Free The Dylanologists by David Kinney

New York City and was spending more time two hours north in Woodstock. He was running from the questions, making himself elusive. It started to dawn on his followers that his public persona—the singer Bob Dylan—was just a character, a myth, a front. The real man hid behind a mask, and he was not going to yank it off and stand naked before them. He didn’t want to be known. He feared being tied down and categorized. Guthrie had had the same idea. “There ain’t no one little certain self that is you,” he wrote. “I’m not some certain self. I’m a lot of selfs. A lot of minds and changes of minds. Moods by the wagon load . . .”
    Dylan created personas and then demolished them, denied they had ever existed, and scorned the people who still clung to them. Almost as soon as any one image was lodged in the public’s mind, he began to resist. This repeated “self-annihilation” screwed with his fans’ heads, critic Ellen Willis wrote at the time. “Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled. Illusion is fine, if quarantined and diagnosed as mild; otherwise it is potentially humiliating (Is he laughing at me? Conning me out of my money?).” The people who couldn’t deal with the head games quickly dismounted from the bandwagon. The new passengers who were jumping on board—more every day—could be smug. They got it . Until the changeling changed again and suddenly they didn’t. Dylan seemed to subscribe to P.T. Barnum’s maxim: People enjoyed being fooled. “No other performer,” Peter Stone Brown would come to decide, “fucks with his fans like Bob Dylan. There’s no doubt about it. He fucks with his fans.”
    The strategy, if you could call it that, was more than a little ingenious. Controversy sold records. What better way to build your following than to tell people to go away? Dylan kept people off balance. He did the unexpected. He refused to explain himself. How did you create an obsession? You cultivated a mystique. You built something bottomless. The more people dug into the songs, or into the mysteries of his life, the deeper they went; the deeper they went, the more they dug. Everything fed the myth.
    Whether he was loved or hated, he couldn’t be ignored, and by 1965, Dylan was bigger than ever. But then it got out of hand. “Dylan is LSD set to music,” said Phil Ochs, the folksinger. “One year from now I think it will be very dangerous to Dylan’s life to get on the stage. Dylan has become part of so many people’s psyches and there are so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now . . . I think he’s going to have to quit.”
    He spent the first half of 1966 on the road. In England, the crowds were nastier than the young hooligans in Forest Hills.
    â€œJudas!” someone screamed at a show in Manchester.
    â€œI don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” Dylan replied.
    He made it home in one piece. But in July he crashed his motorcycle on a quiet two-lane road in Woodstock. He disappeared. Rumor had it that he had been crippled, or disfigured, or paralyzed.
    The wreck gave him a much-needed break from the road, the press, the hysteria, and the drugs. But it only amplified the myth. So much so that some people could not help wondering whether the injuries were exaggerated, or the wreck entirely fabricated, a ploy to advance the narrative and enhance the legend.
    As he convalesced, the movement grew into the counterculture and devolved into hippie psychedelia. Dylan was anointed their spiritual leader in absentia. He was hanging around in Woodstock living the clean life. He had married a former Playboy Club Bunny and started having kids. He painted, and played a lot of music in a basement with his band—soon to be the Band—but mostly he stayed out of sight. While “his people”