Revisit ‘Tangled Up with Dylan’: a film about the most obsessed Bob Dylan fan
When it comes to Bob Dylan, it’s hard not to be astounded by his poetry and song-driven tales of a thousand heartbreaks and a thousand triumphs. There may be a hurdle to getting into Dylan, given that he has such a vast catalogue to approach, but once you’re over that hurdle, it’s easy to become obsessed with him and understand exactly why he was awarded that Nobel prize.
There are thousands of devoted Dylan fanatics, there is one man who is beyond obsessed. His name is A.J. Weberman, and he is the man that Dylan himself attacked in 1971 after he had been stalking and harassing his family. Weberman had even gone through Dylan’s bins and put on demonstrations outside his Greenwich Village home with several of his “Dylanology” students.
Discussing the time when Dylan physically assaulted him, Weberman noted, “I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker. I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. A couple of days later, I’m on Elizabeth Street, and someone jumps me, starts punching me.”
He continued, “I turn around, and it’s Dylan. I’m thinking, ‘Can you believe this? I’m getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan!’ I said, ‘Hey, man, how you doin’?’ But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He’s little, but he’s strong. He works out. I wouldn’t fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some fucking lawyer. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
Weberman has also (unsurprisingly, given his obsession) written a number of books about Dylan, including the strangely titled RightWing Bob: What the Liberal Media Doesn’t Want You To Know About Bob Dylan. So too, is there a highly sought-after bootleg record entitled Bob Dylan vs A.J. Weberman, which is comprised of a number of telephone conversations between the two men.
The record is largely why James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfeabout decided to make Weberman the subject of their documentary Tangled Up with Dylan: The Ballad of A.J. Weberman. Given Weberman’s peculiar character, they likely knew that he would make for a fascinating (if somewhat bizarre) topic of inquiry.
Discussing the film and Weberman, the duo said, “We first came across Weberman in various biographies of Dylan. He was and probably always will be portrayed as a persistent nuisance in the extreme. The way people wrote about him was purely hateful, which stuck out. We then heard the bootlegged phone call he made to Dylan, which made for fascinating listening, and we thought, ‘I wonder what this guy is doing now?'”
Knowing Weberman’s obsession, perhaps it may have been dangerous for Bluemel and Ralfeabout to make their film, but it seems that Weberman’s intensity has cooled. The duo said, “He never really commented on the film. In fact, he has never really asked us any personal questions about our lives at all. When we meet up with him these days, it’s just straight into whatever is on his mind. So no, he’s never let on what he thought about it.”
“He probably would have preferred it if we used more of his Dylanology rants and kept in some of the more outrageous conclusions he comes up with,” they added. “There was one point while shooting he said he would prefer it if we stopped filming, then he immediately changed his mind and said fuck it, let’s keep it in the style of cinéma vérité. I liked that.”
You can check out the full documentary below.
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