Meet a few of the Bob Dylan obsessives portrayed in David Kinney’s new book:
In quasi-narrative fashion, Kinney begins his story in Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, then globetrots chapter by chapter through the lives and half-lives of various self-proclaimed Dylanologists. There’s a kind of gradation to the subjects: On the extreme end is a figure like the notorious A.J. Weberman, originator of the term “Dylanologist,” a hippie holdover and hard drug repository, who “‘spent hours and hours listening to Dylan, taking Ritalin, LSD, mescaline, smoking joint after joint trying to figure it out,'” eventually digging through Dylan’s garbage, staging “birthday parties” outside Dylan’s apartment, and essentially stalking the artist with increasing paranoia.
Most of the other subjects aren’t nearly this frightening: They’re restaurant owners (at one establishment, Zimmy’s, one can get a “Simple Twist of” sirloin for $15.99), professional tape collectors/archivists like Mitch Blank (whose apartment is a kind of Dylan museum), bootleggers, PhD’s, academic and popular bloggers, and other fans who’ve sunk into the rich well of Dylan’s music only to never come up. These are the people who camp in general-admission lines for hours or even days on end, then rush the stage to get “on the rail,” that is, front-row center where they can bask or bake under Dylan’s withering disregard.
John MacDonald argues that the drive to decipher the meaning of Dylan’s lyrics sets apart the true Dylanologist from the type of fans many other musicians attract:
It’s only when Kinney turns to the Dylanologists that have devoted their lives to ferreting out the meanings behind Dylan’s music and art — rather than collecting his grandmother’s candy bowls — does he get at what makes Dylan so singularly attractive, and infuriating.
When Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 at the age of 19 (“a rough little pixie runt with a guitar,” according to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) he was already a shape-shifter — a Jewish kid from nowheresville Minnesota who had transformed himself into Woody Guthrie. By the time people made up their minds about whether Dylan was putting them on, he had donned another mask and released a new batch of songs that suggested hidden truths, a new language to describe the world. But Dylan copped to nothing, gave up no secrets — he was a protest singer one minute and a drugged-out cynic the next.
Such radical transformations, paired with Dylan’s kaleidoscopic poetry, have only fed his myth — and spurred on his most dedicated fans to do what cannot be done: figure him out. “The more people dug into the songs, or into the mysteries of his life,” Kinney writes, “the deeper they went; the deeper they went, the more they dug.”
John Dickerson’s unhappy takeaway from the book:
After reading this series of profiles, it’s hard not to share Bob Dylan’s feelings about his most devoted fans. “Get a life, please,” he told one interviewer about the devotees. “You’re not serving your own life well. You’re wasting your life.” Kinney doesn’t make this argument explicitly. His book is not unlike a Bob Dylan song—he paints a picture and then you’ve got to interpret it yourself—but the conclusion seems plain: The life of the Dylanologist is often a wasted one.
One woman who hitchhikes from show to show winds up the victim of a serial killer. Another superfan commits suicide. Others become disillusioned and wonder what they did with their lives. “Why am I such a mess?” asks Charlie Cicirella during a nervous breakdown in line for a Dylan show in December of 2005. “Why is my life such a mess?” Cicirella tells Kinney that listening to Dylan for the first time “was the first time he could ever remember not feeling alone.” But what did that inspire him to do? Based on the book, the answer is: Attend lots of Dylan concerts and fight for a spot in the front. Others can quote Dylan’s words but don’t have much to say on their own. A.J. Weberman’s dumpster-diving search for the ultimate Dylan sends him off the deep end. He concludes that “Blowin’ in the Wind” is actually a racist screed: “I wasted my fucking life on this shit.”
(Video: A clip from the 1967 documentary about Dylan, Don’t Look Back)
The Dish 