This is one of the weirdest bootlegs I own. Dylan fans are guilty of grabbing hold of anything that his name can be linked with and I’m as big a sap as the next collector. No music on this. Just AJ Weberman talking about an interview he did with Bob Dylan in January 1971, followed by 2 telephone conversations between them following the interview.
Weberman is, to quote West of Scotland vernacular, a bit of a roaster. Amongst other things, he was convinced Dylan was a heroin addict, so he tracked down where he lived in New York and started raking through his rubbish to find clues/evidence that could substantiate his claims! The sleevenotes on the bootleg tell you more:
AJ Weberman, self styled Dylanologist, mega egotist, founder member of the art of Garbology, (the practice of sifting through someone’s garbage to interpret their character) had become notorious by circulating his revelations on Dylan’s persona on the underground press. Probably in an attempt to curb some of Weberman’s wild theorising and to protect his young family from intrusive attentions, Dylan began to actively cultivate Weberman’s interest in him, and around December 1970 and early January 1971 arranged to meet with Weberman at his recording studio in Greenwich Village that he’d recently had converted from a shop. Whatever the understanding between them may have been, Weberman’s motivation for attending these meetings was to consruct an article on Dylan that he could circulate in the underground press. When Dylan became aware of this, two telephone conversations ensued, the first from Dylan to Weberman requesting to see a draft of the article, the second a return call from Weberman to discuss amendments.
There’s books on this! And folk like me read them! Dylan is revealed to be obtuse, awkward and contradictory once he realises Weberman has taped him in conversation. Hardly revelatory stuff then, but you need to hear it. And he swears quite a lot too. It’s in 3 parts:
* part 3 will download from megaupload, as it was too big a file for my usual file host
Plain Or Pan 