Free The Dylanologists by David Kinney Page B

and he resolved to interpret them. “I spent hours and hours listening to Dylan, taking Ritalin, LSD, mescaline, smoking joint after joint trying to figure it out,” he said. He brought some academic discipline to the task of analyzing Dylan’s writing. He drew up a chronology and set it alongside the songs. He built a concordance on an early punch-card computer. He memorized every song, liner note, and poem like some hippie hafiz.
    After working at this for a while, he tried a new tactic. Dylan had moved into a house on MacDougal Street right down the block from the Café Wha?, where he got his start a lifetime earlier. One day, Web­erman decided to go through the trash bins outside and search for “a piece of paper that contained a translation of his hieroglyphical poems,” a clue that would help him unlock the secret codes that he was sure Dylan’s songs held. Instead he found uncompleted letters, fan mail torn into tiny pieces, dirty diapers, and dog shit.
    Weberman seemed to harbor as much hatred for his hero as love. It was the early 1970s, but he was still angry about what had happened years earlier when Dylan stopped writing topical protest songs. To Weberman, the man had frittered away his moral capital. He had never even spoken out against Vietnam! Weberman concluded that the singer was strung out on heroin. He founded an organization called the Dylan Liberation Front and printed up buttons reading FREE BOB DYLAN.
    He had begun teaching a Dylan class, and one day he brought the students by the house for a field trip. “Hey Bobby! Please crawl out your window,” Weberman shouted at the house. Just as he started demonstrating his “garbology,” Dylan materialized across the street. “It looked like smoke was coming out of his head,” the unhinged fan wrote later. The two men went for a walk, sat on a stoop, and had a long and remarkable conversation. Overjoyed, Weberman prepared a piece on his lucky encounter for the underground press. He had to reconstruct the discussion from memory, so he called Dylan’s office and asked him to read it and check the quotes, real and imagined.
    Dylan reviewed the draft, then called Weberman, who had a recorder running. It was a hilarious discussion about a half-­remembered conversation. They argued over the draft. At certain points, Dylan seemed to be intently micromanaging the article. At other moments, he seemed to be just cruelly toying with the fan. Among the things Weberman recalled Dylan saying in their talk on the street was the cryptic sentiment that he “might gain a soul” if he let Weberman get into his life. Dylan denied saying this. Or did he just regret saying it? It was hard to tell. These were two men who liked their facts slippery.
    â€œI know that’s what happened,” Dylan told Weberman about the remark, “but that ain’t what happened, man.”
    â€œThat’s what you said. So fucking quotable, man!”
    â€œIt’s, uh—doesn’t even sound like me.”
    Weberman didn’t tell Dylan he was taping until halfway through the second conversation. “Hang on for a second, Bob, I want to turn the cassette over,” he said. When he did, Dylan lost it, predictably. “I ain’t never gonna call you again, man. Never, ever, fucking again.” And yet he stayed on the line and worked on the piece some more. They traded attacks. Weberman called him a millionaire sellout whose songs weren’t any good anymore. Dylan said he would write a song about Weberman called “Pig”—“you go through garbage like a pig”—but he didn’t want to give him the pleasure of hearing it. He said he was going to make up his own buttons with a picture of Weberman’s face affixed to a pig’s body. “It’s okay, man,” he told his stalker. “You’ll live through it.”
    Weberman defended the Dylanological analysis