The Dylanologists (16 page)

The singer played dumb. “I might have seen it. Were there lines from the movie in there?”

“Lots of them,” Bauldie answered.

“Were there really?”

“Yeah. Is it one of your favorite films, that?”

“I don't remember. Which lines were they?”

“Do you want a list?”

But before Bauldie could go through it chapter and verse, others jumped in with their own questions, and Dylan escaped unscathed.

3

Scott Warmuth had listened to a little Dylan over the years, but
“Love and Theft”
made him sit up and pay attention. That fall, as the world convulsed following 9/11, Scott had his own crisis. Doctors had found a mass in his chest, and he suffered through weeks of worry before learning it was a benign tumor. Then he had major surgery and an excruciatingly painful recovery. He couldn't play guitar, holding a book was uncomfortable, and he didn't watch television, so he just listened to a lot of music.
“Love and Theft”
was at the top of his playlist for months. It was “very strong medicine.” There was a line on “Mississippi,” the second track, about how the narrator needs a distraction. Man, how Scott could relate to that. He couldn't tell you how many times he played it as he lay in his bed. “I couldn't go anywhere physically, so I would travel to that world,” he said. “I lived there.”

A decade later, the album was still in regular rotation at Scott's house, and he was still teasing out its fifty-seven minutes of secrets.

It seemed that all his life Scott had been unwittingly training for this peculiar job. He grew up in suburban Long Island. When Scott was young, his father worked at a vinyl pressing plant, and one of the perks of the job was that he could bring home LPs. They had everything the Doors recorded, and a pile of Judy Collins, the blues and folk music of the day, Moog synthesizer music, 1960s bubblegum records, space-age pop, Engelbert Humperdinck. At ten, Scott would go to the library, where he had learned how to thread microfilm, and dig into the musical backstories of his favorite records. He didn't simply listen to
The Beatles' Second Album
. He researched the men who wrote the songs. That was how he discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He tracked down their records, too, and then, an archaeologist chiseling through sedimentary layers, followed those singers' roots back to music they loved and movies they watched. His library card was always maxed out, with most of the books coming from the 700s: music, photography, art, drawing. He was fascinated by special effects in science fiction and horror films.

If it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert in something, Scott was destined to become a radio disc jockey. When he was old enough to get a cash allowance but too young to drive, he would walk four or five miles to the record shop in the next town. His vinyl filled the shelving that ran the length of a wall in his bedroom. (He now has four thousand records.) He seemed to know everything about every artist, as if he'd memorized the liner notes. “He was the original musical polymath in our neighborhood,” says Tom Gogola, who grew up around the block. Scott wore John Lennon glasses and his dark hair freakishly long. Tom called him “the W.” Scott was the guy who introduced Tom to the obscure and the eccentric. The more bizarre, the better. If not for this friendship, Tom might never have learned about, say, the big-breasted sexploitation flicks of Russ Meyer (
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
) or Stiff Little Fingers, the Belfast punk band. Tom remembers Scott going through one musical phase after another. He had an Elvis period, a big Ramones era, even a B-52s episode.

In high school, Scott was known for being widely read, scarily smart, and wickedly funny, if a little aloof. The guys he ran with called themselves the Friends of the Friendless. He and Tom were enthusiastic teenage tricksters. They found
Frank
Kafka in the phone book and called him up to ask about
The Metamorphosis
. (“I just don't get it!”) Scott would dial up the toll-free evangelical phone lines and pretend that he was in need of their help; his house filled up with their free literature and tapes. For a while, Scott's gang ran a routine at the local 7-Elevens. One of them would buy a Hostess cherry fruit pie, Scott would come in screaming gibberish like a lunatic and smash it to pieces on the counter, and as the buyer chased him outside, Tom would eat the chunks—
Mmmm, that's good!
—and stare at the cashier. They gave it up after one 7-Eleven manager came after them wielding an ax handle spiked with nails.

Scott had been playing guitar since age eight. Early on, he got together with friends and they recorded themselves playing whatever they could. (He has a tape of them playing the head-banging riff from Black Sabbath's “Iron Man” for half an hour.) In high school and college he played in a number of bands: the Vogways, Blind from Wild Turkey, Psychedelicatessen. He was briefly in a hardcore punk band called Six and Violence.

But on air was where he found his home. His first radio show was on the high school station. For years he volunteered at WUSB, the noncommercial community radio station on the campus of Stony Brook University, where he went to college. After he graduated, he worked his way up to music director and hosted programs, including the Drive-In Show on Friday afternoons. Slipping into a cheesy persona (“Why don't you get smart and call your old buddy Scott, 632-6901—that's the number for
fun
!”), he would play vintage advertisements and old movie trailers between garage bands and surfer rock. He got married and moved to Albuquerque, where his first gig was spinning records and performing at a 1950s restaurant and car museum named YesterDave's. It looked like the set of the dance scene in
Pulp Fiction
. Over the years he worked half the stations in town. He did Big Oldies 98.5 and 100.3 the Peak and Sunny 95.1. For a while, he could be heard on three different stations at the same time. He loved the work. He studied music with a fan's passion and a scholar's painstaking attention to detail. He could play you thirty songs that Elvis Presley admired. He could name every singer who recorded, say, “Tequila,” or “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.” Once, he produced a two-and-a-half-hour radio special on “Surfin' Bird” by the Trashmen. Most people would consider it a novelty tune; Scott decided to research its origins, place it in a cultural context, and tell the definitive story.

One of the acts he loved was the Cramps, a “psychobilly” band founded in the 1970s by Lux Interior and his wife, Poison Ivy. Lux was known for stage antics that would make you think twice about getting too close. He might appear in low-rise black leather pants, mascara, and a crucifix—a cross-dressing goth. “It was kind of scary being in the front row,” wrote Henry Rollins, frontman for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. “Lux would find something to swing from—if there were ceiling tiles, they'd all be on the floor by the end of the thing. Lux would somehow find his way out of his pants and be down to a pair of bikini briefs twitching all over the floor.” The Cramps incorporated 1950s kitsch, horror, surfer music, rockabilly, punk. Lux sang lines like “Vampire lesbos are after me!” They once played a mental hospital in Napa.

Most people didn't take them very seriously, but Scott was fascinated with how the Cramps fabricated their songs from bits of pop culture—music and art and obscure films. Their rollicking song “Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs” is a comic homage to Marcel Duchamp's modernist painting. (“Lux is really into Duchamp,” his wife said. “I think if Duchamp hadn't died in Lux's lifetime, I'd think that Lux was reincarnated as Duchamp.”) He found another line, “swirling through the vortex,” in a how-to guide for astral projection­—out-of-body experiences. Scott liked the way the Cramps took what they saw and then twisted it. “I liked that it had roots,” he said. “It was thrilling to me. I wanted to know more. So I dove into it.”

If anybody was primed to take what Chris Johnson found in that bookstore in Japan and turn it into his life's work, it was Scott, whose encyclopedic brain seemed to hold whatever he dug up in his research. As it happened, the primary tool in this effort would be his computer. Dylan had expected to keep the band of Dylanologists busy for a long time after his death. He said it would take a hundred years for people to figure him out. But he probably didn't foresee the scope of the Internet, and in particular Google Books. When the company started digitally scanning books of major libraries and making the pages available and searchable, the work of sourcing Dylan's lyrics became exponentially easier for the diggers.

Over time, Scott and others began unpacking
“Love and Theft.”
The record amazed Scott. It showed hard work and focus and craft. The way Dylan juxtaposed the surreptitious quotes was intricate, and often funny. It rewarded repeat listens and careful study. “He takes all these lines from all these places,” Scott said, “and they all come off as Dylanesque.” In the opening track, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” Dylan sings about various sets of twins, duos, and brothers, and the thefts harken back to earlier works on the theme. The characters in the title are best known as the copycats from Lewis Carroll. The Land of Nod is where Biblical Cain was exiled after killing his brother. “Your presence is obnoxious to me” comes from a minstrel sketch involving a woman who rents the same apartment to two men and they don't know it, since one works all night and one works all day. “Stab you where you stand” is a line in the Edgar Allan Poe short story “William Wilson,” about a man and his doppelgänger. In a 1932 movie about circus freaks, one of the Siamese twins says, “Her master's voice is calling.” The distinctive guitar riff comes from a 1961 rockabilly song called “Uncle John's Bongos” by Johnnie & Jack, who were brothers-in-law.

Scott made another, more surprising connection. The lyrics have a certain New Orleans flavor. Dylan sings of “a street car named Desire” and quotes that Mardi Gras cry “Throw me somethin', mister!” But Scott contended that the song is also seasoned with hidden references from a more pedestrian source, a travel guide to New Orleans. A throwaway phrase in a restaurant review finds a home on
“Love and Theft”
(and became something more grisly in the transference): Brains cooking in a pot are “dripping in garlic and olive oil.” To those who thought it sounded like a coincidence, Scott pointed out that Dylan lifted several other phrases from the travel guide, including the clunky phrase “a multi-thousand-dollar gown.”

Later, he discovered on “Tweedle Dee” bits of obscure recordings by the New Lost City Ramblers, an influential Village folk-revival band dedicated to old-time music. As these references piled up, Scott started thinking more about Dylan's musical template, “Uncle John's Bongos.” He didn't think it was a coincidental choice. One of the founders of the Ramblers was John Cohen, who had been celebrated on the Grateful Dead's anthem “Uncle John's Band.” The writer, Robert Hunter, sprinkled that song with nods to the band's recordings—just as Dylan had done here. (It's also worth noting that Hunter and Dylan have written some songs together over the years.) Scott figured that by tucking the hidden references into “Tweedle Dee,” Dylan wanted to underscore how important the Ramblers were to him, and to folk music. His argument is bolstered by
Chronicles
, in which Dylan praises the band extravagantly. “All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth.”

None of Scott's detective work happened in a linear way; unraveling the threads took years. A decade after the release of
“Love and Theft,”
he and the others weren't done yet. And while they worked, Dylan continued to issue new recordings that were ripe for study.

In 2005, he released a song on a movie soundtrack called “Tell Ol' Bill.” It's gloomy and cryptic: the tortured inner monologue of a man navigating a bleak landscape alone. “Secret thoughts are hard to bear,” he sings. The specter of a lost love seems to hang over everything. Dylan's melody hews faithfully to “I Never Loved but One” by the Carter Family. Both songs' narrators wish for “one smiling face” to comfort them. “All my body glows with flame,” Dylan sings, a curious line that appeared in the poem “The Geranium” by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). The poet put the phrase in the mouth of a woman convulsed in amorous rapture, for the flower is not just a flower. Dylan drew from two other poems of tragically lost love. The phrase “lying restless in heavy bed” was sixteenth-century Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser's; the “thunder-blasted trees” were Poe's—like his narrator, they will bloom “no more.” Dylan also seemed to be recycling the opening of an old folk song called “Old Bill” about a man who leaves his home in the morning and returns in “de hurry-up wagon”—a hearse—with “his toe-nails a-draggin'” following an encounter with a .38. “Oh, no, dat cain' be so,” his wife cries out. Finding these allusions felt like opening up doors into new rooms where the same scene played out ad infinitum.

A diligent digger could find other echoes. Were those Virgil's “iron clouds,” the ones that portend doom in his epic poem? And was that a snippet from
Don Quixote
? And was that French general Joseph Joffre speaking before the first Battle of Marne in 1914? The songs of Late Dylan are filled with rabbit holes like those, obscurities that could be allusions or could be the products of hyperactive Internet searches and overactive imaginations.

In 2006, annotators were given a new record to contend with,
Modern Times
. Studying the songs, Scott made a significant discovery: Dylan was reusing poetry by a forgotten Civil War–era Charleston native named Henry Timrod. “A round of precious hours,” goes a poem published in 1857. “Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked, / And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.” A century and a half later, Dylan sang, “More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours.” Warmuth posted the find online, and within a week he had tracked down a dozen more phrases from Timrod in six songs. (He even found Timrod on “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.”)