‘You’ve got to live up to your responsibility as a culture hero. You’re DYLAN, man, every freak has a soft spot in their heart for you’ (Dylanologist A.J. Weberman, 1971)

‘The Weatherpeople, the heaviest of white revolutionary groups, deliberately took their name from a line in “Bringing It All Back Home”’ (cultural historian Roger Lewis, 1972)

‘I’ve never been into politics’ (Bob Dylan, 1984)

This is a story of cultural power and misguided zeal; political violence and passionate rhetoric; deluded hero-worship and defiant individualism. It centres around a man who, for more than three decades, has consistently declared his lack of interest in politics, of whatever hue; and a cast of underground warriors who chose this same man as a beacon of revolutionary hope. It involves some of the most notorious (or heroic, depending on your slant) US political groups of the late 60s and early 70s; a prison radical whose assassination briefly reconnected the ‘movement’ with its icon; a counter-culture stalker who took it upon himself to become that icon’s public conscience; assorted members of the Beatles; and Bob Dylan, the man who penned the words ‘don’t follow leaders’, and was promptly claimed as the standard-bearer of a revolutionary vanguard he never wanted to join. Strange days indeed...

The story begins with the leaders of the black revolutionary movement: the Black Panther Party. They emerged from Oakland, California in 1966, and rapidly became a national force, part Marxist revolutionary vanguard, part provider of community aid to America’s ghettos. By June 1969, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was dubbing the Panthers as ‘without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’. He selected them as the chief target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign, which invested millions of dollars and thousands of government personnel into infiltrating and undermining ‘subversive’ organisations.

The explosive collisions between police and party in the late 60s produced a constellation of heroes and martyrs. Prime among them was the Panthers’ founder, Huey P. Newton, jailed for his role in a shoot-out in which a police officer was killed, and Newton himself seriously injured. From October 1967, when the confrontation occurred, until he was released (and later cleared on a legal technicality) in August 1970, ‘Free Huey’ became one of the clarion calls of the American left, black and white.

The journey of Newton and the party he created was chronicled in Seize The Time, a 1970 book by Bobby Seale, Newton’s first colleague in the Panthers. By the time it was published, Seale was himself in prison on murder charges (he was eventually acquitted). He had won further notoriety as one of the Chicago Eight, a group of leading radicals who were alleged to have fomented the riots at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968. Seale’s stature as a revolutionary icon was assured during the Chicago trial, when the judge ordered him to be bound and gagged in the courtroom after interrupting proceedings with demands for his constitutional rights to be upheld.

Among his tales of police brutality and revolutionary fervour, Seale inserted a chapter entitled ‘Huey Digs Bob Dylan’. The setting is the home of radical lawyer Beverly Axelrod in 1966: Newton and Seale are laying up the pages for the first issue of their party newspaper, cunningly titled The Black Panther.

‘While we were laying that paper out, in the background we could hear a record, and the song was named “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan. Now the melody was in my head... but I didn’t really hear the words. This record played after we stayed up laying out the paper. And it played the next night after we stayed up laying out the paper. I think it was around the third afternoon that the record was playing. We played that record over and over and over.

‘Huey P. Newton made me recognize the lyrics. Not only the lyrics of the record, but what the lyrics meant in the record. What the lyrics meant in the history of racism that had perpetuated itself in the world. Huey would say: “Listen, listen – man, do you hear what he is saying?” Huey had such insight into how racism existed, how racism had perpetuated himself. He had such a way of putting forth in very clear words what he related directly to those symbolic things or words that were coming out from Bobby Dylan.

‘I remember that the song got to the point where he was talking about this cat handing in his ticket and he walked up to the geek, and the geek handed him a bone. Well, this didn’t relate to me, so I said: “Huey, look, wait a minute, man”. I said, “What are you talking about a geek? What is a geek? What the hell is a geek?” And Huey explains it.’

Newton’s explanation runs for almost a page: ‘“a geek”, he tells Seale, “is usually a circus performer”, who has been badly injured and can’t work any longer. But he knows no other life than the circus, so he agrees to do the lowliest jobs just to stay in the community. Maybe he even agrees to eat live chickens in a cage as a freak attraction.’ Newton continues:

‘These people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this, so during his performance, he eats the raw chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone.

‘Then to put it on the broader level, what Dylan is putting across is middle-class people or upper-class people who sometimes take a Sunday afternoon off and put their whole family into a limousine, and they go down to the black ghettos to watch the prostitutes and watch the decaying community.(...) That makes the middle-class and upper-class people, who are down there because they get pleasure out of it, freaks.

And this goes into the one-eyed midget. What is the one-eyed midget? He screams and howls at Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones doesn’t know what’s happening. Then the one-eyed midget says, give me some juice or go home. And this again is very symbolic of people who are disadvantaged. They’re patronizing Mr. Jones, the middle-class people. You know, they’re not interested in them coming down for entertainment. But if they’ll pay them for a trick, then they’ll tolerate them, or else they’ll drive them out of the ghettoes. This song is hell. You’ve got to understand that this song is saying a hell of a lot about society.’

Seale digests this explanation, and notes: ‘Bobby Dylan says, you don’t know what’s happening, do you, Mr. Jones? And to hand him the naked bone was too much – was really too much.’

An insignificant if amusing interlude, you might think, suggesting that Huey P. Newton missed his vocation as a literary critic. But as Seale explains later in the chapter, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ came to occupy a key place in the imaginative landscape of the Panthers:

‘This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. And in the background, while we were putting this paper out, this record came up and I guess a number of papers were published, and many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael [who popularised the phrase “black power” – PD] also liked that record. This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set.

The brothers had some big earphones over at Beverly’s house that would sit on your ears and had a kind of direct stereo atmosphere and when you got loaded it was something else! These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. They’d be trying to relate an understanding about what was going on, because old Bobby did society a big favor when he made that particular sound. If there’s any more he made that I don’t understand, I’ll just ask Huey P. Newton to interpret them for us and maybe we can get a hell of a lot more out of brother Bobby Dylan, because old Bobby, he did a good job on that set.’

At his home, shortly before his arrest in 1967, Newton was caught on camera, stripped to the waist, surrounded by cultural debris – the San Francisco phone directory, a Wes Montgomery album, issues of The Black Panther, radical black texts. In his hands was the Highway 61 Revisited album.

The black power movement of the late 60s was sharply divided between cultural nationalists, who spurned all vestiges of white ideology, and Marxist revolutionaries, who were prepared to align themselves (at least on some issues) with elements of the white New Left. The first group dismissed rock radicals out of hand; poet and dramatist Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) described white protest songs as ‘passionate luxurious ego demonstrations’, doubtless well-intentioned but flawed by their creators’ status as oppressors.

Amongst the black Marxists, however, Dylan retained a more privileged position. Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers’ Minister Of Information in the late 60s, noted in an essay for the left-wing paper Ramparts that Stokely Carmichael had used Dylan’s ‘Mr Jones’ line to denigrate his opponents in a vicious TV debate.

Cleaver himself was renowned for his equal devotion to Dylan and to Mao Tse-Tung. In an open letter to California Governor Ronald Reagan, written from prison in May 1968, he warned that Dylan’s ‘empty handed beggar is at the door, except that his hand is not empty any more. He’s got a gun in his hand. And he’s stopped begging. In fact, he’s nearly stopped talking, because it’s becoming clear to him that hardly anyone is listening. When he finally stops talking altogether, he is going to start shooting. Have you been listening to me, Governor?’ (Post-Prison Writings & Speeches)

That year, black activist Julius Lester offered an alternative interpretation of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ to readers of the US radical newspaper, The Guardian:

‘There is a class of whites who call themselves liberals, who will agree with anything a revolutionary may say up to the point of agreeing to what must be done to solve the problem. At that point he “puts his eyes in his pocket and his nose to the ground”, as Bob Dylan so graphically described the phenomenon of consciously refusing to see. The white liberal is the Mr. Jones who knows that something is happening and knows what it is and all he can do is become filled with despair.’ (Revolutionary Notes)

Lester’s Mr. Jones apparently knew more than Dylan intended. But the same article demonstrated that Dylan’s words were open to endless readings in the late 60s, all of them favourable to the prophets of black liberation. He concluded his assault on closet liberals by asserting that the time had come for them to step aside, and for true revolutionaries to unite: ‘Everybody’s saying they ain’t gon’ work on Maggie’s farm no more’.

While the Black Panthers flirted with Dylanology, other sectors of the New Left were also engaging with Dylan’s work. As Roger Lewis noted in Outlaws Of America, ‘The figure of Bob Dylan seems to overshadow every other single performer in both influence and ideas. His lyrics are cited with the same familiarity as the Torah to the Hassidic Jew.’

Familiar quotations littered the pages of the radical press, usually appended as incontrovertible truths: ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’; ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears’; predictable lines from ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’. Feminist activist Marilyn Salzman Webb could borrow some of Dylan’s rhetorical power by heading a crusading column in Win magazine ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’, without needing to connect the two texts any more overtly than that. Writing in the programme for the 1969 Woodstock Festival (itself named after the town where Dylan lived at the time), Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman opened with the expected scriptural quotation (‘He not busy being born...’) and ended a vehement passage about the Chicago Eight with the promise: ‘The hard rain’s already falling and it wasn’t just the politicians that are getting wet’.

His comrade Jerry Rubin went a step further in his utopian brochure for ‘Yippieland’. This post-apocalyptic paradise would be a land where ‘The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm’, etc. etc. Meanwhile, Rubin vowed: ‘At community meetings all over the land, Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem.’

Like holy writ, Dylan’s lyrics were regarded as failsafe ammunition for the radical cause. Yet one white New Left organisation took their identification with Dylan, and their commitment to the revolution, several stages further than the rest.

With doomed inevitability, the American left fragmented as the crisis of the late 60s neared its climax. Students For A Democratic Society (alias SDS) was launched in 1960 as a vehicle for idealistic, young socialists to operate outside the straitjacket of the Communist Party. As the twin crusades of the late 60s – Vietnam and black power – gradually merged into what became known as ‘the Movement’, SDS occupied the same vanguard position amongst white radicals as the Panthers did amongst their black comrades.

Yet at the moment when it should have been at its most potent, SDS was split by arguments about correct revolutionary tactics. One faction argued that the organisation should play a supporting role to the Marxist working-class, and should not be distracted by calls for black liberation, international solidarity and feminism. Their opponents took a broader perspective, declaring that the struggle for black power should take precedence over traditional Communist calls for a working-class uprising; and that students and young Americans in general represented a potentially revolutionary force in their own right, regardless of their class origins.

The latter faction announced themselves with a paper titled after a marriage of lyrics from John Sebastian (of the Lovin’ Spoonful) and Bob Dylan: Hot Town: Summer In The City, Or I Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm No More. Two months later, at the SDS Convention in June 1969, they presented a lengthy manifesto for their revolution: ‘You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows’. Both titles were apparently suggested by Ted Gold, a popular member of SDS.

Gold’s borrowed rhetoric stuck. As the SDS Convention debated the pressing issue of how exactly the American ruling class should be overthrown, his preferred faction became known as ‘Weatherman’ – or, later, the Weathermen. (Or, later still, in a gesture of anti-sexist solidarity, the Weather Underground.)

The Weatherman collective soon outgrew SDS. In September, they mounted their first violent demonstration, outside the courtroom where the Chicago Eight were being tried. In October, they staged several ‘Days Of Rage’ in the same city, hoping to bring tens of thousands of activists onto the streets. Instead, fewer than a thousand joined the protest, several hundred of whom (including most of the Weatherman vanguard) were arrested.

Faced with the reality that they did not control a mass organisation, Weatherman took the decision to go underground, and become an urban terrorist group. So it was that Bob Dylan’s name was regularly cited in press stories about bomb explosions at New York City’s police HQ, the Bank of America and (their most stunning PR coup, in 1972) the Pentagon.

Through it all, Dylan’s words remained Weatherman’s shared language. Lorraine Rosal’s August 1969 plea that feminism should be added to the group’s revolutionary palette was titled Who Do They Think Would Bury You (from ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, of course). While the self-styled Motor City 9 faction from Detroit showed a predilection for Doors quotations, the original Weather leaders kept the faith. Bring The War Home (i.e. from Vietnam to the American streets) joined Power To The People as a common slogan in their letters and manifestos; Dylanology quickly translated that into an August 1969 pronouncement titled Bringing The War Back Home. Weather activist Shin’ya Ono (Yoko Ono’s cousin) recognised the irony of naming their group after a class of person whom Bob Dylan had declared unnecessary, and issued his own manifesto: You Do Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.

There was even a Weatherman songbook, with which the underground revolutionaries celebrated their outlaw status in their hideaways. The Supremes’ ‘Stop! In The Name Of Love’ was rewritten as ‘Stop Your Imperialist Plunder’; ‘Maria’ from West Side Story became ‘Kim Il Sung’ (‘the most beautiful sound I ever heard’), and in an uncanny prophecy of punk, ‘White Christmas’ mutated into ‘White Riot’ (‘I’m dreaming of a white riot/just like the one (on) October 8th’).

Dylan’s work was presumably too sacred to undergo mass transformation, and only ‘Lay Lady Lay’ was considered suitable for inclusion – retitled ‘Lay Elrod Lay’ in honour of an unfortunate Chicago attorney whose neck was broken during the ‘Days Of Rage’. (A Weatherman was duly arrested for his attempted murder; it later emerged that Richard Elrod had bumped his head into a brick wall while attacking one of the Weather protestors.) Lines such as ‘You thought you could stop the Weatherman/But up-front people put you on your can’ (for the ‘whatever colours...’ section of Dylan’s song) suggested that most of the collective’s creative power had already been exhausted on the Supremes.

Weather’s resident Dylanologist, Ted Gold, was one of three activists killed in March 1970 when a bomb they were assembling in a Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally exploded. (Another of the dead was Diana Oughton, a society heiress instantly celebrated in glossy magazine articles, and later on album by Grace Slick and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane.)

After Gold’s death, the regular poaching of Dylan phrases slowed, although the Weather Underground remained a small but still threatening terrorist force in America until the late 70s. In December 1970, however, at the height of the underground press debate over Bob Dylan’s radical credentials, Weather issued a manifesto designed to update and clarify their original You Don’t Need A Weatherman. It was titled New Morning – Changing Weather. As Weather historian Ron Jacobs noted, the statement ‘took its title from a just released album by Bob Dylan. Both the album and the statement shared a reflective, yet resolute mood.’

In New Morning – Changing Weather, the Weather Underground reached out for the first time towards the youth counter-culture of America, recognising its search for liberation (sexual, chemical, musical) as a sister crusade to its own call for the overthrow of the US establishment. ‘People have been experimenting with everything about their lives, fierce against the ways of the white man,’ wrote Weather leader Bernadette Dohrn. ‘They’ve moved to the country and found new ways to bring up free wild children.’ They might even have built themselves a cabin in Utah, to catch rainbow trout. In the eyes of the revolutionary hurricane that was the Weather Underground, Bob Dylan was still setting the mood for the Movement, even with an album dismissed by other elements of the New Left as self-obsessed and conservative.

The debate about Dylan’s political sincerity had first erupted when he apparently turned his back on the protest movement, a move signalled by the release of Another Side Of Bob Dylan in 1964. At Newport in ’65, and again in Britain during the 1966 tour, left-wing traditionalists allied themselves with folk purists outraged by Dylan’s dalliance with the evil ghosts of electricity.

In the first issue of the San Francisco radical paper Steps, published in December 1966, Frank Bardacke defended Dylan’s apparent apostasy from the movement after reprising the case for the prosecution:

‘He is seen as a threat to the left, representing an anti-political response to the increasing crises in American life. It is often said that he has rejected politics and retreated into his own private concerns and fantasies. (...)

The left has been mistaken. It is not only the Negroes who are in chains, but all Americans who are trapped by an uneasy boredom, by loneliness, and by god knows what else. These are the chains that Dylan wants to break. He is convinced that the only way to freedom is through an understanding of his own personal dilemmas. And he knows that such an understanding will involve him in an exploration of the terrible anxiety of middle class American life. [Bardacke continues by itemising this theme in Dylan’s writing, with particular emphasis on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” as a critique of “a totally commercialized America” – PD] So Bobby Dylan has escaped. He has held onto his dangerous fantasies. And he intends to ‘blow their minds’. In a society where the most important restrictions of freedom are the limitations on consciousness, “blow their minds” is the rallying call of freedom fighters. It is roughly equivalent to the cry of an older historical period: “break your chains”.’

Between the lionisation of the Panthers and the Weather Underground, and the empathy of Frank Bardacke, however, many of those who had regarded Dylan as the very embodiment of radicalism were beginning to air their suspicions about his true convictions.

They were aided by his comments in public and in private. Playing devil’s advocate in the 1968 Sing Out! interview, Dylan memorably teased Happy Traum: ‘How do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?’ Around the same time, he played the same mind game with a self-declared radical, photographer Elliott Landy:

‘I started talking about politics with Bob because I was involved in the anti-war movement. But he didn’t want to talk about it: he didn’t seem to be concerned with it. I asked him, “You mean you’re not into politics? How can you write songs like “Masters of War” without being political?” He told me, “I’m just into using language. I pick up what’s in the air, what’s on people’s minds, and turn that into words.” His joy was in moulding phrases, not making statements.’

I remember one time when he said he might even consider voting for George Wallace for President of the United States. (...) I could not believe I was hearing this from the “leader” of progressive popular political thought.’ (Dylan In Woodstock)

Dylan’s apparent indifference to contemporary politics seeped into the mainstream, fuelled by the lack of anthemic statements and radical zeal on albums such as Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. American leftist poet Tuli Kupferberg mourned the loss of his revolutionary idols: ‘Dylan’s times are changin’/Che’s blood it is running out’. More directly, journalist Ray Gosling (writing in International Times, alias IT) was one of many commentators to note that ‘Bob Dylan has made a fortune for the Columbia Corporation, and it is wrong’.

Nashville Skyline was so transparent an album that many critics assumed it must be opaque; radicals searched through its banal homilies for oblique comment on the Vietnam War. Yet the retrospective unease sparked by that 27 minutes of country comfort deepened when Dylan released Self Portrait in June 1970 – the month when Weatherman bombed the New York police, and the Black Panthers invoked a Revolutionary People’s Convention, threatening to ‘inflict total destruction upon Babylon’.

‘Steve’ reviewed Self Portrait for the British underground weekly IT: ‘Dylan’s no longer a leftist – he’s as far right as you can get – at least on the evidence of this album. He’s complacent, uncaring, and seemingly dedicated to a solid conservative way of life. (...) This is the paradox: Dylan can still identify with the misfits and the rejected; he can still feel for the rebels; but his own writing is now set firmly on the establishment side.’
Yet the hip media was still prepared to cast Dylan a line. ‘Steve’ noted: ‘“Self Portrait” is probably the most important Dylan album yet – either as a colossal put-on (which it might well be), or as a consolidation of the changes in his head since “John Wesley Harding.”’ In a rival paper, Frenz, an anonymous reviewer took up this theme: ‘Only two readings really stand the test of all 24 songs: firstly, that the statement has a finality about it ... “This”, he is saying, “is what I am”. (...) The second side of the argument is that the album is final, and that Dylan has given up any struggle within himself to “move on”.’

The terms of this debate, and the depth of this concern, seemed irrelevant to the man who had shocked and tantalised Traum and Landy. Still less did Dylan seem likely to be bothered by the 20-page ramblings of a New York Dylanologist named A.J. Weberman, self-styled leader (and, at this point, sole member) of the Dylan Liberation Front (or DLF). Weberman somehow found ‘the rationale behind Dylan’s current apoliticism’ within ‘In Search Of Little Sadie’; and in an early sighting of his soon-to-become-legendary concordance, dared to translate the lyrics of ‘The Boxer’. He picked up on the commonly-held conceit that Paul Simon’s song had been inspired by Dylan, and then rendered each line into radical prose: ‘I have squandered my resistance (= I have given up fighting American fascism)’.

Strangely, Weberman’s obtuse barbs – accompanied by his virtual stalking of Dylan’s new home in Greenwich Village – caught a nerve, both in the singer and the wider radical community. Over the next 18 months, Weberman was a constant presence in Dylan’s life, sometimes ghostly, sometimes all too corporeal. The apolitical hero of the Panthers and Weatherman was slowly, insidiously cut down to size – and, if Weberman is to be believed, back into a semblance of radical shape.

New Morning followed four months after Self Portrait; as is usually noted by Dylan biographers, Rolling Stone critic Ralph J. Gleason penned an effusive welcome for the album, titled ‘We’ve Got Bob Dylan Back Again’. Less often quoted is the context of his jubilation:

‘Here we are. Tim Leary armed and dangerous in Algiers. Nixon armed and dangerous in the White House. Bombs bursting in Rochester and guns firing at random in Cairo. The Kent State massacre being blamed on the massacred. Jackson’s dead accused of violence and the poison spreading all around, as no man can trust his brother and the country an armed camp. (...) As we go into this dark night we will need what light, what sustenance we can get and that is just what [Dylan] has given us. The brightest light and the strongest sustenance of all - hope. This is a hopeful album and my God how we need it.’

There was much more in the same sentimental vein. Yet Gleason’s paranoia was well founded. During 1969 and now 1970, the Nixon administration had hardened its defences against the dissent and disgust aroused by its handling of the Vietnam War. The COINTELPRO intelligence operation against the Black Panthers – involving surveillance, spies, infiltrators, forged letters and faked phone calls, even murder, anything that would topple the black power movement into self-destruction or at least mutual distrust – had softened the black-gloved determination of 1967 and 1968.

As Neil Young is still reminding us, there were ‘four (anti-war students) dead in Ohio’. Violence and discord had replaced the pacifist solidarity of the civil rights and anti-war crusades. Weather had gone underground; many of the left’s most prominent leaders were in prison, in exile or in denial of their past; meanwhile, the Vietnam conflagration was spreading into Cambodia. It was a time both for terrorism, and for retreat; a new morning of individual anguish, not collective glory.

Gleason’s reference to Timothy Leary illustrated how much the landscape had changed. The high priest of acid culture, a gentle guru who favoured turned-on introspection to political revolution, had been imprisoned in California on drugs charges. The Weather Underground had arranged his escape and he had fled to the apparent sanctuary of the Black Panthers’ overseas embassy in Algiers, staffed by the exiled Eldridge Cleaver. Leary left behind a desperate call to arms: ‘The conflict which we have sought to avoid is upon us. (...) Listen. There is no choice left but to defend life by all and every means possible against the genocidal machine. (...) Resist physically, robot agents who threaten life must be disarmed, disconnected by force ... Arm yourself and shoot to live ... Life is never violent. To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.’

In this troubled climate, the comforting, bucolic imagery of New Morning failed to satisfy those who believed they too were sheltering behind barricades. ‘(Dylan’s) like a ghost of his former self, and it drives me up the wall’, complained psych-folk-rock protestor Country Joe McDonald. ‘I don’t know where the real Bob Dylan went, but I don’t believe this one ... I don’t know what happened to him, but something did - and he disappeared.’ Rumours that Dylan had joined, or was at least financially supporting, the Zionist pressure group, the Jewish Defence League, did nothing for his underground credentials.

Blinded by his own fervent radicalism, yet still under the spell of Dylan’s iconic power, A.J. Weberman personified the disappointment of the left. He coined a theory: Dylan’s lack of political commitment could only be explained if he was addicted to heroin, which Weberman named his ‘current bag’ (or c.b. for short). He applied this ‘proof’ to Dylan’s previous work, with the aid of his notorious concordance, in which virtually every noun was assumed to denote ‘dope’ or ‘junk’. Even the bland word ‘something’ apparently meant ‘heroin’ in Weberman’s eyes; according to this crazed scholarship, the line ‘if you see your neighbour carrying something, help him with his load’ actually translated as ‘if you see your neighbour carrying heroin, help him with his stash of eleven bags of junk’. (Numerologists please note: in Weberworld, a load is always eleven bags full.)

The c.b. theory solved other mysteries in Dylan’s career, like the 1966 bike crash – a suicide attempt, Weberman declared, from which Dylan had only recovered by opting for ‘a living death – his c.b.’. Yet Weberman’s most fiery prose was reserved for Dylan’s failure of political zeal, which was caused by – well, you can guess:

‘Bob is now part of the power structure and is a reactionary force in rock. This is a result of his having many millions of $ – “relationships of ownership” (who owns what). “They whisper in the wings, etc.” (they prompt the politics of the rich). Another factor is Dylan’s c.b. which makes him susceptible to arrest and also generally kills political response. Dylan must be dealt with. He has decided to return and live close to the culture he ripped-off and betrayed. But for how long?

“All Power To The Good Dylanologists – Free Bob Dylan From Himself.’”

As Dylan had once written, it’s people’s games you’ve got to dodge, and Weberman’s involved analysing Dylan’s garbage for tell-tale signs of his c.b.; harassing him on the street; even invading Dylan’s home. In an unwise attempt to calm this righteous storm, Dylan agreed to talk calmly to Weberman (who recorded at least one conversation, which was made briefly available in the late 70s as a Folkways album, and chronicled several more encounters in the underground press).

A.J. duly reported to the counter-culture that ‘Dylan said he didn’t dig the Panthers because of their position on the Middle East situation - “Little Israel versus all those ...”. I tried to explain to D how the Panthers believed that everyone has a right to live, Jews, Arabs AND Palestinian refugees.’ Dylan excused himself by claiming, ‘I don’t follow politics’, but did apparently attempt to appease Weberman by promising, ‘I will write a song about political prisoners on my next album’. A.J. also claimed that Dylan offered him a job within his entourage, plus exclusive access to his forthcoming recording sessions. But he was determined to hold out against these capitalist baubles: ‘I know D’s still into his c.b.’, Weberman wrote, ‘& he was trying to cool me out by using his charisma & offering me his “friendship”, trying to co-opt me and the DLF, but we will fight on – till we win.’

To mark Dylan’s 30th birthday in May 1971, Weberman staged a Dylan Liberation Front demonstration in front of his Greenwich Village house. ‘You’re Invited To Dylan’s Birthday Party’, said his flyer. ‘Dylan still sells millions of LPs to young people although he never plays concerts for them & despite the fact that Dylan made his reputation by putting down the establishment he now owns office buildings, stock in large corporations and dresses & looks like a businessman when he appears in public.’

Sadly for Weberman, though fortunately for Dylan, the singer was out of the country for his birthday - in Israel, in fact, which might have sparked another volley of A.J.’s rhetoric had he realised. Despite the Weberman diatribe about Dylan’s fashion sense and stock holdings (the left was now struggling to come to terms with the fact that many of its counter-culture heroes were multi-millionaires), it was Bob’s drift away from the correct political line which most infuriated his arch critic.

In a piece probably written before the birthday party, but not published in Britain until IT 106 in mid-June 1971, Weberman spelled out the details of Dylan’s treachery:

‘I have come to the conclusion that Dylan has turned into A HYPOCRITE AND A LIAR back in late 1967. Bob Dylan, the same cat who wrote MASTERS OF WAR, a caustic indictment of munitions manufacturers, bought at least $20,000 worth of stock in LING-TEMPKO-VOIGHT (LTV), a large Amerikan Corporate Giant which manufactures anti-personnel bombs for use against the people of Vietnam . . . If Dylan thinks he’s gonna get away with shit like this that slimey motherfucker is fuckin crazy. A CAPITALIST PIG. About 3 months ago Dylan invested $250,000 in an office building on Times Square and Broadway (1500 Bdwy)... So Zimmerman takes money from the hip community (most of his fans are freaks) and gives it back to the establishment which hippco-people generally despise...

So now I realize that despite Dylan’s millions, heroin has turned him into a general rip-off artist who uses the reputation of the old groovey right-on Dylan to sell unimaginative, asshole shit to millions of young people.’

Then, of course, there was the question of Israel: ‘DYLAN SUPPORTS RACIST & COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONS _ the Jewish Defence League is a militant organization whose aim is to attack anyone they believe to be anti-Jewish ... In my opinion these people are a disgrace to the humanistic traditions of Judaism.’ And Weberman alleged for the first time in print that Dylan had contributed $5,000 to the JDL - under the name (Freudians please note) of his late father, Abe Zimmerman.

Weberman’s New York hustling - the garbage raids, the street demos, the bulletins and diatribes which filled the underground press - attracted a coterie of admirers. They included the equally splenetic street singer and avowed anti-capitalist, David Peel; and Jerry Rubin, leader of the Yippies (Youth International Party), an anarchic hippie organisation equally devoted to surreal, dope-crazed humour and the overthrow of the Nixon administration. Like Bobby Seale of the Panthers, Rubin had been one of the Chicago Eight; not being a black activist, he had succeeded in staying out of jail.

Together, Weberman, Peel and Rubin broadened the horizons of the DLF, which was rechristened the Rock Liberation Front (RLF). As outlined in the US radical mag Freedom, the RLF allowed itself an array of targets, notably ‘rock singers who claim to represent the youth culture and who have long hair and have the trust of the kids, but are really no better than businessmen - except instead of producing Kunga butter they’re producing records, they produce culture.’ Taken to its logical extreme, this would have entailed disavowing almost every working rock musician of the era; after all, even the distinctly non-commercial David Peel had been paid to issue two albums on Elektra, a musically diverse but politically non-aligned corporation.

As ever with Weberman, though, publicity took precedence over political logic. The RLF’s first victim was neither particularly long-haired nor, in 1971, claiming to represent any part of youth culture except himself, his wife and their two daughters: Paul McCartney. Weberman and his pals staged a mock Macca funeral in front of his in-laws’ apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Then they marched on the offices of Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, both of which were equally culpable of hypocrisy in the RLF’s eyes.

McCartney was a soft target: he’d been reviled in the rock media for both his post-Beatles music and his supposed blame for the Beatles’ break-up. While John Lennon was chanting ‘Power To The People’ and campaigning for the IRA, and George Harrison was raising millions for famine relief in Bangladesh, McCartney was farming in Scotland. Lennon thought the fake funeral was ‘funny as shit’, adding that he hoped the RLF wouldn’t be after him next. To forestall that possibility, he arranged to meet Weberman, Peel and Rubin when he moved to New York in September 1971; and for several weeks thereafter, he prominently displayed a lapel badge which read: ‘Free Bob Dylan’.

A.J. Weberman wasn’t the only curse from which Dylan might have wished to be free in late 1971. He was also uneasy about the imminent publication of a biography by journalist Anthony Scaduto, especially after Weberman had told him that Scaduto was threatening to expose Dylan’s supposed drug habit and homosexuality. ‘He told Dylan I was doing a hatchet job’, Scaduto recalled to Johnny Rogan. ‘Before then, Dylan wouldn’t co-operate.’

In an effort to ensure that Scaduto remained in shallow waters, Dylan agreed to offer him a degree of input, sitting for several hours of interviews and even reading Scaduto’s manuscript. ‘He was a hell of a nice guy, sweet and charming, except when he got to the point where he said, “I don’t want you to write anything about my wife and kids”,’ Scaduto remembered. ‘He meant not a word, not even her name or the kids’ names. I just ignored his demand.’

During their discussions, political issues were obviously raised. In a New York Times magazine profile of Dylan, published to coincide with the biography, Scaduto noted: ‘In the last couple of years, some who deified him as a leader of the radical movement have expressed fears that he is no longer lashing out against a system into which he refused to fit.’ He quoted Dylan on the subject of political groupings: ‘My enthusiasm has altered. In this day and age one can’t put one’s faith in organizations and groups. There has to be a certain amount of comradeship, root beginnings and moral justification to allow one to put his mind and body on the line.’

Despite that, Scaduto raised the intriguing possibility that Dylan might recently have met leading members of the Black Panther Party. He stated that one of the Panthers’ attorneys, Gerald Lefcourt, had written to Dylan on behalf of the Party’s Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, asking if the singer would play a benefit concert for the BPP, or at least make a substantial contribution to their funds. The FBI’s COINTELPRO assault on the Panthers, plus the harassment of several major police departments, had sparked a long series of armed confrontations between activists and the men they called ‘the pigs’. Several prominent Panthers had been killed; dozens more were in prison, awaiting trial. Most of the Party’s resources had to be directed towards attorneys’ fees and other legal expenses. Even with their ‘Supreme Commander’, Huey Newton, now out of prison, the Black Panther Party was on the verge of financial collapse.

According to the story Scaduto had heard on the underground telegraph, Dylan had agreed to meet Newton and Hilliard – but the encounter faltered almost immediately, when Dylan began to lecture the Panthers about their antagonism towards Israel. Scaduto was told that Hilliard had sprung to his feet in anger, saying: ‘Let’s get out of here. We can’t talk to this Zionist pig!’ The more placable Newton is said to have intervened, telling his comrade to ‘Cool it’, and continuing the conversation for another hour. Dylan, however, was unwavering in his response: ‘I can’t help you as long as the Panthers are against Israel’.

Scaduto confronted Dylan with this account, but received a curt response in vintage Dont Look Back style: ‘What meeting? Why don’t you talk to Huey about it?’ Panther sources also denied that the liaison with Dylan had taken place. Scaduto noted that, in any case, he’d been informed that Hilliard had been in jail and Newton in China when the meeting was supposed to have occurred. Hilliard was convicted and jailed in July 1971; Newton left for a comradely two-week trip to China in late September 1971; Scaduto’s article appeared in the New York Times on 28th November 1971. By this reckoning, Scaduto had presumably been told that Dylan and the Panthers had met in late September or early October 1971.

Tantalisingly, there is no concrete evidence to confirm or rule out the Panthers/Dylan meeting. Newton wrote his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, in 1972/73; he made no mention of Dylan in the book, despite Bobby Seale’s earlier testimony about his infatuation with ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’. If the meeting had occurred and Newton had felt betrayed by his musical hero, then he might have wished to conceal the episode; or, perhaps more likely, he could have devoted a chapter to honkies who talk loud but end up saying nothing.

Two decades later, David Hilliard also published an autobiography, This Side Of Glory; once again, Dylan was absent from the text. There is no record that Hilliard shared Newton’s admiration for Highway 61 Revisited; but in the early 90s he would certainly have been aware of the potential media interest in an encounter with one of the century’s most prominent cultural figures. Equally, both Newton and Hilliard may have felt that another brush-off from a white liberal wasn’t worthy of reporting in the midst of the assassinations, jail sentences and internecine warfare which was the BPP’s lot in the early 70s. Or, of course, the meeting might never have taken place.

In his Dylan chronology, A Life In Stolen Moments, Clinton Heylin pin-pointed the meeting almost a year earlier than Scaduto, in December 1970. He wrote: ‘The meeting does not go well and both sides part without finding any common ground’. Heylin also penned an informative biographical sketch about Dylan’s collaborator in film, Howard Alk (Telegraph 18), in which he argued convincingly that it may well have been Alk who introduced Dylan to the Panthers.

The film-maker had involved members of the Party in two of his projects, American Revolution II, and The Murder Of Fred Hampton. The latter documented the December 1969 assassination of a leading member of the Panthers’ Chicago chapter, during an early-hours police/FBI assault. Despite police claims that they had been attacked first, subsequent forensic work proved that no more than one bullet had been fired by the occupants of the Panthers’ apartment, compared with several hundred coming from police guns; that, anyway, the police had fired first; that Hampton appeared to have been drugged by a police informer masquerading as a Panther before the raid took place; and that he was shot twice in the head while he lay semi-conscious in his bed. In the hands of Dylan and Jacques Levy, it might have been the perfect subject for a cinematic protest song.

Intriguingly, Heylin pointed out that The Murder Of Fred Hampton was funded by none other than Albert Grossman, who told Alk: ‘That man’s [Hampton] got to be heard’. Yet this circumstantial evidence doesn’t prove any more than that one of Dylan’s key associates was a Panther sympathiser. Given the estranged nature of Dylan’s relationship with his manager at this point, Grossman’s financial contribution to Alk’s film might have made Dylan less likely to add his own support, not more.

Likewise, A.J. Weberman’s January 1971 account of conversations with Dylan, in which he noted that ‘Dylan said he didn’t dig the Panthers’, doesn’t confirm that he had actually met the black activists, merely that he had discussed them with A.J.

Yet there is one more concrete piece of evidence to suggest that, at the very least, Dylan had the Black Panthers and their crusade on his mind in the final months of 1971. In November that year, he issued a single which was greeted as his first protest song since the mid-60s. Its subject was another radical black icon, and Panthers member, who had just died in a shoot-out with the law: George Jackson.

A footnote in Michael Gray’s Song And Dance Man III highlights one of history’s vanishing acts: ‘When “Soledad Brother” was published, the “Sunday Times” called George Jackson “one of the great voices of the American left”. Now you look him up in vain in almost all the major encyclopaedia and in the reference books on who’s who in recent political and public life. He’s become an unperson.’

There were two caricatures of George Jackson current in the early 70s. The first described a petty criminal driven to extreme violence during his years of incarceration; who masqueraded as an apostle of civil rights and righteous radicalism in an attempt to win parole; who cruelly tossed a guard to his death from a Soledad Prison parapet; and who was killed during a savage escape attempt, during which several police officers were butchered. The second was a mythic hero, an American Che, a symbol of black oppression and the promise of liberation, the movement’s premier philosopher and rhetorician, who was illegally retained in prison for a $70 robbery, framed for one murder, and then set up so that he could be executed. The truth, as ever in the recent history of America, has been lost in a swirl of rival conspiracy theories.

Some dates to remember: Jackson was charged with murder, alongside two fellow inmates (collectively the Soledad Brothers), after a prison officer was killed in January 1970; seven months later, his brother Jonathan Jackson died in a shoot-out outside a California courtroom, having taken a judge and several jurors hostage in an attempt to win his brother’s release; George Jackson’s collection of letters from prison, Soledad Brother, was published to ecstatic reviews from the underground press in November 1970; Jackson died on 21st August 1971, in San Quentin prison.

His fate was linked in counter-culture mythology with that of Angela Davis, a black professor and Communist Party activist who (it was alleged) provided Jonathan Jackson with the guns with which he took his hostages. She had regularly written to George Jackson in prison, but went on the run after Jonathan’s death. She was caught two months later, and remained in jail, charged with conspiracy to commit murder, until being found innocent on all counts in June 1972. In her honour, John Lennon penned possibly his weakest song ever, ‘Angela’; while the Rolling Stones celebrated her in the vaguer but noticeably less crass ‘Sweet Black Angel’.

Bob Dylan chose instead to write a song mourning the death of Davis’s imprisoned comrade. ‘George Jackson’ was released on 22nd November 1971; recorded on 4th November; and written, so CBS Records informed the press, a day earlier. Some accounts of Dylan’s career have him rushing to the studio, overcome by his grief at Jackson’s death; in fact, more than two months (and enormous press coverage, both over and underground) passed between the shooting in San Quentin and the composition of Dylan’s song.

Had Dylan met the Black Panthers during the intervening weeks, they would doubtless have informed him that Jackson had been appointed an honorary Field Marshal of the Party and that his death was the most significant tragedy to date in the sorry history of black liberation in America. Whether or not his interest was piqued by Newton and Hilliard, or Weberman, or simply the pages of the New York press, Dylan was reportedly moved to read Soledad Brother, and then channel his sense of loss and outrage into song.

A.J. Weberman was overjoyed by the apostate’s conversion. He told the Liberation News Service that Dylan was ‘coming around’; to Anthony Scaduto, he boasted: ‘I feel great. When I started harassing Dylan through the media, I didn’t think my chances of affecting him were too good. But the objective of the DLF has been reached. I don’t think Bob would have changed without the DLF’s pressure.’

Yet Scaduto was among those who challenged the sincerity of Dylan’s concern for George Jackson. Having initially opined that ‘it works as music, and as an effective verbalization of the anguish so many felt over the killing’, he began to talk to his friends in the Village, and discovered that they were less convinced by Dylan’s gesture. Subsequently Scaduto fired off an acerbic letter to the Village Voice. ‘I said that if Dylan was not being about honest about his feelings,’ he explained to Johnny Rogan, ‘then he was no better than anyone else in rock’n’roll. I don’t know why I wrote it. I’d been in a pub down the Village. I was drunk. I banged it off and felt sorry about it afterwards. We had no contact after that.’

Rolling Stone magazine commented: ‘The song immediately divided Dylan speculators into two camps: those who see it as the poet’s return to social relevance and those who feel that it’s a cheap way for Dylan to get a lot of people off his back.’ Village Voice critic Robert Christgau countered that ‘Dylan responded with real human sympathy to a hideous assassination that “Rolling Stone” chose to fudge over with a notably pusillanimous account.’

British commentators were equally divided. Mick Farren of IT said: ‘I may be naive, but I really feel that Dylan has put out this single because Jackson’s murder is something that, even in his seclusion, he cannot ignore.’ But another British underground newspaper, Ink, asked: ‘Is George going to be turned into comfortable myth? Betrayed through brave, liberal pop songs and posters?’ More pertinently, it reported: ‘The Managing Director of CBS London, when asked if some or all of the profits of this record were going to the now empty defence funds of George’s brothers (Soledad, Mangrove) replied: “There has been no discussion of this so far”.’ Ink suggested that Dylan fans should wait for the song to appear on an album, and meanwhile send their 50p to the Soledad Brothers or Mangrove Nine defence funds.

To my knowledge, Dylan has never commented on George Jackson, or his song, in any interview. Yet there are clues within his lyrics as to the depth of his emotional and political involvement. For example, the opening lines (‘I woke up this morning/There were tears in my bed/They killed a man I really loved’) suggest an immediacy of response unlikely in a man who had only discovered how passionately he felt after reading a book. Factually and philosophically, in fact, there was nothing in ‘George Jackson’ that betrayed any deeper knowledge of his subject’s life and beliefs than Dylan could have learned from the six o’clock news. ‘They were frightened of his power,’ he said of the prison guards, ‘they were scared of his love’; but love, especially for his captors, was an emotion markedly absent from most pages of Soledad Brother.

Michael Gray astutely decribed the song’s most revealing verse: ‘Jackson says in one of his letters that, from now on, he’s just going to divide people into the innocent and the guilty’. As Dylan re-states this, it is Us and Us, not Us and Them:

   ‘Sometimes I think this whole world
   Is one big prison yard
   Some of us are prisoners
   The rest of us are guards.’

This, one might feel, is Dylan’s only authentic contribution to the song; also the sentiment most at odds with Jackson’s political philosophy.

A.J. Weberman was triumphant in late November 1971. His hero had returned to the path of political correctness, and he had been instrumental in Dylan’s conversion. He no doubt reckoned that Dylan had made good on his promise, ten months earlier, to write a song about political prisoners. (As an aside, the RLF’s first target, Paul McCartney, was moved to write his first piece of political protest, ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’, in February 1972. As with Dylan and ‘George Jackson’, many radical observers doubted his sincerity.)

A.J. also had an announcement to make: ‘John and Yoko are the newest members of the Rock Liberation Front, a group dedicated to exposing hip capitalist counterculture ripoffs and politicizing rock music and rock artists.’ Dylan, Lennon, Weberman: his pantheon was complete.

Yet his pride was shortlived. On 2nd December 1971, the Village Voice carried a letter from the Rock Liberation Front - David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, but decidedly not A.J. Weberman. As the text made clear, the RLF had turned against its founder:

‘We ask A.J. Weberman to publicly apologise to Bob Dylan for leading a public campaign of lies and malicious slander against Dylan in the past year. It is about time someone came to Dylan’s defence when A.J. published articles and went on radio calling Dylan a junkie – which he never was attacked Dylan for “deserting the movement” – when he was there before the movement and helped create it - and publicised Dylan’s address and phone - exposing Bob and his wife and children to public embarrassment and abuse.

Weberman is to Dylan as Manson is to the Beatles - and Weberman uses what he interprets Dylan’s music to try and kill Dylan and build his own fame. Now A.J. Weberman takes credit for Dylan’s George Jackson song. More egocentric bullshit. Dylan wrote it in spite of Weberman and in spite of “the movement”. Dylan wrote it because he felt it.

A.J. Weberman’s campaign - and the movement’s complicity with it - is in the current fad of everyone in the revolution attacking each other and spreading false rumours about each other. It’s time we defended and loved each other - and saved our anger for the true enemy, whose ignorance and greed destroys our planet.’

The Rock Liberation Front’s missive was accompanied by a contrite note from Weberman: ‘Dear People, please accept my apologies for past untrue statements and also the harassment of Bob Dylan and his family. From now on I’ll leave them alone. If any nasty articles come out about him I’m sorry. I wrote them long ago and I’m doing my best to have them killed. Sincerely, A.J. Weberman, Minister of Defence, Rock Liberation Front.’

This volte-face was staggering. Lennon had worn Weberman’s ‘Free Bob Dylan’ badge in public for months; now he and his right-on pals were distancing themselves from A.J.’s Yippie tactics, which they had outspokenly supported. What had happened to sever Weberman from his fellow rock liberators?

Yippie leader Jerry Rubin provided the answer in an interview with Jon Wiener, the author who uncovered Lennon’s FBI files. “‘Dylan came to my house,” Rubin told him, “and complained about A.J. Weberman. He said he had been in Israel on his 30th birthday and A.J. was picketing his house in New York and it was written up in the papers there so he had to cut his Israel trip short. So I forced A.J. to apologise publicly to Dylan. Yoko actually got him to write the letter in the Voice. I thought that when Dylan saw he was free of A.J., he’d be so appreciative that he would agree to tour the country with John and Yoko, raising money for political causes and rallying people to go to San Diego. We’d make musical history as well as political history. The whole thing was going to revive the 60s. That was my plan”.’

Rubin’s account was not entirely accurate; some six months passed between the birthday event, and the expulsion of Weberman. Moreover, he claimed credit for instituting a plan which Lennon believed he had conceived. Yet the link between the RLF’s attack on its founder, and the proposed Lennon tour of America, seems inescapable. As Lennon told a reporter in December 1971, ‘We’re just in the inception of revolution’. He intended to strike the first match.

Allen Ginsberg recalled in 1983, ‘Yoko Ono and John Lennon decided that they would go on a tour of all the persecuted areas, the hot spots as they called them: to visit Lee Otis Johnson, who was in jail in Texas for 30 years for a joint, John Sinclair, Angela Davis, and others. So they formed a giant touring group and went to Ann Arbor.’ There they played a benefit concert on 10th December 1971 for John Sinclair, leader of the radical White Panthers, who was serving a ten-year sentence for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. Two days after the show, Sinclair was released. Lennon greeted this as the first victory in the second American Revolution.

Ginsberg explained that the Lennons ‘had an itinerary: they were going to wind up in 1972 at the Republican Convention in Miami [the location was switched from San Diego during early summer 1972 – PD]. It might have resulted in enormous cultural changes, a sort of cultural revolutionary shot.’ The former Beatle rightly considered that if Bob Dylan could also be persuaded to join the crusade, its power would be infinitely multiplied. He was encouraged by Ginsberg’s testimony that on 17th November 1971, Dylan had joined him to record ‘Going To San Diego’, an anthem for the proposed demonstration.

‘Lennon was trying to get Dylan into the tour,’ Yippie activist Stew Albert told Jon Wiener. ‘We couldn’t ever get a commitment from Dylan. But Lennon said he was sure that if the tour started getting big headlines, Dylan would jump into it.’ The FBI certainly believed so: an informer’s report in January 1972 noted that ‘PCPJ (New York People’s Coalition For Peace & Justice) is presently planning to hold a peace concert at an unknown location in New Hampshire during the New Hampshire Presidential Primary. Plans presently are to have John Lennon and Bob Dylan take part in the concert.’

None of the concerts ever took place; the Yippie/RLF crusade never left port. As Allen Ginsberg noted, ‘The FBI and Immigration and the Narcotics Bureau got together to try and expel [Lennon] from the country. Lennon – and Yoko Ono, who was a citizen – had to drop their whole political campaign.’ Other pressures mounted on Lennon: he and his wife were involved in a custody battle over Yoko’s daughter, and their efforts were severely hampered by the immigration dispute; plus he slowly began to feel as if he was being used by these American radicals as a symbol, rather than a participant (still less a leader). In a mean-spirited moment, he lashed out at Jerry Rubin’s supposed body odour, and his ‘superstar ego’ (and Lennon knew whereof he spoke on that subject). Through it all, Dylan remained at a discreet distance, having moved away from the Village to escape Weberman – and, perhaps, Lennon.

May 1972 found Lennon in court, battling to retain his right to remain in the USA. On the advice of his lawyer, Leon Wildes, he made it clear that he was no longer a threat to the US administration. ‘They think we’re going to San Diego, or Miami, or wherever it is,’ he said plaintively on The Dick Cavett Show. ‘We’ve never said we’re going. There’ll be no big jam with Dylan, because there’s too much going on.’

Dylan was one of those who responded to Wildes’ call for testimonials from prominent citizens, to justify Lennon’s continued presence in the country. His warm words carefully avoided any hint of political activism: ‘John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to this country’s so called ART INSTITUTION. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this mild dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as artist art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray to John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe.’

As the momentum of the San Diego/Miami campaign ebbed away, so too did the heat of the Dylan/George Jackson controversy. An occasional critic still vented his anger, such as David Walley of IT, who in a review of Scaduto’s biography quipped that Dylan had become ‘the Howard Hughes of the counter-culture. Having surrendered to the void, he has ceased to be an anticipated item. He can no longer mystify anyone except by inventing reasons for his name to appear in scurrilous rock’n’roll papers. And this was the idol?’

Walley’s judgement was prescient. Attention in the underground press switched away from Dylan (and indeed black liberation) during the early months of 1972, focusing instead on Nixon and Vietnam (in the States) and Ireland (in Britain). Yet there was one heart in which the old scars still burned.

In spring 1972, A.J. Weberman resurfaced, angry as hell at Dylan, as usual, and at Lennon as well. His rationale was the controversy over the album of George Harrison’s Bangladesh benefit concert, from which all proceeds were supposed to be directed towards the famine victims. New York magazine had printed an article by Peter McCabe, alleging that Beatles manager Allen Klein was directing $1.14 from the sale of each album into his own pocket; and that Columbia Records were stealing another 25¢ for Bob Dylan’s services.

‘Now it’s time for others to speak out,’ Weberman rampaged. ‘Self-proclaimed radicals John and Yoko should either come out for or against Klein. The sidekick, Jerry Rubin, should make a public statement too. As should Bob Dylan regarding the twenty-five cents Columbia is getting from each album. He’s willing to make a public squawk over Scaduto’s book by going to the Voice office but not about the Bengalis getting ripped off. The mark of a shallow egotist.’

A review of Toby Thompson’s Dylan book in the final issue of the British paper Ink around the same time provided a telling snippet of A.J. gossip. The pseudonymous ‘Judas Priest’ warned that Thompson’s Positively Main Street would ‘cause apoplexy among hardcore Dylan freex everywhere, and was allegedly the cause of A.J. Weberman’s nearly successful suicide attempt’.

It was difficult to imagine even Weberman being so upset by the mild revelations in Thompson’s affectionate book that he would seek to take his own life (an allegation that cannot be substantiated, incidentally). If suicide had ever been on Weberman’s mind, it was more likely planted there by an act of betrayal from the people he had assumed were his closest comrades: the Rock Liberation Front. Out of the blue, some four months after the paper published Weberman’s apology to Dylan, and six months after the same text had first appeared in the States, A.J. wrote to IT’s London office to retract it. He had never sounded more impassioned, or more aggrieved:

‘I guess you took my apology at face value – but dig it, there was a lot behind it.

Like what would you do if John Sinclair’s wife approached you and said that she believed that John & Yoko’s appearance at the upcoming Sinclair benefit depended on your making that apology to Dylan. Then Jerry Rubin told me that if I’d apologise to Bob, John and Yoko would probably bail out political prisoner Dana Beal...

... and then your friends on the left went after you. That attack on me was bullshit - Jerry Rubin encouraged me to attack Dylan –he came over to my pad and told me that the DLF was RIGHT ON and that Dylan was definitely a pig – and I looked up to him at the time.

David Peel played at the birthday party, supplied the sound equipment etc., and John Lennon wore a FREE BOB DYLAN–DLF badge on the front cover of the “New York Post”, said Dylan took junk in a “Rolling Stone” interview [not in any text I’ve seen – PD] and wrote I DON’T BELIEVE IN Zimmerman... not a word of this was mentioned in their attack on me. It was like entrapment – they egged me on, gave me the equipment then busted me for it.

I didn’t write that apology – John Lennon wrote it and I signed hoping for the best. I guess one of the reasons I did it was cause of [the] George Jackson single – I thought that Dylan might really be gettin back into it – but as it turned out Dylan kept all the bread from that single and just did it to get me off his back.

You see I really want to believe in Dylan – or wanted to... now I’m convinced there’s really no hope of getting Dylan back into the movement – he’s just too conservative in lifestyle and politics.

What I said about Dylan and JUNK is the fuckin truth. All the apologies in the world won’t change what I learned about him by applying the analytic method of criticism to his poetry. He still owns office buildings on Times Square and still has millions of dollars. He supports the reactionary Israeli government instead of supporting progressive elements within Israel and has left the city for an estate on Long Island.

Now I’m friends with John and Yoko. In fact I’m going over to see them after I finish this letter.. and I hope to get them to make some statement that I was unfairly pressured into making that apology though I must admit a lot of the blame rests on my shoulders. It hurt me a lot - I was really depressed for days - cause I feel I let down my people in England. I swear to you it will never happen again. POWER TO THE PEOPLE.’

Pointedly, Weberman signed his letter from the ‘Dylan Archives’, not the DLF or the RLF. Lennon never spoke a word in his defence. Henceforth A.J. became an increasingly isolated figure, never short of campaigns, but bereft of fellow campaigners. His revolution had burned out without ever showing flame.

Twice in the following years, the fall-out from the Dylan/George Jackson/RLF fiasco glowed back into life. Audiences at the initial shows on Dylan’s January 1974 tour with the Band were greeted by a strangely familiar figure, handing out flyers with an equally familiar message:

‘Free Bob Dylan? Why pay high ticket price$ when Dylan is worth million$?

The Dylan you’ll see is an imposter. The real Dylan was killed by cynicism brought on by: 1. Use of hard drugs (speed and heroin); 2. Capitalism – the ownership of war stock (Ling Tempco Veight) and real estate such as 1400 Broadway in NYC; 3. Support of rightist groups like the pro-Nixon Jewish Defence League, which wants to leave the fate of the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in the hands of right-wing Germans such as Haldeman, Zeigheiler, Erlichman, Kalmbach, Buzhardt, etc. Evidence of Dylan’s death can be seen in the lyrics of his recent songs excepting George Jackson.

But Dylan refused to meet with Jackson’s mother and kept all the money from the song for himself! This was his first good song in years – before that his garbage got more attention than his poetry - and the only reason he wrote it was to get moderate A.J. off his back.’

The author was, of course, A.J. Weberman. His intervention inspired this exchange between Dylan and Rolling Stone reporter Ben Fong-Torres, during an interview in Montreal, a week into the tour:

‘Q: I’d like to ask you about the rumors about your giving some of the profits from this tour to the Israeli war effort. One rumor has it that you’re sending money in your father’s name, and you’ve been characterized as an “ultra-Zionist”.

A: I’m not sure what a Zionist really is. I don’t know how these things get started, really. It’s just gossip.

Q: You told Newsweek that there’s a new generation, that “everybody’s thinking the same thing”. Basically, that this isn’t a time we need protest songs. Do you really believe that “everybody’s thinking the same thing”, and that you no longer need to write “message” songs?

A: There’s still a message. But the same electric spark that went off back then could still go off again – the spark that led to nothing.’

A month later, a rather closer Dylan acquaintance raised the JDL issue in the San Francisco Chronicle, two days before Dylan’s shows at the Oakland Coliseum just outside SF. In late 1971, Joan Baez had begun performing ‘To Bobby’, a song which pointedly called for Dylan to return to the movement. ‘Won’t you listen to the lambs, Bobby,’ she sang plaintively, ‘they’re crying for you’. (Straying into Weberman territory, one might note a line from Planet Waves, Dylan’s first proper post-1971 album: ‘I ain't haulin' any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore’ [‘Tough Mama’].)

Now Baez’s sister Mimi Fariña penned an open letter to Dylan, regarding the continued rumours that he was using some of his tour profits to aid the Israeli war effort. She doubted the veracity of these reports, she wrote, but added: ‘The money you earn is the money we are willing to give you... if it is going to support the taking of more lives, we should know that before we buy our tickets.’ Dylan didn’t respond to this voice from the past.

When he returned to the road in late 1975, he was promoting a single – his first overtly political statement since ‘George Jackson’. Once again, he had read a book by an imprisoned black man, and chosen to chronicle the inmate’s case in song. Perhaps mindful of the criticism he had aroused by keeping the royalties from ‘George Jackson’, Dylan agreed that the proceeds from two Rolling Thunder Revue shows should go to the defence fund for Ruben ‘Hurricane’ Carter, a middleweight boxer imprisoned for a murder that he swore he hadn’t committed.

As with Jackson, the debate about Carter’s innocence has continued ever since. Joni Mitchell added a spark of contrariness to the Rolling Thunder excursion by becoming the first of the participants to doubt Carter’s sincerity. But Dylan kept the faith: ‘He’s a righteous man... he’s not your typical bank robber or mercy slayer.’

A dissenting voice was raised in The National Review in April 1976. Under the title Rock Music, Bob Dylan & The Outlaw Business, it represented one of the most brutal (if cynical and factually challenged) assaults ever published on Dylan and rock culture in general. Some choice extracts:

‘Successful pop stars are skilful market researchers, anticipating trends, performing for their constituencies the same function as the Establishment media - saying what their public wants to hear. With shameless sincerity they croon the messages of the moment, accurately reflecting the up to date counterculture fad...

Most successful in skimming the energies of the Outlaw Assembly Line... is Robert Zimmerman, who first conned his way onto the media stage by taking the name of a Welsh lyric poet & chanting plastic songs to a barbiturate beat... Sneering hatred and contempt, amplified and broadcast electronically, he created hateful realities for millions of adolescent listeners.

Then, in 1972, smarting from the accusation that he had copped out, Dylan electrifies the counterculture with his elegy for George Jackson. Once again hatred is turned against the Establishment. The record is a sensation. Zimmerman fans weep in gratitude that the bard has come back to fight injustice. Enormous airplay! The single rockets to the top! Dylan is again the Messiah! There is only one little flaw in the operation; there is one person who is not around to share the royalties and the applause. The slain martyr, George Jackson, is dead. [Hey, an early Zimmerman song was about another slain martyr, Medgar Evans.]

But no matter, there’s a new seeding of discontent, a new victim to sanctify, a new generation of gullible youth thus encouraged to nihilist sacrifice and stupid rebellion. And a new wave of popularity for the clever kid who in one album made more money in imitating Guthrie than Woody ever saw in his life. It’s the Outlaw Exploitation Game, folks, more fun and easier than Texas oil-drilling. Just wait until the next martyr is discovered and watch it gush. Who’s next? Here comes Hurricane Carter and another cheap shot at the charts...

Does Dylan stand on picket lines? Get his head busted by company police? March at Selma in the hard rain? . . . Yes, we know what we was against. But what was (is) he for? (Besides fake nostalgia.)...

It’s no accident that the Weathermen, the most publicized group of Dylan groupies, that bewildering, fugitive band of terrorists now cut off from their culture and condemned to underground existence, took their name from a depressing Dylan song...’

The author of this jaundiced diatribe was none other than our old friend Timothy Leary, whom we last glimpsed en route to Algeria, Weather Underground pistol by his side, heading for the sanctuary of the Black Panther compound run by Eldridge Cleaver. Much had changed since 1971. In a fit of ultra-left righteousness, fuelled by COINTELPRO infiltrators, Cleaver had split the Black Panther Party and declared Huey Newton to be a traitor to the cause of black liberation. Supporters of the rival factions gunned each other down; the Nixon administration watched with glee.

Cleaver soon headed for France, and gradually his revolutionary fervour ran dry. He negotiated a trip home, claiming to have undergone a ‘born-again’ religious conversion.

Leary too had found his way back to America. He fled Algiers, alleging that Cleaver had attempted to hold him and his wife prisoners. In Switzerland, he gave himself up to agents of the American government, who flew him to the States. There he served the briefest of prison sentences, despite having escaped at the start of the decade only a few months into a ten-year stretch. Rumours spread amongst the scattered, beleaguered remnants of the Weather Underground that Leary had won his freedom by testifying against the activists who had freed him from prison and engineered his flight to Africa. Weighed alongside his own desertion of the movement, Leary’s accusations against Dylan carried no power, left no mark.

‘My songs were never political in the sense of dogma,’ Dylan told interviewer Marc Rowland in 1978. ‘As far as somebody getting beat up and going to jail for a crime they didn’t commit, that’s injustice, that’s not politics. I’ll fight against it like anyone else would. It’s something I don’t think any one political party can solve.’

His supposed comrades from the late 60s counter-culture provided few reasons to shake his disinterest in politics, especially the revolutionary brand. That former scourge of ‘pig’ culture, Eldridge Cleaver, moved swiftly from evangelical Christianity to the Mormons and the Moonies, before becoming a stalwart of the Republican Party now headed by his old adversary, Ronald Reagan. Huey Newton was shot dead in 1989, long after he’d erased any trace of his hero status with well-publicised drug abuse, sexual violence and even murder. His Black Panther Party bowed and broke under the strain of COINTELPRO, becoming little more than an adjunct to local social service departments.

One despairing batch of BPP radicals formed the ill-fated terrorist organisation, the Black Liberation Army, a revolutionary vanguard with no following among the people. The Weather Underground met the same fate; its leaders are still being tracked down and tried for their crimes of violence. John Lennon was shot in 1980, shortly after renouncing his early 70s radicalism. A.J. Weberman turned from Dylanology to the eternal conspiracy web of the Kennedy assassination, among less healthy pursuits. George Jackson, as Michael Gray pointed out, is virtually forgotten. And Bob Dylan now offers a stark brand of eschatological rhetoric – dark prophecies of destruction and decay, leavened not by radical zeal but by surreal humour. He appears not to have veered from his 1974 view that the late 60s movement was ‘a spark that led to nothing’.

Yet even in this age of political apathy and post-Marxist conservatism, vestiges of Dylan’s close encounters with the radical left remain. In 1996, the Maoist International Movement staged a Prison Awareness Week at the University of Massachusetts; one of the highlights was apparently a heartfelt, irony-free performance of Dylan’s ‘George Jackson’ by an unnamed activist. Quotes from that song litter the websites of American anti-prison campaigners, testament to the continued political power of Dylan’s name and words.

In the final years of his life, Eldridge Cleaver veered back and forth between drug connections and the lecture circuit. In his latter guise, he continued to fill his speeches with Dylan quotations, regularly opening his oration with a 35-year-old phrase: ‘I’ll know my song well before I start singing’. Erratic to the last, Cleaver now claimed to be both a conservative and a radical; through each incarnation, his devotion to Dylan remained intact.

And early in 2002, Huey P. Newton was treated to a TV biopic on the PBS network in America, directed by radical black film-maker Spike Lee. Reviewer after reviewer noted that the screenplay credited Newton’s two biggest influences as being Mao Tse-Tung – and Bob Dylan. ‘Hit ’em with that Zimmerman!’, cried the Newton character. And from the soundtrack echoed the familiar chords of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. Somewhere, Mr. Jones is enjoying the last laugh.