The Dylanologists by David Kinney Page A

England. The writer found the events to be equal parts fun and “spooky.” For a long time he struggled to figure out the right description for the Dylan fan community, and then it came to him. They were like inmates in an asylum, but they didn’t know it because they were all suffering from the same pathetic mental illness. These fans were “struggling to come to grips with the grotesqueness of real life.” While most listeners took what they could take from Dylan’s music and moved on with their lives, obsessed fans continued “to draw and suck and crave far beyond the boundaries of good sense.” They listened to Dylan sing and talk about how wrongheaded it is to lead a life of lifelessness, and then they went on with their conventional lives.
    The self-flagellation went back and forth for a few issues, but Bauldie got over his crisis of confidence quickly and the Telegraph continued on, evolving into a glossy publication filled with interviews, bits of biography, and its own brand of song criticism. Bauldie grew into a central figure in fan circles until his death at age forty-seven in a helicopter crash.
    In 2000, Weberman was busted for money laundering, and while in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn he returned to his old obsession. He used the time inside to work out new and complicated theories about Dylan’s lyrics. He had never let go of the idea that there was a decipherable system to the lyrics, even the songs that sounded like streams of consciousness. “It borders on being a code,” he explained. Weberman decided he could translate Dylan’s words using a complex analytical system, a science that could “never be fully explained or demystified.” He described his findings in a 536-page Dylan to English Dictionary , in which Weberman argued that in Dylan’s language Texas might mean “Europe,” match could be a code word for “Klansmen,” phone sometimes stands for “radio”—“it could go on almost ad infinitum, ” he insisted.
    Reading Weberman brought to mind the workshop of the paranoid schizophrenic scientist John Nash in A Beautiful Mind , the walls plastered with newspapers, words from disassociated articles circled and connected by a thousand red lines, a lunatic’s web of meaning.
    â€œWhy are Dylan fans the worst?” an interviewer once asked music writer Greil Marcus. He didn’t mean all Dylan fans. He meant obsessives like Weberman.
    â€œI don’t know the answer to that. There’s no question you’re right,” Marcus said. “Hm. Not just the worst—they’re the stupidest. I think it’s because something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe that there is a secret behind every song. And if you unlock that secret then you’ll understand the meaning of life. Like every song is this treasure chest, and nothing is what it seems.”
    Weberman knew other fans reviled him. He thought it was because they didn’t want to admit they were wrong. They didn’t want to acknowledge that they had missed what he had found. Like his other conclusions, this one missed the mark. The reason he repulsed other obsessed fans was that they feared he was just a crazier version of them.
    Over the years, Weberman theorized that in addition to being a junkie, Dylan had contracted HIV. Contradicting everything that had been written about the man, Weberman concluded that Dylan was a conservative, a racist, and a Holocaust denier. After his many decades of analysis, he had decided that the transcendent song Dylan wrote in the Village in the spring of 1962, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was actually a racist rant in code. Dylan’s unspoken question was what to do about blacks demanding civil rights, and his answer was to “let ’em blow . . . in the wind,” or, in other words, to lynch them. “Nobody’s going to believe