At a latest displaying of “A Full Unknown,” the brand new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of younger ladies settled in to observe 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 screen.
“It’s not what you suppose 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 ladies exchanged confused glances, however stated nothing.
For greater than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — although it’s Weberman who has carried out many of the intertwining.
He started as considered one of Dylan’s keenest observers and followers, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted by way of trash cans exterior 94 MacDougal Road, 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 e book decoding 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 Sixties, and he helped arrange smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on institution figures. Dylan offered a lot of the soundtrack.
“I stated, ‘Wow, this man’s an actual revolutionary,’” he stated. “I used to be into the civil rights motion. I fell for it.”
He fell onerous. 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 tune “Time Passes Slowly.”
Pop stars have lengthy been figures of obsession, relationship again no 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 have been notably engaging for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.
Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a category on Dylan at Harvard College, stated Weberman’s perception that sure lyrics seek advice from him are “just about fantasy and past self-obsession.”
“It’s onerous to understand how critical or grounded he’s at instances,” the professor stated of Weberman, including, “To be honest, 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 stated 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 document’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 change into strung out on medicine — which Dylan denied — and had “offered 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 stated he lastly met Dylan round 1971 when he knocked on his door.
“He stated, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look by way of his rubbish.”
Amid soiled diapers and kitchen scraps, he discovered private letters and household pictures from the family, the place Dylan lived along with his spouse, Sara, and their younger youngsters.
“I stated, ‘This isn’t a rubbish can, this a gold mine,’” he stated.
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 photos of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even requested readers if anybody might get hold of 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 multinational figures, stated Weberman, greater than educational 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 Struggle.
“A.J. all the time stated, ‘You might be what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the basis of the matter: his rubbish,” stated 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 depart 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 Road and attacked him.
Pressed for proof, Weberman stated Dylan made a transparent reference to the assault in his 1978 tune “The place Are You Tonight?” with the lyric “laughter down on Elizabeth Road” and the strains: “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 illustration 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 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 way of his trash and appears exasperated at his insinuation into his life and lyrics.
“I’m not Dylan,” Dylan says. “You’re Dylan.”
Right this moment, celebrities hardly ever deal with obsessive followers themselves; the duty usually falls to legislation enforcement. A person who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded responsible to numerous crimes, together with housebreaking, after breaking into her house greater than 90 instances. Final 12 months, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days exterior the TriBeCa house of Taylor Swift, one other singer whose phrases are repeatedly the topic of hypothesis and dissection.
However Weberman’s conduct occurred in an period when the police have been anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was extra believable than it’s immediately. For his half, Weberman says he was not nuts. He stated he had common conversations with Dylan by cellphone and at his Houston Road music studio earlier than Dylan lastly bought fed up with him.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman stated. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I used to be focused on his poetry. It was political, not about his movie star.”
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 stated.
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 e book, “The Dylan Heresy,” which presents nonetheless extra exegesis.
Within the movie show not too long ago, Weberman alone applauded after Chalamet’s performances of the songs, however joined in when folks followers within the movie booed Dylan’s electrified efficiency on the 1965 Newport Folks Pageant.
On Tuesday, Weberman stopped by Dylan’s previous MacDougal Road constructing and, feeling sentimental, lifted a lid on one of many previous trash cans and peered inside.
He walked across the nook onto Houston Road and stood in entrance of Dylan’s former music studio, the place he wrote his 1975 tune “Fool Wind.”
“That tune’s about me,” he stated. “Have a look at the way it begins: ‘Somebody’s bought it in for me, they’re planting tales within the press.’”
Produced by Jack D’Isidoro.