Doing Dylan is a Trip Unto Itself
Luce, Phillip Abbott
Book Review: Doing Dylan is a Trip Unto Itself Anthony Scaduto Grosset & Dunlap, $7.95 They tell me that Bob Dylan lives out here near me. He apparently spooked a group of high school students...
...I was obliged, being the Associate Editor of Rights, then the newsletter of the ECLC, to convey James Baldwin to the banquet...
...I would rather have picked up Bobby, but Gene Foreman was entrusted to that task and it proved near fatal...
...Dylan is an individual and a poet...
...Envision a cold December night in New York City...
...Webberman, is convinced that Dylan was using drugs at some point in his career because A.J...
...Scaduto's book is New York Times' computerized rehash...
...The book is a bummer...
...So much for hogs...
...The way it happened was Dylan decided to spin a yarn, but the sun spots were obviously out of focus...
...The other evening, Barbra came home from the theatre where she works and told me that she had gotten Bob Zimmerman to write a note to our son Dylan...
...Unfortunately, for the ECLC at least, is the fact that Dylan attempted to leave the ballroom prior to his award, but was stopped at the door by the very physical presence of Edith Tiger (now the super boss of the ECLC) because he "had to accept" the award...
...Dylan today is apparently much more in the New Left than he was during my acquaintanceship with him...
...The only time that I did any Dope with Dylan was one night with Peter Yarrow in the West Village and I ultimately had to be helped into a cab and sent back to my apartment in Hell's Kitchen...
...I can recall a number of talks up at Corliss Lamont's own "private property" on the Palisades, the interchange falling between Joan Baez, Michael Knew (am I the only one around who will admit to Michael and his relationship with Joan...
...I am not intimating that Dylan was ever anything more than an individualist, but the sheer importance of that tact has often been covered over in the propaganda prose of the New Left politico-rock-dopies in their quest to force Dylan into their very own mold of reality...
...found some pieces of sterile cotton among the remains of garbage around Dylan's New York abode in 1969-70...
...It's bad enough that the Red Chinese reprinted one of my poems and referred to me as a "leading Negro poet" without the Foreman episode...
...A book about that evening would be as popular as Peyton Place, except for the fact that most of the audience would rather forget it happened...
...He apparently spooked a group of high school students some months ago by appearing unannounced in their classroom...
...I attempted to contact Dylan through a school-teacher source, but apparently my note went astray because only Barbra has seen the man that is so poorly portrayed in Anthony Scaduto's book Bob Dylan: A Biography...
...But, when Dylan does a disaster, like his rewriting of the shooting of George Jackson, the New Left flips over and once again bootlicks...
...When Dylan finally appeared on TV and did a record with the Cash-Nashville people, the New Left freaked and went into their paranoid anti-working class cowboy mentality...
...Before the lawsuits, I am not intimating that Dylan was, to coin the phrase, coming out of the closet, but rather only that at this juncture within the circle of the Lion's Heads' magnificent Alsace-Lorraine chef's cuisine, lots of things were happening, but they had some style...
...Through it all, James Baldwin was cool...
...I feel it's time to set some facts straight...
...The New Left protects its innards-almost as carefully as the Old Left...
...Nowhere in the book is this whole bohemian interculture mentioned...
...It just so happens that I was at the banquet and have the transcript of the tapes taken there...
...rather than the jaded lyrics of the Left...
...As a matter of historical note, Mr...
...If you have never had your ass patted by Peter Orlovsky (Ginsburg's lover of the period) then you have missed the significance of the numerous drunken late night suppers we all had at the Lion's Head...
...He not only insulted the age barrier by noting the bald heads, but had the audacity to note that we all had a bit of the Oswald in us...
...This at the very time that the left-wing was caught in its own dialectic about Dylan...
...I was to speak before a front group of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee the next week and they demanded that I submit a copy of my remarks prior to speaking...
...I do not know that Dylan did H, but I do know that he did Dope...
...Add to that, a posh hotel and a convention hall full of old and-or middle-aged veterans of the Long Island Communist Party or fellow-travelers gathering to show off their furs and money in the presence of Corliss Lamont and the ECLC staff...
...Remember who had just been shot...
...My hope is that the future holds more hope for the biography of Bob Dylan than Mr...
...Baldwin, on the other hand, was neither interested in us nor in the whole of the ECLC banquet...
...Hentoff wasn't there and if he were he would hardly own up to the travesty that took place that night in the Americana Hotel...
...Modesty aside, the drunken Dylan scandal at the ECLC dinner began with his accepting the award in my name and for all "the people who went to Cuba...
...According to the book, Bob Dylan received the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee "in behalf of James Foreman and SNCC...
...The same mythology is portrayed in Scaduto's book, but in my case it is conducted by omission...
...1971 found the New...
...In 1964, the whole band of Village freaks were intuned with Allen Ginsburg and his assemblage of people...
...Baldwin was most straight and devoted to trying to cope with the white super-libs while worrying that the commies in the audience would not really relate to him...
...But Dylan went on to yet alienate what was left of the cocktail set...
...The issue is (and Scaduto does do credit to the evening by noting that the description of the affair was Kcntoff's and not Dylan's) what happened...
...Even the New York Daily News got it on, with Lillian Roxan calling the book "a captivating and obsessive (sic) portrait of a genius...
...The locusts were indeed loose in the land...
...Albert Maher and I smuggled Mr...
...Phillip Abbott Luce...
...When he appeared at Newport and had the audacity to stop the contrite mimic of the thirties' syndicalism sound and came on with electric background, the Old Left went Stalinist and not only booed and booed, but were off Dylan and back to Seeger as if shot out of the Kremlin...
...I cannot accept the pseudo-literary New York hell bent for intellectualism bent that ascribes all favorable facets of art to the left-wing simply because the left-wing so decides...
...But Albert Maher and his friends from Harvard had made it possible for a number of us to discover the Timothy Leary road a good bit before the Americana caper...
...Dylan was a social anarchist at that time and almost apolitical when it came to left-wing agit-prop kinds of moving the masses...
...The whole thing was bizarre...
...There is nothing new in it and nothing of importance emerges for the Dylanphiles...
...For those of you still titilated, I am afraid that I can only recall kissing Dylan once (tongue in cheek) at Clark Foreman's home (father of Gene and then the director of the ECLC and (definately not a communist), following a riot at New York's Town Hall where I had been among many speakers following our trip to Castroland and our first appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Had time and grace had their sway, the whole evening might have been pulled off, but Dylan could not escape either through the doors or through the bottle...
...Albert and I were often trying to get both Joan and Bob into the violence trip of the Progressive Labor Party and they both rejected it completely...
...Baldwin down Central Park West to the Americana and were turned on by his whole being...
...So much for politics and art...
...Everyone in the Dylan assemblage of my time was doing some Dope...
...nice guy" to the old ladies and the bourgeois communists, while Dylan and Gene were wandering around like a couple of Bowery bums...
...Scaduto is to Dylan what Irving was to Hughes...
...This whole Dylan episode had vast repercussions on the left...
...I insist upon correcting this point because I am tired of being confused with James Foreman...
...Scaduto makes it a point to discredit Webberman "by the roll up your sleeve trick...
...We attempted to use him, but he held strong...
...The influence of Cash in 1964 is especially important if we are to consider Dylan and his music outside of the col-iectivist culture trip we are subjected to by the mass media rock magazines and pundits...
...Enough lies exist in this universe...
...Our son was not named after Bob Dylan, but after Dylan Thomas...
...I shall attempt to deal with them, but you must excuse me if I get a bit catty...
...Clark Foreman and his wife, Mari, Bob Dylan, Albert Maher, Ted Stuart, and myself...
...To keep it short, Dylan blew the evening by giving a political dada speech while accepting the award...
...Interesting as the thought might be, the reality states that neither I nor any of the early travel ban busters swam in the altogether with the head of the Cuban Communist government...
...Jerry Rubin lied in his scatological study, Do It!, when he said that I went "skinny dipping" with Fidel Castro...
...Even if we all do look alike...
...The 1963-64 period, which is the only time of which I have any knowledge of Dylan, was full of pot, hash, acid,and (may God spare us) Gene Foreman's heroin needle...
...Because this "review" is more an attempt at filling in various segments of the era for posterity than in debating comma faults, allow me one last note on that era...
...The George Jackson dribble is agit-prop at its worst and it can only be hoped that in the relatively near future Dylan will again return to the individ-valism of Frank Meyer, whom he knew...
...In other words, I think that, the left-wing used Dylan for what they could, when they wanted, and then simply oystered him into their super-hyped epistemology of the present in order to make it appear as if he were always one of them...
...Scaduto relies upon no less an authority than Nat Hentoff for his info on the ECLC banquet...
...I am at odds with my old friend Carl Oglesby when he notes in the Scaduto book that the New Left took Dylan to their political bosom - only because I am inclined to find it more rape than love...
...Yet, the mystique is real and the subject is certainly a vital part of our culture...
...Bob Dylan is a name that, like it or not, has captured a part of the essence of the 1960s...
...So, he accepted the award (in my name) and lost the ECLC at least $10,000 in the process...
...James Baldwin was the major thrust at the dinner and Dylan was supposed to receive the award and say a few words and be on his way...
...York Times and Merle Miller coming out of the closet...
...The Scaduto book also abruptly overlooks the whole issue of Dope in the Dylan mythology...
...They just couldn't shut him up...
...It is within this context that I shall attempt to infuse some information regarding the Dylan trip that I took...
...The New Left garbage collector (and heir apparent in the zippie movement), A.J...
...Gag, choke, burp...
...The rest of the reviews that I read, from Penthouse to Creem seem equally adulatory...
...There are at least two other deletions from what Publishers Weekly has called Scaduto's "superbly detailed and important biography...
...The last thing the latent left-wing wanted to hear was some long-haired weirdo suddenly striking into their very private political parts...
...Scaduto might have dispelled a few, but instead he only added to the list...
...Dylan was an individual when I knew him and I was struck with the fact that he showed me a note from Johnny Cash in 1964 remarking that Cash was the immediate influence in his life...
...Consider for a moment the various stages of Dylan and the response of the New Left (let alone the Old Lefty...
...My own position was compromised from the beginning, as I had to be Mr...
...Michael Ochs, Phil's brother, captures the essence of the Dylan trip when he wrote: "A lot of us grew up with Bob Dylan, and now that we are all searching for the next horizon, Dylan included, it's a real joy to relive those early years...
...I am not intimating that Dylan was doing acid then (that night) but I know he was smoking Dope with Gene and drinking an inordinate amount of Beaujolais wine...
...He was either drunk or stoned: remember this was 1963 and most of the left was still ignorant about Dope...
...Dylan was not at any time a communist or even a fellow traveler...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
