The Weberman Tapes: The strange tale of Bob Dylan and his biggest fan
It was some morning in 1970. Bob Dylan had only recently moved back to New York City after a few years of being a recluse upstate. Things in his career were changing rapidly, and he was in an odd place with it all. He’d cast off the protest scene, he’d pissed off the folk crowd, he’d even try to shake off his own fans with Self Portrait. But then, this one morning, he looks out of his window to see a gaggle of people outside his house with banners reading, ‘Free Dylan from himself’. In an odd move for the deeply private star, he went downstairs and asked the leader of the group to get a coffee and chat. Thus begins the strange tale of Bob Dylan and AJ Weberman, the world’s first and weirdest ‘Dylanologist.’
But this wasn’t really the first time the two had met. Or, at least in Weberman’s mind, it wasn’t; he was a fan, which is an understatement. Weberman was one of the main people who felt personally scorned by Dylan’s decision not to write protest songs anymore. In a kind of intense, parasocial relationship with the singer he’d heard on tape, Weberman seemed to make it his personal mission to understand why Dylan had changed paths and put him back on the righteous one.
In 1969, he started the Dylan Liberation Front in order to “help save Bob Dylan from himself”. He was convinced that the move away from political messages was a kind of cry for help or that he was hiding from his own personal and social responsibility as he’d been sucked up into the big business machine of music. Many people felt that way after Dylan went electric and shocked his folk fans. But not that many people took to riffling through his bins, looking for clues.
Weberman called himself a garbologist, which is the study of digging through someone’s trash in order to understand them and society as a whole better. However, while the study is generally used to understand broader social patterns, Weberman used it specifically to try to get Dylan’s mind. During the day, he was lecturing on ‘Dylanology’ at the Alternate University of New York, teaching about how he was a revolutionary force and a voice for the radical left even though he’d faltered on his position. At night, he was going through the musician’s bins, looking for insights to use to put him back on track as the leader Weberman believed him to be.
So, in short, Weberman was a seemingly crazed man. He was basically stalking Dylan, obsessed with this ideological idol he believed the musician to be. He genuinely seemed to see it as his life’s calling to return Dylan to his righteous path and rightful place in the political scene, and he was going to extremes to make it happen. This brings us to that morning. Having gathered students and peers in the Dylan Liberation Front, they stood outside his house when suddenly, the musician emerged, walked up to Weberman, and invited him for coffee.
It’s an odd move, given how private Dylan has always been. The man evades the press, evades fans, and even lied about his life to evade prying eyes way back at the start of his career. So, for him to sit down with Weberman is peculiar. Perhaps it was simply an attempt to end it all, protect his family and stop this stranger from going through his bins. Or, perhaps there was a level to which Dylan was absolutely fascinated by this man and, for once, allowed himself to indulge in confronting or simply listening to the voices that seemed to be telling him what he should be doing constantly.
So they chatted. Dylan asked Weberman to stop going through his bins, and then they left. The musician thought that was that until the phone rang. “I typed out my recollections of our conversation together, and I’m gonna use it as an interview. I’m gonna send it out to every underground paper in America for free,” Weberman says on the first of what has become known as The Weberman Tapes.
It was the beginning of an odd back-and-forth captured over several recorded phone calls. Weberman told Dylan about this interview, Dylan requests to read it and correcting, surprisingly not just trying to kill the whole plot. They then talk over and over about the corrections to be made, with Dylan going into more detail on his thoughts on things and Weberman talking about his mission to reconfigure his career. It bursts into an argument in several moments as Dylan defends his intentions against this superfan, claiming he’s become little more than a commercial shill. It’s tense, but then, oddly, it’s not again. Across the 50 minutes of recorded conversation, these two figures build a strange kind of report, challenging one another, then chatting idly in moments.
It’s a fascinating document. Ironically, it goes beyond solidifing Weberman’s position as what Rolling Stone called “the king of all Dylan nuts”, but essentially made his role as a Dylanologist bonafide as he now had this incredibly rare one-on-one insight into the musician’s mind. Given how elusive Dylan is in interviews, the Weberman Tapes are probably one of, if not the most revelatory and intimate conversations ever captured with the musician, presenting a no-holds-back first-person insight into this era, even if it was captured in the strangest way imaginable.
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