana songs and his image as an avatar--well, you do the math, they did. I'm doing the math too and finding that the surviving members of Nirvana strike me as disingenuous, and that's being nice, but I guess they're entitled. With Courtney Love...forget about it. As usual, she's the loud-mouthed tramp she always was, a washed-up starfucker and a nut, and these claims that she's going to "sue" Activision just sound good, they make good copy. She's ugly in every way and her music was never good, ever, not even for a moment.

And while I'm on the subject of Cobain being dead, why not take a casual look at the suicide? I have to wonder if Alex Constantine is saying he was murdered by the government since that also sounds good and makes good copy for the terminally stoned and paranoid. But no, I don't think Cobain was murdered by anyone at all, he was simply a loser. What I believe happened is that his dirty wife was his drug enabler; he was hiding from her as much as he could to kick; she found him; they shot-up together, "for old time's sake," and he died on her of an overdose. You do the math, my take.

Frankly, when someone's totally fucked up their life as he did, having an avatar of you singing Bon Jovi songs is an afterthought that cannot compare to the original disaster. Nobody had to remind me what a pathetic and embarrassing decade the 1990s were, it was. Jimi Hendrix is on one of the games. You can unlock all of the avatars. Get over it. As many others have astutely pointed-out, Cobain left behind a child and he was therefore selfish and dishonorable. Now he's part of the "too stupid to make it to thirty" club. Courtney apparently feels the same way but now just wants to save face with her stupid, feigned drama over this non-issue.

She authorized it, the surviving members of the band did not, they lost a lawsuit against her years ago and had no control over it, she did. At least their dismay is sincere. Face it: rock as a mass movement that's real has been dead for decades, over a generation. Now it has a video game. Long live music, rock is a corpse that's been humped dry. God knows the boomers have talked about themselves to the point that nobody gives a shit anymore.

Bush ruminates on the failure of 60 years of GOP excesses at NYC's Federal Hall

Wall Street--Meeting at the venerable Federal Hall where the Bill of Rights he's despoiled as much as he and his vice president could get away with was penned and debated, soon-to-be ex-President George W. Bush made some remarkably stupid comments that are only going to cement his legacy as our era's Herbert Hoover.

One imagines that you could cut the irony with a butter-knife: "I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown,""It would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success," and the capper of, "It is true that this crisis included failures, by leaders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." The final quote is paradox-ridden.

Do any of these statements jibe with each other at all? Maybe if you're comatose. Does he even know what the hell he's saying? Did he ever? Do economists? Does the lame duck president sound like he knows what he's talking about? Does the Treasury Secretary or the Fed chair? No to all of them, but bozo is on his way out anyway and there will be investigations into the corruption of his administration regardless of how many pardons he hands-out. Why? The public's going to scream for it in-the-midst of general strikes and rioting that will not be quelled. Nobody can pacify a sociological explosion.

Whenever the Democrats fail to achieve that coveted 60 seat, filibuster-proof majority, the Republicans have had the opening they've needed to obstruct a social-dividend, being the traditional minority party of obstructionism. They should be good at it: they remained in the minority after the Great Depression for good reason for over 50 years. You get good at being the minority under those conditions, and they're going to get more practice again. What was happening 60-years-ago? It was when the Republican Party began their endgame against the New Deal and progressive politics in-general, sweeping into the Halls of Congress, ultimately bringing us such friendly lights as Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, and Joseph McCarthy (he sneaked in during the 1946 elections). Would we all be where we are now without the tragic-results of the 1948 national elections?

Barry Goldwater would enter the Senate in 1953. McCarthyism--a misnomer since HUAC was formed before his entry into Congress--grew to monumental proportions during the 1950s, and thousands of lives were wrecked. The "Eisenhower era" is synonymous with repressiveness and secrecy, just like this one, and free-thinking was discouraged. Conglomerates and the interstate highway system were created during this period, thanks to the GOP and the Eisenhower administration.

The postwar "economic miracle" smothered dissent with a runaway consumerism that's finally crashing. Rather than blaming Americans for the global recession, Europeans and the rest of the developed world should be happy--they now have an opening to escape concentrated American capital, and they should take it. People with differing opinions tended to keep them to themselves. Nearly everyone in Washington was running amok, but the Republicans took center stage, eventually pushing Truman into military action in Korea by implying he and his party were "soft on communism" and "pink." It's amethod that has now run out of steam, along with race-baiting. Gay-baiting and the attacks on rationality, science, and secular culture, are now losing any of their sting. "Sixty-years-ago," is a distant past, an antique of another era. Who were some of its architects? Right in-front of your face, even today.

The Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the rest of the American business and financial community, did their best trying to crush any remaining dissent through the red-baiting of the "McCarthy era," and through every single communications medium available at the time. The same methods achieved the Vietnam war, a more bipartisan affair than is normally acknowledged. Any notion of JFK pulling-out troops from Vietnam permanently is a political mythology that flies-in-the-face of the now declassified internal record. Yet, it all fits-into a false narrative--a false consciousness that has been fostered for decades--that the two party system represents the will of the American people. It does not.

A massive propaganda campaign selling what we know today as the postwar "American Dream" was concocted and sold beginning in the late-1940s. Some of the key to this was to detach the American people from a consciousness of their history, of their past. A consumerist culture reflects this drive where the individual is stripped of any past...or any future, only a perpetual present. In Europe, the Marshall Plan was beginning, and it entailed the same aims towards pacification: to impose American-style capitalism on a freshly-radicalized Continent that was definitely disposed towards heading left politically and economically. Now do you understand the anti-Americanism of the postwar era? I thought not. America offered the carrot-and-the-stick in George Marshall's rebuilding program and in the creation of paramilitary groups and CIA intimidation of legitimate domestic political parties, acting suspiciously as the Nazi occupiers had.

My own grandfather watched in horror as his own superiors--U.S. Army officers--were ordered to reinstall a Nazi Burgomeister (it's like a mayor) in a German village they were occupying under General George S. Patton's 3rd Army. A lot of WWII veterans experienced these things and saw them as a betrayal just as my grandfather did then and for the rest of his life. "What the hell were we fighting for?" he asked me. "Big business," I replied. He agreed. Never underestimate the intelligence of the average man, and heed their warnings. The warning-sings were boldly apparent in the shattered ruins of postwar Europe.

The joint CIA-Mafia crushing of the dock strikes in the Port of Marseille in 1947 (and later in 1950), the destruction of the Communist Army (also former anti-Nazi partisans) in Greece that same year, the assassinations of Communist Party leaders in Sicily and Italy, and the assassinations of former partisan leaders throughout the rest of Western Europe were the opening-shots of a campaign of violent pacification by American power. The State Department revived international organized crime and and their drug smuggling operations to facilitate this.

Many of the individuals these operatives and criminals tortured, murdered, and intimidated had been part of the resistance movements under German occupation, and were frequently their leadership. In France, Italy, Germany, and other European nations, former fascist politicians and judges were reinstalled into their former positions of power. Such are the origins of the "Christian Democrats." The natural political-shift that was to alter Europe into a more leftist model was blunted considerably, but not entirely.

The wheel turns, and history and its forces will not be denied forever, and Europe blaming us for this mess is ultimately appropriate. This is how the current international economy came into being.

The 1950s was an unusually repressive decade, thanks mostly to the GOP. Loyalty oaths had to be signed, religion was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance (and still there!), and the hunt for essentially nonexistent "fifth columnists" continued in-earnest until HUAC was laughed down in the mid-1960s. Enough has been written and stated on the criminal behavior of the GOP during the 1960s-70s, but can be summed-up in the name of one man: Richard M. Nixon. If it weren't for the creation of a Republican majority in the Senate in 1948, it's doubtful that the last sixty years would have played-out quite the way they did, and that would be just fine.

"Sixty years of success" was their success and the success of the two party monopoly over our political system; but it was big business and finance that truly won, the real power behind the throne, the faceless dictatorship. But without the Democrats, they couldn't have done it. Make no mistake about it: these bastards will do anything in their power to preserve their position--just as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, the Hollenzollerns, and the Romanovs did, giving us the war that ruined the entire 20th century, WWI. If they have to drag us all down into hell to do it, they'll make the attempt. The key is knowing this and consciously refusing to serve their interests. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but the alternatives are far worse--we could just continue-on like before, finally reaching that real catastrophe that's been awaiting us.

The market system never worked, and it was much closer to Marxist-Leninist forced production, with both the Soviet and American approaches embracing Frederick Taylor's "scientific management."

Really, they were just two-sides of the same coin of an authoritarianism poised to extinguish humanity from the earth. The Soviet Union and its order fell leaving the U.S. without a viable enemy, so we created as many of them as possible throughout the world to feed the war machine that maintains our hold on the seaways and markets of the world. This was a forced arrangement more than it was a natural one, and still is.

This crisis is the end of Empire, which gives hope to those who desire life in a real democracy; but it doesn't mean the powerful are going down without a fight. That's what the war on terrorism is for, and it's not going to work. All the last eight years have done is to erode American power in the world, and to isolate us diplomatically. The economic part is coming soon, maybe tomorrow.

George W. Bush didn't make this postwar order, he was just instrumental in wrecking it. Thanks George, our first Socialist--on-accident, mind you--president. I've been wondering when two generations of business domination were going to end. It truly is a new day in America, a time for the working man (and woman) to seize unique historical opportunities and to take all that concentrated power and wealth away from a class of privileged criminals who have used violence to get and keep what they stole from the rest of us. If the American public don't start using their heads, we're going to see another world war, it's coming otherwise.