Hyperion Books. - Who is that man?: in search of the real Bob Dylan

for
COCO PEKELIS
the true fortuneteller of my soul

and

MAX GUARINO
19852003
forever young

Contents

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.

FERNANDO PESSOA

In the spring of 1970 I saw Les Blanks lush, lyrical, and intimate documentaries about the blues singers Lightnin Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb (which Les was still editing). They are amazing filmshere was the life of the blues itselfand I told whomever I met that summer that they had to see them, that they were essential sacred texts of our culture. As it happened I spent the good part of a week in late June and early July on a train with a bunch of blues freaks (the Band, Leslie West, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead) and proselytized Less films to one and all. The Bands Rick Danko asked if Les (whod by this point moved in with me) might bring the films up to Woodstock so they could all see them. Les and I borrowed a car and drove up to Woodstock to show the films to the Band and assorted Bearsville hipoisie. They were all suitably awed.

A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Jon Taplin, the Bands manager. Turns out Bobby had heard about Less films and wanted to see them. He was going to be in New York on Friday, and Jon asked if I could set up a screening. No need to ask which Bobby he meant. This was the Bobby, Sir Bob himself, my idol, the sublime, inscrutable Bob Dylan. Some years ago Dylan and Howard Alk had taken footage from the Pennebaker documentary of his 1966 European tour and made it into a maddening methedrine-addled antidocumentary called Eat the Document . Taplin explained that Dylan now wanted to release Eat the Document , but in order to distribute it he needed an extra forty-minute film to go with it. He suggested Bob take a look at one of Les Blanks documentaries.

Les is a large bear of a characterbearded, slow talkin, Southern. He is a man of few words and fewer effusions of emotion, but the idea that Bob Dylan might see his films visibly animated him. But where to screen the films? My walk-up tenement on East 4th Street was out of the question. By chance I had purloined the keys to my publishers fancy brownstone apartment on a fashionable side street on the Upper West Side while he was on holiday. Just the spot.

The day came. On a swelteringly hot afternoon in late July, Les and I lugged a 16 mm projector, a folding screen, and cans of film uptown on the subway. We set it all up, arranged and rearranged the furniture, and waited. Hours went by. Anxious thoughts attacked us. Did we give them the right address? Was this the right day? Finally they arrived. The Band entered in their cowboy regalia, along with wives and girlfriends in airy summer dresses. And then there was Bob himself. It was as if he had fallen out of the sky from another climate entirelythe dead of winter actually. He was dressed in a long wool overcoat, hat, and gloves (and shades, of course). Low blood sugar, perhaps due to his habit, I thought somewhat uncharitably.

Like a sleepwalker taking his nocturnal stroll, Bob walked straight into the house flanked by Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko and sat down. There were no introductions, no small talk. Even members of the Band who knew him as well as anybody treated him with the deference usually reserved for foreign dignitaries.

While the men retired to the dining room where the projector was set up, the women flipped through European fashion magazines in another room. Les, in a state of alert apprehension, ran the Lightnin Hopkins film. When it was over Dylan cryptically signaled that hed seen enough. The lights came up. We all waited for him to say something, but the oracle was silent. Les was now palpably humming with anxiety. I had to do something. I walked over to Dylan, who was still sitting there swaddled in his overcoat and gloves, and asked, How did you like the film, Bobby? What was I going to do, call him Mr. Dylan?

He regarded me with a deadpan expression and, passing over my question entirely, asked, Whos the architect of this houuuse? He spoke the way he sang, leaning on the syllables, the way a cowboy might lean on a bar. I was still listening to the music of the words when I realized he was asking me a question. I froze. He couldnt mean something as literal as this, could he? Dylan being Dylan and all. Of course not. It was code; it was an allegorical question. But about what? I was in a roomful of books and they all had the same title. Like the wicked messenger or Frankie Lee, I was in the presence of the Sibyl but too witless to grasp the message.

The words architect and house reverberated in my brain. They ballooned into sound sharks and swam eerily through my synapses. They bristled with archaic meanings. They grew huge. They began to fill the room, monstrous dollhouse words that would turn the building inside out if I didnt stop them. All this was taking place in a fraction of a second I hoped, but it must have been somewhat longer because Dylan spoke again: Ya know who built this place?

Okay, the only solution now was to play it straight, pretend to take him at face value. Bobby, I said (after all wed been through we were now firmly on a first-name basis), I figure this house must have been built in the nineteenth century.

But centuries and stuff like that meant nothing to Dylan. He wanted that architect . So can we get this guy? he persisted. For a moment there, I was Bob Dylans contractor. This was all a hundred years ago, I said. Man, the guy is long gone. Mundane matters like the life expectancy of architects or muleskinners didnt enter into it. His idea of history was porous. There were no specific time periods. Everybody whod ever lived was a contemporary: Noah, Jesse James, Bessie Smith, or St. Augustine himself. They all lived in the timeline of the songs.

And then there was that other matter, the onion-domed Xanadu that Dylan was building at Zuma Beach. Like anyone else involved in building a house he was fixated on the minutiae of wallpaper, carpets, and kitchen cabinets. Enigmatic Bob, it turned out, was seriously into paneling. Bob walked over to the intricately paneled oak walls of the dining room.

Howd they dooo that? he asked as if it were some lost art.

Well, you know, with miter boxes, I guess.

Miiiter boxes? Bob liked the sound of the word. Bishops and carpenters, you know, they all used those things.

No one mentioned the movies or whether he liked them or whether Dylan ever considered using them as part of the thing he was putting together for Eat the Document . I went to get a drink of water from the kitchen. When I returned, the Gypsy had gone.

As Les and I walked down the street we wondered how often Dylan encountered situations in which the simplest question could throw his devout followers into a state of paralysis. What if, like some Zen master around whom meanings multiplied like flies, he could never order a cup of coffee or buy a pair of shoes or find a carpenter because no one would believe him capable of such commonplace utterances? Les didnt seem to mind that much that he wasnt going to be on a double bill with Dylan. Dylan had seen one of his movies and that was enough for him.