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.

WHEN: why doesn't the right call Bernie Sanders a socialist?

WWW--Oh right, someone, somewhere, did. I don't care about those other obscure assholes, I mean some famous asshole like Glen Beck, Limbaugh, or the whole Lollipop Guild chiming-in--even skirt chasing Jack Burkman and his desire to...uh, his desire.

Goddamned if I ever thought I'd miss William F. Buckley Jr., but I do. Do they even know what a socialist is?

Buckley did, and even though he himself was prone to red-baiting and calling people who weren't communists communists, and all the other permutations, he tended to have a higher accuracy count. No, whatever isn't socialist is socialist to the "New Right," throwing their tantrums and having their own 1960s. Luckily, it's going to end about the same way for them: a dystopian move towards hard drugs (already there!), cults (ditto), and even disco (not quite there yet). This is more a matter of profound ignorance about virtually everything.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is an acknowledged philosophical socialist, like myself. But how often has anyone called him that? Name that person, I defy you. Best of luck!

The Indiana GOP's Laughable Obama Mailer on William Ayers

South Bend, Indiana--What do you do when your party has nothing to offer the public except more of the same corruption, pederasty, whore-mongering, ethical-lapses, and an unbending loyalty to the rich at the expense of the rest of the public? You keep beating the same drum, over-and-over again because you have no new ideas or agendas and never did. In that moronic indefatigable spirit, Indiana's GOP sent this piece-of-paper to me.

This isn't to say Barack Obama is perfect by a long-shot, but the connection to former Weathermen leader Bill Ayers is stretching things more than a little bit. The truth is, it's a blatant lie meant to squeeze the rest of that 9/11 fear out of a frightened minority of the public.

Recall that this piece is coming from someone who doesn't intend to vote for Barack Obama, but for Ralph Nader (a write-in, Madonna's...well, Madonna, though Mickey Mouse is a real person). That said, I don't have a problem with the majority of the Weathermen bombings, though the truth be known, their core leadership (people like Ayers and Dohrn) were all rich kids throwing a tantrum over their parents' war. Like their parents, they had--and probably still harbor--a lust for power, which they got a good taste of during their rampage.

But the United States was committing genocide in Southeast Asia at that time, violence against Black Americans over the Civil Rights movement was appalling and widespread, and the nation was in flames and divided as it had been during the Civil War. Today, one could argue forcefully that we're doing the same things in slow-motion in Iraq, and that the GOP is doing their best to neglect and disenfranchise Blacks. One would expect similar activitites as the Weathermen today, but welcome to the post-9/11 and Oklahoma City bombing world. Today, domestic terrorism is unlikely to come from a leftward-direction.

If you're an individual who sees these things for what they are--unspeakable crimes against humanity committed by our government for the benefit of giant corporations, you have some options.The choices are few and difficult: you could just try to go on with your life knowing what's really happening in another country in your name. If you have a conscience, this isn't going to be easy, but never underestimate the power of rationalization, it worked wonders in Germany under Hitler. One of them is what Ayers and the rest of them did during the Vietnam war, though I don't recommend doing so.

Another option is to back what's happening wholeheartedly, eventually becoming a party to the slaughter, if only indirectly. This is the easiest route, since most of society and its institutions are going to tell you constantly that this viewpoint is not only valid, but necessary for "the maintenance of our way of life." And isn't our way of life wonderful? You'll be rewarded for doing what's wrong in most cases, but it's even money you won't be punished...at least not by Americans.

Yet another option is to take the route of nonviolent civil disobedience to the war, not even allowing for the application of violence against property that serves the war's expediencies--property that makes the war possible at all, like supply-dumps, recruiting centers, military bases, defense research labs, defense contractors and their facilities, defense research labs at public universities, and-so-on. These were the kinds of targets that the Weathermen targeted, and their main goal was to destroy property only, not to target human beings. But they did want to instill fear and terror in those who supported and expedited the war in Southeast Asia, making them terrorists. They wanted to "spread the love," which I don't find morally wrong.

Ultimately, I don't advocate what Ayers and others in the Weathermen Group did during the 1960s-70s. They and a group that became the PLP (the ineffectual Maoist People's Labor Party) splintered the most effective progressive student political organizations, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) America has likely ever known. That's not the issue. The issue is Obama's connection to Ayers, which is practically nonexistent. Times have changed, but the GOP doesn't appear to have noticed.

For example, the generation of new voters never lived through the red-baiting of the Cold War years, scarcely knows all the details of the 1960s, and doesn't really care at all. They just know things are fucked-up and that they don't make enough money to live on. No "socialism" there, just common sense by ordinary people. The kids don't want to hear about Bill Ayers. Neither do the majority of Americans who want to hear about what McCain and Palin plan to do to "fix" the economy and to stabilize it. Reform is in the air, but all candidate McCain can do is talk about Ayers. This is because he has no "plan" and no vision, and neither does the rest of his obsolete party (who said they were ever good? not I).

Imagine that: all the GOP has to sell is fear. That's not a good platform for needed change that the vast majority of the public now wants and is going to start demanding before long. But please, please keep banging that same drum until the bitter end. I know you will. In one week--at-minimum--you're going to lose a lot of seats in Congress. And, oh yeah: thanks Indiana GOP, I needed kindling to burn the rest of my trash out here in the country. Thanks.

If Bill Ayers was a threat to anyone during the 1960s-70s, it was himself and the rest of the Weathermen, a cop, and a janitor. He and his wife Bernadine Dohrn helped splinter most of the New Left, making it essentially impotent in-the-face of an escalating war under President Nixon. It's all reminiscent of what Pier Paolo Pasolini said about the student riots in Paris during the Spring of 1968. "It's an internecine struggle." said the radical Italian Communist, poet, philosopher, movie director, and general polymath. Pasolini was right about Europe--and unwittingly--about people like the Weathermen. Ayers and Dohrn came from privileged-backgrounds. While underclass radicals went to prison in the 1970s-80s, Ayers and Dohrn were allowed into academia. Maybe that's why they do so much community work today. They should for the rest of their lives, they owe us and their comrades in our prison system.

This Republican mailer below omits quite a bit. If you were ignorant of the facts--as most Hoosiers are--you'd think Ayers met Obama right after he stopped bombing and turned himself in alongside his wife in 1980. Obama was a blip at that time, a nobody.

Barack Obama a radical Leftist? Take it from someone who actually is: that's a laugh. If only he was a Fred Hampton, a Malcolm X, or a Martin Luther King Jr. The fact is, he isn't. If....