At a recent showing of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.
They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, armored in a winter coat and hat that he never removed. Then, the film began.
“This is all made up,” the man brayed at the screen.
“It’s not what you think it is.”
“You’re scum!”
And so A.J. Weberman’s full-throated annotation of the film continued for 2 hours and 20 minutes, replete with dark interpretations of lyrics and references to how Dylan and the film intersected with such things as communism, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the C.I.A. and Barry Goldwater.
The group of women exchanged confused glances, but said nothing.
For more than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — though it is Weberman who has done most of the intertwining.
He began as one of Dylan’s keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted through trash cans outside 94 MacDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness.
Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood moment, Weberman sees a renewed opportunity to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for decades. He is writing a new book interpreting Dylan’s lyrics, and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking for his take on the film.
Though his garbage-sifting has waned, his vendetta is as strong as ever.
Weberman, who has supported himself since his teens by selling weed, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Riverdale. He briefly attended Michigan State University before being kicked out after a pot arrest, and then settled in the East Village and eventually fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
It was the 1960s, and he helped organize smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on establishment figures. Dylan provided much of the soundtrack.
“I said, ‘Wow, this guy’s a real revolutionary,’” he said. “I was into the civil rights movement. I fell for it.”
He fell hard. Weberman began laboriously compiling all of Dylan’s lyrics to study.
While listening to Dylan songs on acid, Weberman became convinced that Dylan’s cryptic lyrics masked dark meanings. He heard references to himself. He played Dylan’s records backward and claimed to hear certain messages, like “Don’t expose me” concealed in the obscure song “Time Passes Slowly.”
Pop stars have long been figures of obsession, dating back at least to the Beatles. The affable Liverpudlians inspired morbid theories among fans as their hair grew longer and their songs stranger. Some people played their records backward for secret messages and scoured album covers for clues that Paul McCartney was dead. Charles Manson, the cult-leader killer, took inspiration from their words, which he thought predicted a race war. A deranged fan killed John Lennon.
As a shape-shifting rock poet — a prophet with a nasal yowl — Dylan and his opaque words were particularly attractive for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.
Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a class on Dylan at Harvard University, said Weberman’s belief that certain lyrics refer to him are “pretty much fantasy and beyond self-obsession.”
“It’s hard to know how serious or grounded he is at times,” the professor said of Weberman, adding, “To be fair, he was always after what makes the songs tick — not that he was going to find the answers in the trash.”
Weberman said his growing perception that Dylan was abandoning his leftist political messages had fueled his drive to shame the artist into “getting a conscience back.”
He took issue with albums like Dylan’s 1969 country offering “Nashville Skyline.” The record’s cover showed the smiling singer benignly tipping his hat, and its songs lacked overt political and social commentary.
He began claiming publicly that Dylan had become strung out on drugs — which Dylan denied — and had “sold out the left” by abandoning the political music that had defined his rise. He helped found the Dylan Liberation Front to re-radicalize Dylan and “free Bob Dylan from himself.”
Weberman said he finally met Dylan around 1971 when he knocked on his door.
“He said, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look through his garbage.”
Amid dirty diapers and kitchen scraps, he found personal letters and family photographs from the household, where Dylan lived with his wife, Sara, and their young children.
“I said, ‘This isn’t a garbage can, this a gold mine,’” he said.
Weberman began stalking the singer, pestering him on the phone and in person and writing about him in the East Village Other, an underground paper where he published images of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even asked readers if anyone could obtain a sample of Dylan’s urine. He wanted to test it for drugs.
Aron Kay, a Yippie buddy known for throwing pies in the faces of establishment figures, said Weberman, more than academic scholars, developed a visceral understanding of the songwriter and was determined to coax Dylan back to taking political stands about issues like the Vietnam War.
“A.J. always said, ‘You are what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the root of the matter: his garbage,” said Kay. “Even if Bob may not acknowledge it, it was a psychic cultural bonding between them. There was like a love-hate thing.”
Or perhaps Dylan wanted no involvement at all. He eventually stopped putting out items of interest, and asked Weberman to leave him and his trash alone.
Weberman agreed, but eventually returned with a reporter and photographer whom Sara chased away. Later that day, Weberman claims, Dylan saw him on Elizabeth Street and attacked him.
Pressed for proof, Weberman said Dylan made a clear reference to the attack in his 1978 song “Where Are You Tonight?” with the lyric “laughter down on Elizabeth Street” and the lines: “It felt out of place, my foot in his face / But he should have stayed where his money was green.”
On the songwriter’s 30th birthday in 1971, Weberman helped lead a demonstration outside his building. Dylan eventually moved out.
Dylan scoffed at Weberman’s claims about his lyrics, including in a contentious phone conversation that Weberman recorded in the early 1970s that was released by Folkways Records as “Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman — The Historic Confrontation.”
In the recording, Dylan calls Weberman a pig for going through his trash and seems exasperated at his insinuation into his life and lyrics.
“I’m not Dylan,” Dylan says. “You’re Dylan.”
Today, celebrities rarely handle obsessive fans themselves; the task often falls to law enforcement. A man who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded guilty to various crimes, including burglary, after breaking into her home more than 90 times. Last year, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days outside the TriBeCa home of Taylor Swift, another singer whose words are regularly the subject of speculation and dissection.
But Weberman’s behavior occurred in an era when the police were anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was more plausible than it is today. For his part, Weberman says he was not nuts. He said he had regular conversations with Dylan by phone and at his Houston Street music studio before Dylan finally got fed up with him.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman said. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I was interested in his poetry. It was political, not about his celebrity.”
A spokesman for Dylan declined to comment.
Weberman made his mania into a program, and expanded it. He taught a Dylanology class at the Alternate U., a countercultural center in the Village. He brought groups of students, and later other Dylan followers, to the MacDougal building. He expanded his explorations into the jetsam of other famous people, including former President Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“I moved on to other garbage cans,” he said.
Around 2000, Weberman’s own trash was searched, by federal agents who found weed packaging and later arrested him for money laundering. While serving a yearlong sentence, he created a 536-page “Dylan to English Dictionary,” a word-by-word analysis of Dylan’s metaphorical and allegorical language.
These days, Weberman is finishing his latest book, “The Dylan Heresy,” which offers still more exegesis.
In the movie theater recently, Weberman alone applauded after Chalamet’s performances of the songs, but joined in when folk fans in the film booed Dylan’s electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
On Tuesday, Weberman stopped by Dylan’s old MacDougal Street building and, feeling sentimental, lifted a lid on one of the old trash cans and peered inside.
He walked around the corner onto Houston Street and stood in front of Dylan’s former music studio, where he wrote his 1975 song “Idiot Wind.”
“That song’s about me,” he said. “Look at how it starts: ‘Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press.’”
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