Pubdate: Mon, 16 Jan 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Colin Moynihan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

THE ANSWERS MY FRIEND, ARE WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK

A. J. Weberman stood near Bleecker and Elizabeth Streets recently,
telling the story of how Bob Dylan got mad at him. It was the spring
of 1972, according to Mr. Weberman, when Mr. Dylan grabbed him and
shoved him angrily before riding off on a bicycle.

For years, Mr. Weberman had been rooting around in Mr. Dylan's trash,
looking for insight into the songwriter's sometimes oblique lyrics. He
had promised to stop the snooping, but had been visiting the trash
cans again, he said, incurring Mr. Dylan's displeasure.

"I deserved it," Mr. Weberman said the other day. "I don't hold it
against him."

The anecdote, to whatever degree accurate or apocryphal, provides a
prism through which to view two main themes in the life of A. J.
Weberman, 61, a Yippie, author and longtime "Dylanologist," who also
helped to popularize the practice of garbology, or searching through
trash for journalistic clues.

In November, Mr. Weberman's new book, "Dylan to English Dictionary,"
was published by the Yippie Museum Press, with an initial print run of
1,000 copies. In the 536-page book, he seeks to analyze the
metaphorical and allegorical language used by Bob Dylan.

"All these years I've been looking for some kind of code sheet," he
said. "I'm looking for a Rosetta stone to understand Dylan."

Mr. Weberman said that he spent two years cataloguing Mr. Dylan's
lyrics and identifying consistent ways in which the songwriter uses
words, then applying those ideas to interpret songs. For instance, "As
I Went Out This Morning," which was released in 1967, opens with the
lines: "As I went out this morning/To breathe the air around Tom
Paine's/I spied the fairest damsel/That ever did walk in chains." Mr.
Weberman contends that the lines describe Mr. Dylan's experience in
1964 of receiving an award named after Tom Paine and feeling
politically exploited.

Once in a while, Mr. Weberman sees himself in Mr. Dylan's words. He
wrote that "Where Are You Tonight?" released in 1978 - which includes
lines like "There's a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze,
laughter down on Elizabeth Street," and much later in the song, "It
felt outa place, my foot in his face, but he should-a stayed where his
money was green" - was a reference to the 1972 encounter.

Of course, it is impossible to know for sure. Mr. Dylan did not
respond to a request for comment made through his record company.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Weberman has been a gadfly and obsessive
questioner. He has written two other books, "Coup D' Etat in America
(The Third Press, 1974), in which he and a co-author, Michael
Canfield, speculated about the murder of John F. Kennedy; and "My Life
in Garbology" (Stonehill, 1980), in which he described looking through
trash belonging to public figures, like J. Edgar Hoover and former
Attorney General John Mitchell.

But Mr. Weberman's most enduring fascination is with Mr. Dylan. In
1969, Mr. Weberman said, he used a computer at a university to
cross-reference all the words used by Mr. Dylan. The resulting
printout, which he called the Bob Dylan Word Concordance, was one foot
high, he said.

Mr. Weberman met Mr. Dylan that year, he said, and hung out with him
off and on until the relationship soured in 1971, when Mr. Weberman
and other Yippies marked the songwriter's 30th birthday by holding a
demonstration outside his West Village home. They wanted him to
spearhead the movement against the war in Vietnam, even though Mr.
Dylan had already made it clear that he did not wish to be a spokesman.

Howard Sounes, the author of "Down the Highway: The Life of Bob
Dylan" (Grove Press. 2001), said that at one point Mr. Dylan tried to
befriend Mr. Weberman to try to get him to leave him alone, but
stopped because he was alarmed by Mr. Weberman's behavior.

"He sort of pursued Dylan as a stalker," Mr. Sounes said. "He was the
most unpleasant and notorious of all Dylan's obsessive fans."

All the while, Mr. Weberman sifted through items discarded by Mr.
Dylan. In November 1971, Esquire magazine published a story by Mr.
Weberman in which he described going through Mr. Dylan's garbage.

Mr. Weberman, who grew up in Brooklyn and now lives on the Upper East
Side, began his dictionary in February 2001 while he was beginning a
sentence of a year and a day for money laundering connected to the
sale of marijuana. Some evidence in the case was found by federal
agents who went through his trash.

"The garbologer was garbologized," "Mr. Weberman said. "I was hoisted
on my own petard."

His current book is the first to be published by the Yippie Museum
Press. This summer the press will publish a second book, called "The
Pie and the Mighty," by Aron Kay, a Yippie known for flinging pies at
elected officials like Jerry Brown, the former California governor,
and James L. Buckley, the former New York senator.

Mr. Weberman said that he did not expect widespread endorsement of his
book - certainly not from Mr. Dylan - but insisted that the songwriter
should be grateful that he was around.

"I'm like Verlaine to Dylan's Rimbaud," he said. "There's a natural
tension between the poet and his critic." 
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