Free The Dylanologists by David Kinney Page A

protested the Vietnam War, Dylan kept his opinions private and perversely suggested in one of the few interviews he gave at the time that maybe he was for the war.
    Pilgrims besieged his Woodstock home. He found fans swimming in his pool and postcoital peaceniks naked in his bed. He came upon a guy in the living room reciting poetry. A mental case strolled in three times. Dylan and his wife once awoke to find the man standing in their bedroom, just watching them. The man who penned “Blowin’ in the Wind” began to keep a shotgun by the front door. He envisioned setting fire to these crazy fuckers. “It was very dark and depressing,” he said years later. “And there was no way to respond to all this, you know? It was as if they were suckin’ your very blood out. I said, ‘Now wait, these people can’t be my fans. They just can’t be.’”
    Even his former girlfriends, Echo Helstrom from Hibbing and Suze Rotolo from New York, received calls from fans. They would ask what Dylan was really like, as if the man were a god. “There were a lot of weirdos,” Rotolo said. “He attracts weird fans. Poor guy. I don’t know how he survived.” Helstrom finally changed her name after one stalker too many. One lunatic called and said he planned to kill Bob so he could take his place. “I’ve been hiding for years,” Helstrom told me.
    In 1969, the entire hippie nation descended on the Catskills for the Woodstock Festival, three days of music and peace and everything else. Or, as Dylan characterized it later, “the sum total of all this bullshit.” Promoters hoped that by staging it practically in Dylan’s backyard, he would show up and play. They didn’t know Bob Dylan. He made other plans far away: a show-closing performance at a festival on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. The idea was that when “his people” showed up, he would be crossing the ocean. Though a mishap delayed the transatlantic voyage, Dylan still didn’t make a surprise appearance before the three hundred thousand people who turned up at Max Yasgur’s farm.
    Fed up with the scene, Dylan moved his family back to New York City, looking for the anonymity he had lost in 1963. He didn’t find it. Instead he came face-to-face with a new breed of fan: the Dylanologist.
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    On Bringing It All Back Home , Highway 61 Revisited , and Blonde on Blonde , released in 1965 and 1966, the songs became more and more surreal, foreshadowing an era that was a lot of things, but above all else deeply strange. The new songs were filled with ambiguity, vague glimpses of unexplained characters. The best ones took on different meanings with each successive listen. His followers wanted to know what they meant. But as Dylan had sung a few years earlier, “I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide.”
    The tribe took up the duty with relish. The pot and LSD and whatever else they were on surely didn’t discourage flights of fancy. They began producing reams of song analysis. They intellectualized his lyrics, elevated them to the level of literature, subjected them to exegesis like sacred text. They tried to crack the codes. They searched for clues in whatever they could gather about his private life. They compared notes with their friends, argued and theorized and disagreed. “Hungry for a sign,” Rolling Stone critic Paul Nelson wrote once, “the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it—and it really would be significant.”
    One man would outdo the rest, a wild-haired, whacked-out yippie pothead and consummate self-promoter named Alan Jules Web­erman. Dropping acid while listening to Bringing It All Back Home, he determined that the songs were operating on multiple levels,