At a latest displaying of “A Full Unknown,” the brand new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of younger girls settled in to look at the delicately good-looking Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.
They barely seen the 80-year-old man sitting subsequent to them, armored in a winter coat and hat that he by no means eliminated. Then, the movie started.
“That is all made up,” the person brayed on the display.
“It’s not what you assume it’s.”
“You’re scum!”
And so A.J. Weberman’s full-throated annotation of the movie continued for two hours and 20 minutes, replete with darkish interpretations of lyrics and references to how Dylan and the movie intersected with things like communism, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the C.I.A. and Barry Goldwater.
The group of girls exchanged confused glances, however mentioned nothing.
For greater than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — although it’s Weberman who has executed many of the intertwining.
He started as certainly one of Dylan’s keenest observers and followers, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted by means of trash cans exterior 94 MacDougal Avenue, the place the singer as soon as lived. However he grew to become Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on insanity.
Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood second, Weberman sees a renewed alternative to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for many years. He’s writing a brand new ebook deciphering Dylan’s lyrics, and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking for his tackle the movie.
Although his garbage-sifting has waned, his vendetta is as robust as ever.
Weberman, who has supported himself since his teenagers by promoting weed, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Riverdale. He briefly attended Michigan State College earlier than being kicked out after a pot arrest, after which settled within the East Village and finally fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
It was the Nineteen Sixties, and he helped arrange smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on institution figures. Dylan offered a lot of the soundtrack.
“I mentioned, ‘Wow, this man’s an actual revolutionary,’” he mentioned. “I used to be into the civil rights motion. I fell for it.”
He fell laborious. Weberman started laboriously compiling all of Dylan’s lyrics to review.
Whereas listening to Dylan songs on acid, Weberman grew to become satisfied that Dylan’s cryptic lyrics masked darkish meanings. He heard references to himself. He performed Dylan’s data backward and claimed to listen to sure messages, like “Don’t expose me” hid within the obscure music “Time Passes Slowly.”
Pop stars have lengthy been figures of obsession, relationship again not less than to the Beatles. The affable Liverpudlians impressed morbid theories amongst followers as their hair grew longer and their songs stranger. Some individuals performed their data backward for secret messages and scoured album covers for clues that Paul McCartney was lifeless. Charles Manson, the cult-leader killer, took inspiration from their phrases, which he thought predicted a race warfare. A deranged fan killed John Lennon.
As a shape-shifting rock poet — a prophet with a nasal yowl — Dylan and his opaque phrases had been notably enticing for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.
Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a category on Dylan at Harvard College, mentioned Weberman’s perception that sure lyrics seek advice from him are “just about fantasy and past self-obsession.”
“It’s laborious to know the way severe or grounded he’s at occasions,” the professor mentioned of Weberman, including, “To be truthful, he was all the time after what makes the songs tick — not that he was going to search out the solutions within the trash.”
Weberman mentioned his rising notion that Dylan was abandoning his leftist political messages had fueled his drive to disgrace the artist into “getting a conscience again.”
He took challenge with albums like Dylan’s 1969 nation providing “Nashville Skyline.” The report’s cowl confirmed the smiling singer benignly tipping his hat, and its songs lacked overt political and social commentary.
He started claiming publicly that Dylan had turn out to be strung out on medicine — which Dylan denied — and had “bought out the left” by abandoning the political music that had outlined his rise. He helped discovered the Dylan Liberation Entrance to re-radicalize Dylan and “free Bob Dylan from himself.”
Weberman mentioned he lastly met Dylan round 1971 when he knocked on his door.
“He mentioned, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look by means of his rubbish.”
Amid soiled diapers and kitchen scraps, he discovered private letters and household pictures from the family, the place Dylan lived together with his spouse, Sara, and their younger kids.
“I mentioned, ‘This isn’t a rubbish can, this a gold mine,’” he mentioned.
Weberman started stalking the singer, pestering him on the cellphone and in particular person and writing about him within the East Village Different, an underground paper the place he printed photographs of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even requested readers if anybody may receive a pattern of Dylan’s urine. He needed to check it for medicine.
Aron Kay, a Yippie buddy identified for throwing pies within the faces of firm figures, mentioned Weberman, greater than tutorial students, developed a visceral understanding of the songwriter and was decided to coax Dylan again to taking political stands about points just like the Vietnam Warfare.
“A.J. all the time mentioned, ‘You’re what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the foundation of the matter: his rubbish,” mentioned Kay. “Even when Bob might not acknowledge it, it was a psychic cultural bonding between them. There was like a love-hate factor.”
Or maybe Dylan needed no involvement in any respect. He finally stopped placing out objects of curiosity, and requested Weberman to go away him and his trash alone.
Weberman agreed, however finally returned with a reporter and photographer whom Sara chased away. Later that day, Weberman claims, Dylan noticed him on Elizabeth Avenue and attacked him.
Pressed for proof, Weberman mentioned Dylan made a transparent reference to the assault in his 1978 music “The place Are You Tonight?” with the lyric “laughter down on Elizabeth Avenue” and the traces: “It felt misplaced, my foot in his face / However he ought to have stayed the place his cash was inexperienced.”
On the songwriter’s thirtieth birthday in 1971, Weberman helped lead an indication exterior his constructing. Dylan finally moved out.
Dylan scoffed at Weberman’s claims about his lyrics, together with in a contentious cellphone dialog that Weberman recorded within the early Nineteen Seventies that was launched by Folkways Information as “Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman — The Historic Confrontation.”
Within the recording, Dylan calls Weberman a pig for going by means of his trash and appears exasperated at his insinuation into his life and lyrics.
“I’m not Dylan,” Dylan says. “You’re Dylan.”
At the moment, celebrities not often deal with obsessive followers themselves; the duty typically falls to legislation enforcement. A person who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded responsible to varied crimes, together with housebreaking, after breaking into her dwelling greater than 90 occasions. Final 12 months, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days exterior the TriBeCa dwelling of Taylor Swift, one other singer whose phrases are usually the topic of hypothesis and dissection.
However Weberman’s conduct occurred in an period when the police had been anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was extra believable than it’s at the moment. For his half, Weberman says he was not nuts. He mentioned he had common conversations with Dylan by cellphone and at his Houston Avenue music studio earlier than Dylan lastly obtained fed up with him.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman mentioned. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I used to be occupied with his poetry. It was political, not about his superstar.”
A spokesman for Dylan declined to remark.
Weberman made his mania right into a program, and expanded it. He taught a Dylanology class on the Alternate U., a countercultural heart within the Village. He introduced teams of scholars, and later different Dylan followers, to the MacDougal constructing. He expanded his explorations into the jetsam of different well-known individuals, together with former President Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“I moved on to different rubbish cans,” he mentioned.
Round 2000, Weberman’s personal trash was searched, by federal brokers who discovered weed packaging and later arrested him for cash laundering. Whereas serving a yearlong sentence, he created a 536-page “Dylan to English Dictionary,” a word-by-word evaluation of Dylan’s metaphorical and allegorical language.
As of late, Weberman is ending his newest ebook, “The Dylan Heresy,” which presents nonetheless extra exegesis.
Within the movie show just lately, Weberman alone applauded after Chalamet’s performances of the songs, however joined in when people followers within the movie booed Dylan’s electrified efficiency on the 1965 Newport People Pageant.
On Tuesday, Weberman stopped by Dylan’s outdated MacDougal Avenue constructing and, feeling sentimental, lifted a lid on one of many outdated trash cans and peered inside.
He walked across the nook onto Houston Avenue and stood in entrance of Dylan’s former music studio, the place he wrote his 1975 music “Fool Wind.”
“That music’s about me,” he mentioned. “Take a look at the way it begins: ‘Somebody’s obtained it in for me, they’re planting tales within the press.’”
