The Dylanologists by David Kinney

he pioneered and named. “As long as you don’t come up with another system that’s more complicated and makes more sense, as far as I’m concerned mine stands. My system stands. You see what I mean?”
    â€œNo,” Dylan replied.
    The conversation ended, the story ran, and later in 1971 Weberman staged a birthday party/DLF protest at Dylan’s doorstep. Hundreds of people showed up. Someone brought a cake topped with hypodermic needles. The next time the Dylanologist stopped by the house, Dylan’s wife angrily chased him off. Walking home, Weberman suddenly encountered his hero. Dylan was very angry. The singer landed some punches, slammed Weberman’s head on the sidewalk, tore off his DLF button, and rode away on his bicycle, the fan later alleged.
    Weberman would go on to overturn the trash cans of Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. He wrote about his discoveries, converted some of the trash into original art, and earned a measure of fame in the pages of Rolling Stone and Esquire . After their fight, Dylan moved west, and Weberman dropped Dylan for a while. He wrote a book about Kennedy assassination theories.
    Then, in the early 1980s, a visitor appeared: John Bauldie, a teacher, writer, and Dylan fan from England. Bauldie had recently launched a fanzine called the Telegraph . The first issue was a few pages photocopied, folded, and stapled at the spine. On the cover it reproduced a note he had received from another Dylan disciple: “That’s the odd thing about Dylan; he reduces me almost to the level of a screaming groupie, anxious for details about what he eats for breakfast and for the latest photograph of him and, at the same time inspires me to a contemplation of the most crucial questions about life and Art . . .”
    Bauldie made a trip to New York and went to see Weberman with a friend. The three of them spoke for a while at a dog park, then Weberman invited them back to his apartment. It was eye-opening. They passed through an armored lobby with steel doors, a video camera, and tear-gas canisters. Weberman was decked out in camouflage and had a shotgun in the cupboard. “Nobody will get me in here,” he remarked. They all sat there in Weberman’s living room, surrounded by boxes of papers, clippings, and photos. As they looked through it all, Weberman said suddenly, “You want this stuff? Take it. I’m all through with it.” They took it, but Bauldie was deeply unsettled. The original Dylanologist acted like a crazy man, and Bauldie wondered what that said about his own Dylan habit. “He scared me,” Bauldie wrote later.
    He returned from America to find a letter penned by a thoughtful librarian and poet named Roy Kelly asking pointed questions about the Telegraph . Wasn’t this a bit pathetic? Dylan took his enthusiasm for words and music, and created new songs. What were we doing with what he gave us? All this pseudoacademic research seemed silly. Why couldn’t they find something better to do with their time? Kelly felt foolish reading the stuff and ashamed by his fannishness. “Is no one seized by the absurdity?”
    Bauldie published the letter, and it triggered a frank discussion of fandom. His readers were of two minds. One argued that it was Dylan’s inspired performances that fed the cult of personality. This fan wanted the concert listings because he wanted every recording; he didn’t want to miss a single “illuminative flash of genius.” At the same time, “I know that, put together, my habits add up to something more than reasonable interest. What they add up to is more like a weakness, a compulsive need.” But as long as he could still separate the trivial from the important, he wouldn’t feel like he had lost his grip on reality.
    Another correspondent took a darker view. The Telegraph was launched after a series of Dylan fan conventions in