What’s Wrong with Bob Dylan’s Biographers? | The New Republic
Entry #203 in the Dylan to English Dictionary, billed by author A.J. Weberman as “the most useful and authoritative translation of Bob Dylan’s poetry you can own,” provides the Dylanological definition of garbage as: “Empty talk, vacuousness, inferior work produced by other artists.” And Weberman, who lays claim to coining the word Dylanology, knows garbage. In the early 1970s, he was infamous for sifting through the trash cans outside Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village apartment. Weberman was rummaging for clues, angling to unlock the mysteries of his idol: discarded song lyrics, intimate letters, something. What he mostly excavated, according to a 1971 Rolling Stone profile, amounted to “a mound of dog crap and a mountain of odoriferous, soiled disposable diapers.”
Like many in the early 1970s, Weberman saw his hero as an apostate, who had forsaken his role as the voice of a generation. He engaged Dylan with open hostility, lurking outside his house and drawing him into a series of belligerent (and highly entertaining) phone calls . Weberman subjected Dylan’s lyrics to microscopic close readings and played his records backward to reveal hidden meanings. Weberman’s Dylan to English Dictionary is a similarly demented project: the result of ingesting every word of Dylan’s songs into an early computer using punch cards, to find a way into those famously impenetrable lyrics. The results may be wholly cockamamie. But the undertaking itself illuminates so much of Dylanology, a discipline animated by the shared belief that Dylan needs to be deciphered. The mission of the Dylanologist is to serve as codebreaker, or some augur of the divine.
