SECTION ONE
SM
COLUMN FORTY-EIGHT, AUGUST 1, 1999
(Copyright (c) 1999 Al Aronowitz)


(Painting by Bob Dylan)

MY DYLAN PAPERS:
PART 1---THE WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL

[History will remember Bob Dylan as the Shakespeare of his era.

There's no doubt about that in my mind. To me, Bob is one of those madman geniuses who has chiseled his niche in the common consciousness. The Shakespeare of his time? He's a cultural Alexander the Great!

For me, hanging out with Bob was like being an extra in that great movie called history. Yes, I wanted to help make that movie, even if only to play a bit part in it. That's why I hung out with Bob. People always try to hitch their wagons to stars, thinking some of that stardom will rub off on them. To Bob, all of us who thought we were his buddies, were just hangers-on to be unceremoniously discarded as he climbed to fame, sometimes using our backs as rungs in his ladder, finally reaching a pinnacle at which he contemptuously decided that fame is a curse.

Did he blame us? Or did he blame his own ambition? Obviously, fame is exactly what he himself had sought.  Yes, I knew he was going to be one of history's giants---more than a mere pop superstar. He knew it, too. To conquer the world, you have to have the confidence to know that you've got what it takes. And what it takes is psychic power---a term Bob used often in his conversations with me. Bob knew early on that he could draw an audience, attract worshippers and manipulate them into doing his bidding.

Worshippers such as me. He played with me like a cat with a mouse, but still I worshipped him. He treated me like a fool because I was a fool. Aren't we all, or at least most of us, at some time or another? Nobody's perfect, not even an Alexander the Great. Too often, the psychically empowered are endowed with such a reservoir of mental mightiness that they can afford to squander some of it on nothing but entertainment. Such as head games. Head games have always been one of Bob's favorite sports. Does he still enjoy making himself feel bigger by making others feel smaller?

As a hanger-on, I was in effect a courtier. Courtiers in the courts of the psychically powerful can end up badly hurt, and Bob has left behind a long trail of hurt courtiers. As I've often said, just because someone is one of the greatest artists ever born doesn't make him one of the nicest guys who ever lived.  

I guess I still worship him. But from a distance.

Because this month marks the 30th anniversary of both the Woodstock Festival and Bob's Isle of Wight Festival, I'll begin MY DYLAN PAPERS with a two-part piece I wrote about those events. Portions were first published in the New York Press.]

PART 1: THE WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL

I.

As a higher power suddenly began wringing out the dark and dirty clouds overhead, I joined Albert Grossman and Robbie Robertson in racing for shelter inside the rear of The Band's rented equipment truck, which had been parked backstage.  Robbie was the leader of The Band and Albert was The Band's personal manager and one or two of the other members of The Band got in out of the rain with us. We were on Max Yasgur's farm in rural Bethel, New York, where, almost overnight, a community of nearly half a million had encamped for what was to evolve into several days of a quasi-religious gathering that would be celebrated as one of the most significant cultural events of the times. We were at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, where the backstage area resembled a midway at a carnival, with The Band's rented truck parked as if it were another concession stall, with its tailgate facing the midway. The Band's equipment had just been unloaded and the emptied room-sized cargo box of the truck could have held a dance floor. The only problem was that there was no place to sit down. As someone lit a joint and we passed it around, I watched The Band's then-new road manager, tall, thin, somber-faced and blond-haired Jonathan Taplin, brave the downpour to make sure that all the unloaded instruments and equipment remained safe and secure beneath tarps or within tents. Only when Taplin was satisfied that everything would keep dry did he come in out of the rain to join us. Maybe I'd seen him around once or twice before, but this was the very first time I can remember ever taking full notice of Taplin. He wore glasses and, although his facial hair was so light as to be virtually invisible, he seemed to need a shave. That was because he was trying to grow a beard.

"Is he The Band's new road manager?" I asked Albert.
                  
Albert grunted in the affirmative.

"Where'd you get him?"

"From Central Casting," Albert answered.

"Well, he sure seems to be dedicated," I said
  
Albert grunted again. In a few weeks, I would learn just how dedicated a road manager Jonathan Taplin was.

II.

I was backstage at the Woodstock Festival in a dual capacity. Not only had I had enough clout as a manager to book one of my acts onto the show, but executive editor Paul Sann also had assigned me to cover the event for the New York Post. When I'd pointed out to Sann that this would put me in conflict of interest, Paul made it clear that he had never been the type of newspaperman to let either ethics or truth stand in the way of a good story. As things turned out, the act I was managing, an obscure folksinger named Rosalie Sorrels, had never appeared before a crowd larger than a coffee house audience. When her turn came to go onstage at the Woodstock Festival, she couldn't find the guts to go out and perform before an audience that approached a half million. A few months later, Sann ordered me to write the Pop Scene column for the Post and when I protested that I was still managing acts, he told me that I was the most qualified person on the staff and that I should shut up and write the column or he'd fire me. Then, when I hit a home run with the column, he lost his temper. He'd wanted me to bunt!

Three years later, when he did fire me, the explanation he gave my colleagues was that he'd just discovered I was in conflict of interest. Would you believe that they believed him and not me? That's what working for the New York Post was like in those days.

It's true that I was the person on the Post staff best qualified to write such a pop music column. Not only had I been managing a rock and roll band for five years but I was also a friend of the Beatles and the only newspaperman in the world to be invited to hang out at Byrdcliffe. That was the Woodstock retreat to which Bob had retired to remain shrouded in the privacy, secrecy and seclusion of the mountaintop mist for the three years following his motorcycle accident.

"That accident came like a warning!" Bob told me at the time. "And I heed warnings!"

III.

From the very first day I met him, Bob Dylan struck me as having parts of both Dracula and the Wizard of Oz in his overall mix. Bob always took great care to make himself mysterious. To have a relationship with Bob, you had to be ready to put up with getting put on.

"Have you ever gotten a straight answer out of him about anything? Huh? Have you?"

One of the two women who were then closest to Dylan asked the other that question in Renaldo and Clara, the hours-long home movie Bob made of his 1976 Rolling Thunder tour.

"Have you?" the second woman answered. "He never gives a straight answer about anything to anyone!"

These two women weren't just kidding. They were Sara Dylan, at the time Bob's wife, and Joan Baez, who'd once had been Bob's sponsor and lover. And, with all the scenes in this movie supposedly spontaneous, improvised and otherwise unrehearsed, more jest has never been uttered in truth. Bob never even would tell the musicians playing behind him on the concert stage what the next song or its key was going to be. Bob always kept everybody guessing. Nobody could pile it as high as Bob and keep getting away with it. And you never knew when he was putting you on. He started out telling people he was born in claptrap Oklahoma poverty. He even started talking with an Oklahoma twang. Once, he told me he'd served time in Redwing Reformatory. He used to try to enhance his self-image with apocrypha the way a girl inflates her breasts with falsies. But is the art of the storyteller in the telling or in the story?

I adored Dylan too much to see him through critical eyes. I was too impressed with his hipness and too humbled by his artistry. He handled words with an economy that put me to shame and he aimed those words with the precision of a laser bomb. I felt honored to be able to hang out with this mumbling twenty-two-year-old kid, skinny as a scarecrow and wound-up as a telephone cord. He'd sit and talk, smoking an unfiltered cigarette with his legs crossed and his free-swinging foot endlessly kicking a steady, nervous cadence, and I found him fascinating. To me, he was bigger than life and yet I had to laugh because Bob sometimes had all the flash of a 1968 Studebaker. Once, when he was already earning almost a half-million a year, I drove him to JFK and saw him off to Europe for a week or two with only an eight-pound zippered bag as his luggage.

Bob Neuwirth, Dylan's chief sidekick at the time, has credited personal manager Albert Grossman with having invented Bob, but it was Dylan who had to invent himself first. Otherwise, a lot of Albert did in fact turn up in Bob. If I never got a straight answer out of Bob, I never got one out of Albert, either. Bob and Albert weren't cut from the same cloth but from the same stone wall. For instance, when I asked Albert how he happened to team up with Dylan, he told me:

"We were both waiting for the same bus."

Mystery and deception and bluff were Albert's style. As photographer Barry Feinstein, one of Grossman's best friends, once joked:

"Albert's sneaky."

They used even their closest
cronies as pawns in their
pettiest ego games

Albert and Bob were both shifty and manipulative, but which one of them coached whom? They both used even their closest cronies as pawns in their pettiest ego games. Once Bob telephoned me from Woodstock and threatened to kill himself if I didn't immediately make the drive all the way from my house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, to come see him. When I finally reached Woodstock, I found him calmly writing a tune in a room over Bernard Paturel's Cafe Espresso in the center of town. Bob seemed surprised to see me. He acted as if he had never called me at all. Was this just a ruse to get me out of my house? Why?

Another time, when he was staying at Albert's place in Woodstock and I was in an apartment in Greenwich Village, he told me on the telephone that Johnny Cash was at that moment waiting for him at the Limelight, the Village club on Seventh Avenue, almost around the corner from where I was. Bob, some two hours away, had no hope of keeping the date, so would I go over to the Limelight and apologize to Johnny for Bob? When I got to the Limelight, I found Cash sitting alone at a table. He was stoned out on pills and booze with an ugly scowl on his face. When I introduced myself, he exploded:

"Who the fuck are you? I was just talking to Bob on the phone and he didn't mention anything about you!" Then Johnny rose menacingly from his seat and growled:

"I oughta punch you out!"

Although I recognized Bob's ambiguity, trickiness and underlying ruthlessness, I was too awed and inspired by his genius not to become one of his most ardent fans. His lyrics pierced the heart of every listener's secret soul with such godlike omniscience that they would often unleash contagions of paranoia even among Bob's own troops. The incisiveness of Bob's lyrics would certainly sometimes get me paranoid enough to wonder whether he was thinking of me when he wrote those words.

He attracted so devoted and so religious a following and his charisma grew to command such widespread idolatry that I, too, when properly drugged, ultimately found myself hypnotized into worshipping Bob as a new messiah. To me, he commanded the counterculture. He'd certainly become the god of the potheads. Bob's most passionate followers were those who regarded weed as a sacrament and the passing of a joint as a ritual. I thought I was hanging out with the most important man in the world. Bob thought so, too.

By 1969, Dylan and the Beatles shared many fans, but the hard-core Dylan-worshippers tended to be more intellectual, more literate and more artistically minded in addition to more readily disposed toward the use or toleration of drugs. That's because the hard-core Dylan worshippers were for the most part second-generation Beats.

As for the Beatles, their egos were inflated, too, but their style, although more show-bizzy, was also more regal and more gracious than the tyrannical Bob's mystery, deception, childlike temper, unpredictable anger and monstrous arrogance. The Beatles had achieved a more exotic, a more serene and a more universal divinity and they commanded a much more widespread following. By 1969, the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus, all right, but in another sort of way.

They had become the treasured icon of a generation's childhood, like a teddy bear with which the owner can't bear to part and to which the '60s generation has kept clinging in its journey toward old age. That generation has kept the Beatles hugged to its heart because, to those who were the kids of that era, the Beatles will signify forever the joy of youth.

By the time of his motorcycle accident, Bob had succeeded in transfiguring the art of writing pop tunes. As Rolling Stone was to comment some twenty-five years later, Dylan had "single-handedly reinvented pop's known rules of language and meaning and revealed that rock and roll's familiar structures could accommodate new, unfamiliar themes, that a pop song could be about any subject a writer was smart or daring enough to tackle."

Breaking all the spoon-moon rules of traditional lyrics, Bob had shown that a pop tune could talk about politics, that it could be an anthem of love or protest, a message of hope or anger, even a paranoid diatribe that told his listener he wished "you could be in my shoes so you can see what a drag you are." Yes, Bob even had been able to get a hit with Positively Fourth Street, and, like others in Dylan's inner circle, I felt a paranoid twinge of fear that Dylan might have written that song about me.

Just as the Beatles had freed the sound of pop music, Bob had liberated its lyrics. Pop music had become the art form at the cutting edge of contemporary culture. No other means of expression could be so searching, so outspoken, so redemptive, so rewarding, so unshackled and so true. Young poets like Jim Morrison were inspired to become singers. Or rushed to learn how to play the guitar, which is how bands like the Grateful Dead got started. I, for one, found myself awed enough to go a little crazy and I decided that contemporary music was the literature of our times, that writing alone couldn't tell the story, that words without music were outdated and obsolete exercises in futility.

And so I started managing rock and roll bands. Even poet Allen Ginsberg added instruments to his poetry readings. Allen called his poems songs. On the other hand, Dylan called his songs poems. When I first introduced Allen to Bob, Allen, preoccupied with his own ego, was reluctant to surrender any ground by recognizing Dylan as a poet. He insisted on classifying Bob as a writer of lyrics. But by the time Bob got thrown from his motorcycle and then disappeared into the mountain mists, the world was hailing Dylan as the poet laureate of his generation. Even John Lennon told me: 

"I'm in awe of Bob Dylan."

IV.

Bob claimed he broke his neck in the motorcycle accident. Afterwards, he also broke with manager Albert. Bob was typically vague with me about both ruptures. Maybe he just couldn't let himself forget that I was a journalist. He always seemed to have something to hide. I've heard varying versions of his motorcycle accident. In one, he'd become a junkie and Albert, taking advantage of a clause in their contract, used the occasion to make Bob detox at his doctor's house. But I was seeing Bob at the time, and I never detected any signs of him high on junk. In another version, the motorcycle accident was nothing but a spill in Bob's Byrdcliffe driveway.

My first hint of bad blood boiling between Albert and Bob came when Bob started sneering at the very mention of Albert's name, muttering angry words about a mysterious incident concerning somebody's wife. Whose wife? Albert's wife? Bob's wife? My wife? If the truth be known, all three wives were in love with Bob. Each loved Bob maybe a little too much. My wife was a friend of Bob's wife, who was a friend of Albert's wife. Bob's wife was Sara. She came from Delaware, where her father, a scrap metals dealer, had been shot to death in a holdup. She'd been married to and divorced from Victor Lowndes, a big-time fashion photographer, and she had a beautiful daughter, Maria. Soon after Bob met Sara, he'd told me he was going to marry her. 

"She's strong!" he'd said.

I wasn't the only one he asked
to make his wedding arrangements

He'd even asked me to make arrangements for the wedding ceremony, but I think he'd made the same request of several others, too, because the details ended up getting handled by somebody else. From the first, Sara was always one of the most queenly women I've ever adored. She ruled with regal radiance and with the power to calm troubled waters. She'd never lose her cheerful cool or pull a scene but, when she was really pushed to it, she knew how to do an icy slow burn. Except she also knew how not to get really pushed to it.

As for Bob, he had a terrible temper. Once, when I was driving Bob and Sara to look for a summer rental on Fire Island, we got stuck in a traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway. Bob pulled a fit, accusing me of having gone the wrong way and blaming me for the traffic jam. In his tantrum, he started to get out of the station wagon. To do what? Walk? Only Sara was able to calm him. She tried to make him understand that he was being unreasonable. He really had no idea that he was being unreasonable. Or was he just putting us on?

My wife and I and our kids had started visiting Bob in Woodstock even before Sara came on the scene. We'd started going to Woodstock in '63, when Bob first moved there to live in Albert's rebuilt colonial farmhouse, situated on a woodsy estate which Albert had just purchased from John Streibel, an artist then famous for drawing the hit comic strip, Dixie Dugan.

The house had been transformed into a comfortable mansion with many rooms, all furnished with antiques. The house also included its primitive original kitchen, which had been left where it was when a new kitchen had been installed. The new kitchen became the main room in Albert's house, with the rarest and most expensive gourmet delicacies stocked in its cupboard. Albert's life revolved around haute cuisine. In the end, he paid more attention to building gourmet restaurants than to building hit acts. I'm sure I'm not the only one to contend that Albert eventually ate himself to death.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Woodstock from my house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. After Sara and Bob moved into Byrdcliffe, situated where the mountaintop sticks its head into the clouds, my wife and I and our children continued visiting them, often spending the night. I would bring film cans full of the latest Hollywood hits, obtained from a friendly New York movie mogul. During this period, Bob and Sara grew to be one of the tightest twosomes I've ever known. Their love bloomed and Sara blossomed. To me, she grew more and more beautiful. They had four babies together, didn't they?

Bob hadn't been easy to tame. On the one hand, he was a genius, but on the other hand, he was an unpredictable, uncivil and unkempt kid who had waited too long to learn how to clean his fingernails and brush his teeth. He drugged and he drank and he stayed up all night. He was the new star and all the girls had the hots for him. They chased him wherever he went. How could he help but turn into a spoiled brat who always got his own way? He was the hip new James Dean. They also compared him to Billy the Kid. Once, as we were on our way out for the night, Bob looked at himself in the full-length mirror of his suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel, broke into a grin and asked:

"Well? Do I look like Billy the Kid?"

If Bob wasn't Billy the Kid, he was Bob the Kid. Everybody always falls for a guy that's nicknamed "The Kid." In his chamois jacket and in his skinny stretch jeans, which he habitually kept pulling down over his boot tops, Bob defined that type. Not only does everybody always fall for The Kid, but they fall at first sight. All at once. Immediately.

You can't help liking The Kid as soon as your eyes are drawn to him, because he's always very boyishly good-looking. He's always smallish and slim and everybody always wants to baby him, please him, look after him and score him for a pal. Everybody always wants to play big brother or big sister or mama or papa or aunt or uncle or grandparent to The Kid. The Kid always looks like the most endearing kind of guy. He's got a certain impish quality to him but he also looks like a Billy Budd type. The Kid was born with a halo. He beams with innocence. He can do no wrong. He can tell any kind of lie and everybody will always believe him.

Nobody ever wants to suspect anything ill of The Kid. He can get away with all sorts of cons and he usually does. He can be the worst kind of scoundrel but he will always be thought of as a hero, a young David who can slay Goliath. The Kid is forever young. He is forever The Kid. Even after his hair turns white, he is still The Kid. He also has a smile that's infectious. And deceptively shy. Bob Dylan's friend, singer Doug Sahm, used to go around saying that Bob's smile can turn on the world. Didn't it?

Bob may have been another Attila the Hun, but he also could charm the bracelets from the tails of rattlesnakes. I found him to be one of the most beguiling men I'd ever known. Beguiling, enchanting, bewitching, magnetic. To be with Bob was always magical. Every word out of his mouth impressed me as a gem. Every glance into his eyes turned out to be another surprise for me. Though calm and clear and placid, his eyes always seemed wounded, tinged with a glint of hurt. The universe I'd see in Bob's eyes never stopped jolting me. Bob's eyes also were always very persuasive. Sometimes his eyes would darken and they would command with a stern glare.

Isn't it true that blue-eyed people rule the earth? Bob's eyes were blue, deep and unfathomable. They revealed everything while at the same time telling me nothing. The ability to keep a poker face is one of  The Kid's attributes. The Kid is an outlaw whose nature is to be secretive, private, mysterious, deceptive. Bob wasn't famous for spilling his guts or wearing his heart on his sleeve. He kept his emotions to himself because he didn't want to show weakness. Even after Bob and Sara started having babies, Robbie Robertson, Bob's guitarist and closest sidekick at the time, found it necessary to comment:

"I never see him itchy-kitchy-kooing his kids."

From the start, Sara parried Bob's tyranny with graciousness. Bob ran hot and cold and he was a succession of either Jekylls and Hydes or heckles and jives, but I've never seen him treat another human as civilly, as respectfully, as lovingly and as humanly as he treated Sara. In the years following his motorcycle accident, Bob acted like a romantic cornball when he was with her. More and more, he depended on her advice as if she were his astrologer, his oracle, his seer, his psychic guide. He would rely on her to tell him the best hour and the best day to travel.

For me, they were the ideal loving couple. They flirted with each other constantly. Their kitchen-talk, table-talk, parlor-talk and general dialogue impressed me as certainly hipper than any I've ever heard in any soap opera or sitcom. To me, this dialogue was by the Shakespeare of his time and his wife. She was always just as hip as he was. Bob and Sara put on an impressive show for me, a drama full of romance and wisecracks and everyday common sense. I felt proud to be the audience. Proud and privileged, too, because I knew what any member of  the army of Bob's fans would have been willing to pay for a ticket to this show. Bob's fans were sitting on the edges of their seats waiting for the curtain to go up. The curtain of mist which Bob had drawn between himself and the world. What was going on behind it?

Rumors began to pile up like wreaths on a grave. They said he was dead. They said he was disfigured. They said he had lost his voice, his hair, his mind. Once, when a reporter managed to reach his front door and knock on it, Bob said that all the rumors were true. Of course, the thought crossed my mind that I should one day write about the Bob and Sara sitcom. Too bad I never kept a journal. I spent a lot of time chauffeuring them around in my station wagon, especially when they would come down from Woodstock to visit Manhattan.

They'd stay for days at a time in the apartment of Naomi Saltzman, the woman who replaced Albert as manager of Bob's business. Naomi lived in a luxury high-rise in the Village near NYU and I often visited Bob and Sara there. I remember that once I showed up at Naomi's after Bob and Sara had gone to a Manhattan store called the Pottery Barn to shop for dinnerware. By this time, Bob had come in contact with Woodstock's arts and crafts community and he was doing a lot of painting. He also was thinking about doing some handcrafting. We were sitting at Naomi's dinner table and I innocently asked Sara what happened during the shopping trip to the Pottery Barn.

"Oh," she answered, "we walked around and we looked at some of the pottery and do you know what he said?"

"He probably said, 'I can make better pottery than that!'" I answered.

"How did you know?" Sara gasped.

Yes, too bad I never kept a journal, but then I've never been the kind of newspaperman to go peeking through bedroom keyholes that weren't my own. To me, Bob Dylan was a god. Once, I was in the bed next to his when he was screwing a hooker in the Detroit hotel room we shared. A friend of mine, Motown record producer Mickey Stevenson, had paid the hooker to pose as a fan who'd gone gaga over Bob. Her role was to submit to Bob after acting as if she couldn't resist him. She certainly won my Academy Award nomination. That was one time Bob himself really got put on.

Another time when Bob seemed more human than godly to me was when he used to send me to get pornographic magazines for him. Porn wasn't as out in the open at that time as it has become. Bob kept sending me to get pornographic magazines until one day he felt embarrassed enough to offer an explanation:

"I'm makin' a montage! I'm makin' a montage in my studio."

It was after his motorcycle accident that Bob got into painting. Woodstock was, after all, an artists' colony and, living in a Woodstock that teemed with painters, Bob was bound to end up finding a buddy who would get him interested in oils. Bob's canvases were colorful and abstract, such as the one on his Self-Portrait album cover, which came out of this period. To me, Bob's canvases showed another dimension of his artistic soul, and, knowing how much I admired them, he once gave me one. One of his colorful abstracts, it's a painting in which I see, framed in a doorway, a god-like magician waving his hand as he holds a tray on which he serves up a destroyed city. I call this painting Lo and Behold! but I can't tell whether the god-like magician is a man or a woman. 

As Bob once cracked during one of his press conferences, "Everybody knows that God is a woman!"

In Woodstock, Bob's lifestyle became very country squireish. In addition to painting, writing songs, working on a book and editing his tour films into a one-hour TV special, he would sometimes drop into the drug store for toothpaste, go to a movie in one of the nearby towns, visit with neighbors or attend antique auctions with Sara. In the winter of 1978, he even flew down to Houston in his private plane to watch Muhammad Ali knock out Ernie Terrell.

As Bob and Sara kept having more babies, Bob kept trying to add a dog to his family. But he kept having to get rid of one dog after another for one reason or another, such as in the case of a monster named Buster. As I recall, Buster was an immense Great Dane who kept biting people. Bob eventually had to send Buster to obedience school but still Buster kept biting people. Once, Buster bit a little girl, a neighbor's daughter. Buster even bit me once, too, attacking when I was defenseless. I was walking down the steps to the front door of Byrdcliffe with my arms full of film cans when Buster tore at my leg.

Built in Woodstock's own woodsy style of Rough-Hewn Modern, Byrdcliffe was a handsome house with a commanding view that somehow made me feel like I was visiting someone's version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In the front, off the driveway, a small outbuilding that once might have been a garage housed a pool table, with Bob acting as the resident shark. He certainly shot a much better game of pool than I did. By this time, The Band and Big Pink had come into the picture and its members were frequent players in Dylan's tiny pool hall. 

The most frequent was Robbie Robertson, who had supplanted Bobby Neuwirth as Bob's Number One crony. If Albert wasn't managing Dylan any more, he was still managing The Band, and Robbie was caught in the middle, just as I was. Robbie was one of the most gracious, charming and diplomatic of all the musicians I've ever known, straddling the fence with tact and style to remain a buddy of both Albert and Bob without recriminations from either.

Dylan's post-accident period became a time occupied not only by the Big Pink basement sessions but also by many kitchen jams, which sometimes included not only The Band but also other visiting musicians. They would pass the guitar around, taking turns at singing tunes. In the same way that comedians get together and tell one another jokes. Each joke would remind one of the other comedians of another joke, and among the musicians each song would suggest another song. But too smoothly for anyone to detect a game of Can-You-Top-This.

As the chain of songs grew, the musicians'd keep passing the guitar around far into the night. I'd find myself being entertained by some of the most spectacular musical talent of my time. The Band's drummer, Levon Helm, usually topped everyone, playing either the mandolin or the acoustic guitar and coming up with one surprise after another, usually a long-forgotten country, folk or pop tune. I remember being knocked out when he came up with bandleader Woody Herman's old hit, featuring the line: "Caledonia! Caledonia! What makes your big head so hard?" I used to wonder how these musicians had enough room in their brains to remember all the words to all those tunes. I wished I had a memory like that. Meanwhile, whenever I'd ask about Albert, Bob would say something like, "Man, Albert's just an old man! He's just too old!"

V.

Bob tried to keep himself shrouded in mystery from the time I'd first met him, but he became weirder yet after the motorcycle accident. He told me that, as he hurtled through the air when he was thrown from the motorcycle to the side of the road, he thought sure he was going to be killed.

"I saw my whole life pass in front of me," he said.

The nation's pop music stations interrupted their programs to broadcast the news as a bulletin. In London, a group of hippie fans printed a memorial poster with a space left blank for the time and place of the funeral services. At Fordham University, a Jesuit priest prepared a lecture entitled, The Ontology of Bob Dylan. I never really believed the story about Bob breaking a vertebra his neck.

Later on, he claimed that was just an expression that his brother used at the time. I always felt a strange twinge of guilt about the spill Bob took because I was the one who had driven him to pick up his new Triumph bike in the first place. I remembered an ominous foreboding as I followed him while he rode the motorcycle home. But I never told him about this feeling. He wouldn't have heeded my warning, anyway. By that time, he was pretty sure he could do no wrong. In reinventing pop music, he had inspired an army of young wannabees. They were busy following in his footsteps, chasing after him on the very musical highway which Bob had paved for himself. 

Bob always showed
nothing but contempt for his
copycats

In private, Bob always showed nothing but contempt for his copycats. Soon after Like A Rolling Stone hit the pop charts, Bob told me with typical arrogance: 

"I'm the best at what I do! Nobody does what I do better than I do."

Bob's scorn for his imitators is exemplified in his film documenting his first English tour, Don't Look Back, which shows Dylan dumping on young Donovan, then enjoying enormous success with Catch The Wind. In the film, Donovan doesn't quite seem to know what to make of it all and so he makes the best of it. Bob's scorn wasn't exactly water rolling off a turtle's back.  It hurt to be impaled by someone whom you hold so dear and respect so much. Eventually, many of those impaled by Bob's scorn would manage to survive, not simply to earn Bob's respect but some would approach superstardom.

Jackson Browne is only one of the many who owe a chunk of it all to Dylan. Eric Andersen, who has achieved a lesser commercial success, is a poetic performer whose good looks and whose dreamy, romantic and personal songwriting style have been compared with Jackson Browne's. Andersen contends that Dylan not only freed him as an artist but that Dylan freed all of art as well. By the year of the motorcycle accident, Bob had become America's countercultural idol and inspiration. Even among hip black musicians, the only thing Jimi Hendrix ever really wanted from me was for me to introduce him to Bob Dylan. By 1966, each new Dylan album had become a pop scene event. Dylan had single-handedly reinvented contemporary music, but how was he going to top himself? What was he going to do next?

Poised for the rush to fill his footprint, the imitators on Bob's heels waited breathlessly for Bob's next step. But, in mid-stride, Dylan had done a Garbo. He'd pulled a vanishing act. He'd disappeared into a cloud on a mountaintop. By the time of the Woodstock Festival, Dylan's next footfall was still in a state of suspension.

VI.

The state of suspension was interrupted briefly by appearances of Dylan's other persona. Bob's participation in a 1968 Carnegie Hall tribute to Woody Guthrie seemed stiff and rusty and solemn. It was as if he dressed his show in its Sunday best because this was a formal occasion, a memorial. In 1968 also, Bob released his John Wesley Harding album. It was as if he tried to slip it in unnoticed. In renegotiating his recording contract with Columbia, he had demanded a clause prohibiting any advance publicity for the album. When he drove into New York two months before the release of John Wesley Harding, I took a walk with Bob through Greenwich Village. He had grown a scraggly beard and he was wearing and an Australian Gaucho hat and nobody noticed him. We even walked right past Folklore Center Founder Israel G. Young, an early admirer who had turned into one of Bob's most bitter critics.

"He didn't recognize you!" I gasped.

"He never recognized me before," Bob answered. "Why should he recognize me now?"

In John Wesley Harding, Dylan pioneered a sudden about-face to simplicity. Among the Big Three of pop royalty, he set a trend, a reaction to information overload, a retreat from the complex psychedelic mind games best expressed by Dylan in the withering surrealistic lyrics of Blonde On Blonde, by the Beatles in the sweeping montage on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and by the Rolling Stones' in the space-age technology of the 3D photograph on the cover of Their Satanic Majesties Request. In John Wesley Harding, Dylan pulled out the plug. He made a beeline for simple basics. Behind his singing on this album, there were only a bass player, a drummer and, on two songs, a country steel guitar.

This wasn't the old snarling and complicated Dylan. This record was too simple, too subdued. This was too much of an about-face from the tripping heights of psychedelia. Neither Dylan's Woody Guthrie appearance nor the release of John Wesley Harding were what the world was waiting for. By the time of the Woodstock Festival, the world had been waiting for close to three years for Dylan's other shoe to drop. 

VII.

Byrdcliffe was atop Woodstock's Meade's Mountain but it may as well have been on Mount Olympus. Dylan's very presence had turned Woodstock into another Mecca to which the faithful had to make their pilgrimages. The faithful were not only musicians but many were just plain fans. With such Woodstock residents as Dylan, Grossman and The Band representing a Holy Trinity, many of the pilgrims decided to stay in Woodstock once they'd gotten there. Soon, that tiny but burgeoning hamlet was turning into a music capital as well as an art colony.

When Mike Lang and John Roberts cooked up the idea of promoting a three-day music fair in the summer of 1969, their choice of Woodstock as the site was in itself a tribute to Bob Dylan. Sticking the festival in Dylan's back yard was like shoving it in his face. The whole point of the show might have been to get Dylan to headline it. In essence, the Woodstock Festival was nothing but a call to Bob to come out and play.

Years later, pilgrims still show up in Woodstock in the mistaken belief that Woodstock is where the Woodstock Festival actually was held. When Roberts and Lang first contemplated the idea of their Aquarian Exposition, everybody figured that the show wouldn't draw much more than fifty thousand. Even that underestimate made the Woodstock town fathers shudder. They weren't about to allow that big a crowd to descend on their tiny hamlet. They raged about the sanitation, health and traffic problems such an event would cause and they vetoed the festival. It had to be moved out of Woodstock's municipal boundaries. The promoters looked around for another site and eventually struck a deal with Max Yasgur to stage the festival in the natural amphitheater on his farm, located in Bethel, some sixty miles from Woodstock. Meanwhile, was Dylan going to show up at this spectacle? Until almost the last minute, Bob seemed to be flirting with the idea.

VIII.

Five days before the Woodstock Festival, Bob was still parrying rumors that he would make a surprise appearance at the event.

"I may show up if I feel like it," he told me. "I've been invited, so I know it'll be okay to show up."

With my wife and kids, I had joined Bob and Sara and their kids for a picnic in their back yard at Byrdcliffe. We were eating roast beef sandwiches and there was potato salad and other goodies piled on the wooden picnic table behind the Dylans' house. It was a sunny afternoon. It was Sunday, August 11th, and the Woodstock Festival was scheduled to start the following Friday. Earlier that day, I had visited the festival site and now I reported to Bob that whereas a rain had turned Yasgur's farm into a muddy quagmire the day before, the sun now had succeeded in drying the mud so thoroughly that promoters Lang and Roberts had been talking about renting a water truck to spray the road to keep the dust down.

"I wish they'd send the truck my way," Bob said. "The motor from my pump broke down and I haven't had any runnin' water for three days. I'm ready to sell this whole place to the land developers. My children need water. We buy a lot of food in this town and we pay a lot of taxes. We expect better service than this."

Sara's chief complaint about living in Woodstock was always that the water dried up in August. In her back yard, she was smiling and warm, like the day. Near the picnic table was a trampoline, which Dylan had just put together for his kids and they were playing on it. Bob knew I was going to write a story for the New York Post and he was choosing his words with impish delight.

$16,000 to fly 100 from the Hog Farm to the festival site to install showers and toilets

Hanging out at home like this, he seemed to lose a lot of his Oklahoma twang. We both knew that he was booked to sail for England in a few days and that he had absolutely no intention of making a surprise appearance at the Woodstock Festival. He just didn't want me to say so in print. When I told him that Lang and Roberts had just spent $16,000 to fly some 100 members of the Hog Farm from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the festival site to install showers and portable toilets, Bob said he didn't think he'd need to spend that kind of money to do the job over at his place.

"Still, it's been three days since I heard from the repairman," he complained.

I told Bob that Lang also had just flown two people to Providence to drive back a couple of mobile homes so he could move out of his motel room and take up temporary residence on the festival site. Bob laughed and said:

"I met Michael Lang once but I can't remember anythin' about him. My opinion of that festival is not any different from anyone else's. I think everyone is probably goin' t'have a good time, but I wouldn't blame 'em if they didn't. Why do they have to call it the Woodstock Festival? We like that name---Woodstock. It has a familiar ring to it. That's one of the reasons we moved up here. There's quite a few towns with that name. There's Woodstock, Kentucky. There's Woodstock, New Hampshire. There's Woodstock, Ohio. There's Woodstock, Maryland. There's Woodstock, Arkansas. There's Woodstock, Oklahoma. There's Woodstock, Wisconsin. And there's Woodstock, Hawaii. There are more every minute, but if it's all the same, we may move on to another one."

He walked past the trampoline toward the swimming pool. He couldn't use the swimming pool, either. There was too much algae in it.

"I've had it!" he laughed. "We need some water and nobody understands!"

IX. 

BETHEL, N.Y.---You sit on the big stage watered by the blue spotlights while the Big Pink band plays Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released and you look out into the eyes of the monster.

It has been there for three days now, this monster, benign, magnificent, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, roosting on a hillside where alfalfa once grew, drowning in the mud, thirsting for water, chilled by rain, unsheltered, unfed, and yet kept alive by something on the stage that can't be explained except in terms of magic. . .

You sit on the big stage listening to the sweet plea of innocence of a singer who tells you that every distance is not near and on the ground, twenty feet below, a state trooper is chasing a bunch of kids off their perch on a heavy construction crane while a bearded acid head stands next to him stark naked.

The rain has left an early morning chill that is warping the piano strings out of tune and there is no excuse to be walking around without any clothes on, but the state trooper ignores the acid head and instead turns his attention to getting permission for a 15-year-old boy to sit on the stage. When you learn that the 15-year-old boy is the state trooper's son, you realize where the monster comes from. It is America's child.

Your feet are puffed with the blisters of no other way to get there and your head tilts to one side with the weight of your eyelids, and you wonder why the monster doesn't just go home, but out there on the rain-sogged hillside it lives, reminding you of its existence every now and then with a full-throated roar that also tells you how terrifying a monster can be. There are bonfires on the hillside and you can smell the marijuana smoke of the monster's breath and you wonder what dreams it sees when it looks down at the stage you're standing on. Isn't music what dreams are made of?

That's the start of the story I wrote that was on the front page of the New York Post the Monday after the Woodstock Festival's Sunday finale. I remember typing the story in the promoter's office. I was on a deadline and then, suddenly, for a reason I no longer remember, I was unable to use the typewriter any more. I wrote more of the story in longhand and I had to dictate the last few takes off the top of my head on the phone to a rewriteman in the Post city room in Manhattan.

There was one childbirth reported at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, called an Aquarian Exposition because we are at the end of the Age of Pisces and the two thousand years of the Christian era and the promoters thought they could turn a few bucks by capitalizing on an Underground which fancies itself to be the secret early Christians of a new religion. . . Listen to the testimony of Artie Kornfeld, who is one of the promoters. . . "From now on," he says, "when people hear the name Woodstock they won't think of the town, they'll think of our festival." . . .

X.

Why does the Woodstock Festival still loom so large in memory? One of the articles printed as part of the extensive coverage in the New York Times found it necessary to quote Shakespeare's Henry V, in which King Henry rallies his troops before the Battle of Agincourt by telling them that they one day will be able to stand tall and say:

"I was there?"

For three days, America gawked at the equivalent of one of the most populous cities in New York State sprouting in an alfalfa meadow to survive three days of not enough food, not enough sanitation, not enough medical supplies, not enough shelter and much too much rain. With the festival resulting in roads choked by one of the most monumental traffic jams in history, the site became unapproachable except by helicopter. Choppers had to be hired to ferry in not only the performers but also many necessary emergency supplies. Abbie

the tickets
proved worthless,
except as collectors' items

Hoffman, the legendary anti-Vietnam War provocateur, at first threatened to lead a protest to disrupt the festival but ended up blessing the event after shaking down the promoters for some money and a large bloc of tickets. The tickets, however, proved worthless, except as collectors' items, because the mob soon broke too many holes through the fences, forcing the ticket-takers to abandon what amounted to an exercise in futility. The one 150,000 who had bought tickets in advance ended up subsidizing the show. Abbie liked the way I likened the audience to a monster in my New York Post story, which was headlined The Benign Monster. In his book, Woodstock Nation, Abbie was later to quote me.

Although the New York State Police and other authorities had expressed fear that violence and lawlessness would run rampant, the monster remained happy, playful and harmless. The cops arrested only 80 persons for minor drug violations and more than 40 had to carried away when they flipped out on bad acid trips. Some on bad trips had to be taken to hospitals but most were cared for at the site by the Hog Farm, a commune of experienced acid trippers led by Wavy Gravy, once known as Hugh Romney, who patrolled the festival site wearing a ten-gallon hat, carrying a staff stuck through a tiny drum and, with his front teeth missing, telling everybody he was the "Please Chief."

One of the bad-trippers died in Middletown Hospital, a second festival fatality resulted from a ruptured appendix and a seventeen-year-old boy was run over by a tractor while sleeping in a field. Otherwise, this generation of civil rights marchers, hippie freaks and tie-dyed flower children proved itself dedicated to peace and love. Babies were born at the three-day event and still more babies were conceived. Never before in America had so large an audience gathered to listen to music. Never before in America had so many persons joined in flaunting the law all at once by taking off their clothes, smoking pot, dropping acid and even orgying, all under the very noses of the cops.

The monster's purpose was not merely to frolic and enjoy the show but also to send a message of civil dissent. This monster wanted to change the world. This monster wanted more than just an end to the Vietnamese War. This monster also wanted civil rights for all and a change in styles of cultural, artistic, social and sexual behavior. The Woodstock Festival emerged as a milestone, a marker, a signpost to show the changing directions of America. It signified the coming of age of an underground youth culture which not only had grown up to flex its muscles but which was splitting its seams and bursting out of its clothes like the Incredible Hulk.

XI.

Dylan, of course, missed the show.

Maybe it was his contrary nature. Maybe it was his insistence on being difficult and disagreeable. Maybe he wanted to be perverse or he wanted to stay mysterious. Maybe he enjoyed his reputation for unpredictability, dissonance, counterpoise. 

"Y'gotta be different!" he'd once told me.

Bob always seemed to try to do the unexpected. He liked to swim against the tide. Not only did he not go to Woodstock, but he created his own Woodstock. For his first big concert reappearance since he had disappeared into the mountaintop mist, Dylan signed on to be the headliner at a festival which, the year before, had consisted of little more than an audience of 10,000 watching some rock bands perform on nothing but the back of a flatbed trailer. For America, the site of Dylan's Woodstock would be even more inaccessible than Max Yasgur's alfalfa field after the roads got choked by the traffic jam. The site of Dylan's big comeback would be across the Solent, that seven-mile-wide appendage of the North Atlantic which reaches between England and the crumbling chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight.

XII.

When Bob asked me to come along with him to the Isle of Wight as his road manager, I felt honored. Also going were Bob's wife, Sara, plus The Band, which was booked to play on its own before reappearing as Bob' backup musicians. When we arrived at London's Heathrow Airport, Sara took charge of pushing the luggage cart up to the customs inspector, who at first waved her through but then, after realizing the luggage was also Dylan's, called her back. Otherwise, Bob's and Sara's luggage was my responsibility. There were seven pieces of luggage traveling with them and one of my jobs was to make sure that all seven pieces got where they were going.

The Dylans' luggage had been thrown together with The Band's luggage for the trip from Heathrow south to Portsmouth, where we boarded a Hovercraft, which rose up out of the darkened sea like a Loch Ness monster. The Hovercraft took us over the Solent to Ryde, the port on the Isle of Wight's northern coast, where a parade of hired taxis awaited our entourage. Bob and Sara and I were going to Forelands Farm at Bembridge, a Sixteenth Century stone cottage within a walled compound that included gardens, a swimming pool, a house trailer, tennis courts, a barn, a twenty-four-hour guard and a proper English hostess, the niece of the late Sir Stafford Cripps. She was an almost matronly woman in her early fifties who went around asking for autographs while wearing a badge that read, "Help Bob Dylan Sink The Isle Of Wight."

It wasn't until 1997 that I got to know her better. That's when I wrote to surrealist poet David Gascoyne inviting him to the Allen Ginsberg Memorial in Manhattan's Central Park Bandshell in June of that year and got a reply from (of all people) her. 

Your letter to David yesterday brought so many memories back to me! When we were all staying at Forelands Farm at Bembridge with Bob Dylan?!

I had been "chosen" to look after Bob n Sara n his friends. It was a memorable week to me. .

The proper English hostess, the niece of the late Sir Stafford Cripps, then named Judy Lewis, has eventually turned out to be Judy Gascoyne, wife of the noted Isle of Wight poet, who, at 83, can now hardly walk because of a broken pelvis suffered in a fall. They met in 1973 in an Isle of Wight psychiatric hospital into which she'd admitted herself after the breakup of an earlier marriage to an Isle of Wight Veterinarian. In the hospital, Judy conducted a class in which she read poetry to the other patients. Without knowing that David was one of the patients in the audience, she happened to read a poem, which he had written.

"When he told me who he was," she was to write me in 1997, "we gradually fell in love and now have been married for 22 years."

In her letter, Judy also wrote me:

. . .I wasn't a very good cook, but the "Fiery Creations" Ron and Ray Foulk wanted me to look after Bob's children. . 

The plan had been for the kids to arrive with their parents. Bob had specified to the Foulk brothers that he was bringing them
and he didn't want to stay with his family in a hotel. 

. . .When it was decided not to bring them, I was put in charge of looking after you all.

Quite a task really, as I had no help and very little food in a strange house, and ten of you all to feed! Bob would insist that I took supper with you all, and the menu was mostly vegetarian because of George Harrison. Breakfast started at midday and was that much easier, since George had convinced us that porridge was better for us than bacon and eggs.

However, the morning of the big pop festival concert, I decided to buy a juicy steak (to sustain Bob!) It cost 15 shillings (75 p.) in today's money (50 cents U.S.), put a hole in the 7 pound;5 a week I had been given for food.

Anyway, while Bob was eating his steak, you had popped in for breakfast and you said, "Is that good, Bob?" And you looked at it longingly! So he immediately cut the steak in half and shared it with you. Those were generous, happy times and I've written about it in Jewels and Binoculars 1993 which came out about three years ago.

So you can imagine what a surprise it was to see your letter to David! . . .

I haven't eaten red meat since 1977 and don't miss it. But those were generous and happy times. Judy remembered me as "this big fat reporter from New York." Actually, there was a time when I weighed 240 pounds.

"Dylan often asked me about the Isle of Wight, Tennyson and poetry," Judy wrote. "I suggested he go to Quarry Abbey to hear the monks chanting. He and Sara enjoyed that. They didn't go swimming in the outdoor pool because they thought it was too cold."

In a newspaper clipping accompanying Judy's letter, she was quoted as saying:

"Then Bob very politely asked if George Harrison and his wife could stay. I had to agree, although it meant giving up my bedroom and dossing down on the kitchen floor."

Judy described Bob as "restless and nervous and very polite," and she remembered him having "green" eyes. She said she was unable to cook more than one meal a day and recalled that Bob "didn't like women giving him food." He ate mostly sandwiches, she said. "It was tiring---but exciting. I had to do everything from shopping and cooking to sorting out tiny stories to give the national newspapers."

Her happiest memories were listening to Bob and George and The Band trying out their new songs on their guitars. Sitting around the table after supper, they'd always swap a few songs on their acoustics. Asked what she wanted to hear, Judy would always request her favorite, Lay Lady Lay.

She always had plenty of visitors in the kitchen. Early in the morning, both Bob and George would come for cups of tea to bring to their wives, she said. And George, she added, would always insist on helping her with the "washing up."

When she ironed Bob's shirt for his performance, she said, she couldn't help feeling how envious his fans would be if they knew. Which is just about the way all of us Dylan hangers-on felt in one way or another. Honored and proud to be hanging out with him.

"I was a sort of mother figure," she also said. "All the time they were here, they didn't take drugs or drink alcohol. . ."

Little did she know.

Judy said there were 10 of us. Also with us was Albert's partner, Bert Block, who brought his wife and daughter. And then I asked No. 2 Beatles road manager Malcolm Evans to accompany George so he could assist me. And then there was Judy.

As for the members of The Band, they had accommodations at the Halland Hotel, a rambling old seafront hostelry rescued by this occasion from being boarded up.

My first problem was that no one had told The Band's road manager that Bob, Sara and I were going to one place and that The Band was going to another place. When I hurried to start loading Bob's and Sara's luggage onto the taxi going to Forelands Farm, I found that The Band's road manager had beat me to the luggage. He already had started loading Bob's and Sara's luggage together with The Band's luggage onto a taxi going to the Halland Hotel. When I tried to tell him he was making a mistake, he refused to pay any attention at all to me. When I tried to retrieve Bob and Sara's luggage from the boot of the wrong taxi, he gave me an argument, grabbing one end of a suitcase while I grabbed the other end until we were involved in a tug-o-war.

What did I know? I was just an amateur. I was just there for the ride (and the story). On the other hand, he was a pro! I thought he was going to challenge me to a fistfight. That's how dedicated a road manager Jonathan Taplin was. NEXT MONTH: THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN FORTY-EIGHT


CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMNS

The Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
blackj@bigmagic.com
  

THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ