Digging Bob Dylan’s Garbage

August 21st, 2016

Awake Goy

A.J. Weberman, pioneer of garbology — A.J. Weberman, pioneer in the field of garbology

Independent investigator A.J. Weberman is a paranoid Jew who – in addition to authoring a study on the JFK assassination conspiracy and a book alleging that former presidential candidate Ron Paul is America’s Most Dangerous Nazi – is the legendary originator of the science of garbology. Weberman recounts the colorful genesis of his dumpster-diving studies in his 1980 tell-all My Life in Garbology:

One day in September, 1970, Ann Duncan and I were on our way to the Café Gaslight on MacDougal Street [in Greenwich Village] and we happened to pass Bob Dylan’s townhouse. For four long years I had been studying Dylan’s poetry, trying to crack the code of his symbolism. As I eyed the home of the reclusive poet I wondered what went down behind the door that Dylan had slammed in my face. Just then I noticed Dylan’s shiny new steel garbage can and said to myself, “Now, there’s something that was inside and now it’s outside.” I lifted the lid, reached in and extracted a half-finished letter written by Bob Dylan himself to Johnny Cash. “Ann, this is no garbage-can,” I shouted. “This is a goldmine!” Thus at that moment garbology was founded. Garbology, as we know it today, is the study of human personality and contemporary civilization through the analysis of garbage, or “garbanalysis.” The basic premise is “You Are What You Throw Away.” Garbage is a macrocosmic reflection, a mirror on life.¹

In quintessentially Jewish fashion, the author finds a pretext to insert a discussion of feces into his tongue-in-cheek exposition:

The unassailable reality is that every living being makes waste. Excretion is both natural and universal, a process in which all lifeforms participate; the more sophisticated the organism, the more sophisticated the waste it produces.

We leave this to the medical profession and, increasingly, to the CIA […] which has been known to analyze the excretions of foreign leaders in order to get an accurate picture of their health. Garbologists stick to other types of human trash for subjects to study: refuse, garbage, the ragbag, the dustbin, the junk pile, the trash heap, etc. Archaeologists sift through this kind of stuff, too, but only if it is ancient. The garbologist finds his research material on the street today (or, usually, early in the morning) and from it he derives a mirrored image of human behavior and the modern world in which we live.²

Weberman next adduces a righteous rationale to his hobby:

After my initial discovery in Dylan’s garbage I realized that this method of research had great potential. The lives of the rich, famous and powerful could be penetrated, great secrets revealed, plain truths brought to light from beneath the glittery façade. Garbology was a new weapon in the war against lies, injustice and faceless bureaucracy. The study and analysis of garbage could possibly alter the course of history! I resolved at once that aided by this valuable science I would leave no stone unturned, no garbage can lid untilted, in my quest for truth.³

Unable to tear himself from the filth, the researcher cannot resist the urge to reintroduce shit into the text – the excuse this time being psychoanalysis – before proceeding with the narrative.

How did I come to garbology? I guess you could trace it back to my early childhood. As a child I had a preoccupation with trash. While the other kids on my block were playing in the sandpile, I was playing in the garbage pile. My parents attributed it to a deficiency in my toilet training; they never realized they had a prodigy on their hands.⁴

The budding garbologist managed to attract a fair amount of publicity to his project, getting exposure in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Glamour, and elsewhere, and even extending his field of study to include prominent politicians. He established the National Institute of Garbology on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and seemed to have hit his stride. Most of what Weberman salvaged from Dylan’s trash was pretty mundane – “disposable diapers […] vegetable cans, Blimpie wrappers, coffee grounds […] rock-and-roll magazines […] a form letter to the Dylans from the Little Red School House […] where children of upper-middle-class and rich liberals of Greenwich Village all go”⁵ – but Dylan, once he discovered his most obnoxious fan was raiding his can, “responded by putting extra dog shit in his garbage,” biographer Howard Sounes reveals⁶.

After being confronted by Dylan, Weberman promised not to venture any further forays into the poet’s rather unremarkable rubbish; but Weberman went back on his word when a pretty Associated Press reporter encouraged the publicity-seeker to give her a peak at some of that famous Dylan trash.

I ventured into the poet’s slimy pail, one last time as it happened, a climactic event that became known as “The Time Dylan Stomped A.J.”

The incident occurred in September, 1971 […]

So, although I’d declared publicly […] that I’d leave Dylan alone, there I was again in front of his house with the AP reporter and a photographer digging through his trash can. I pulled out a crate that had held Israeli oranges, a bag of dirty diapers, and an unsmoked cigar. I was posing with my finds, but as the photographer focused, I heard the door behind me open. The camera clicked just as I heard someone scream, “Get the hell out of my garbage! You filthy animal! I can’t throw anything away anymore without you pawing through it!”

It was Sara Dylan.

She went after the AP reporter, scratching madly at her face, then attacked the photographer (a sixty-year-old wire-service veteran). I tried reasoning with Sara. “If you get so upset about me taking your garbage,” I said, “why do you throw it away?” This only pushed her into a greater fury. It was like trying to discuss integration with a lynch mob.

Dylan photographed with wife Sara and children during the period of Weberman's investigations — Dylan photographed with wife Sara and children during the period of Weberman’s investigations

“Give me that camera or I’ll put you in the hospital,” she threatened. I urged the photographer to get a picture quick. “She’s a nut,” I said. But the reporter and the photographer were halfway down the block.

“You garbage-picker,” said Sara, “You’re filth compared to Bob.” She walked off into the house.

On my way home my conscience began to bother me. Why had I gone back to Dylan’s garbage? Could it be that I was hopelessly addicted to his junk? Was I hopelessly addicted to publicity? I tried to call up Sara to apologize and left a message with her secretary. That afternoon I was walking down Elizabeth Street with my head bowed down to my shoes trying to figure out where I was really at, when I heard a bicycle stop a few feet in back of me. I thought nothing of it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an arm clasped around my neck. I wrenched it loose, turned around and saw it was Bob Dylan, my former idol, the man who’d written all the symbolist poetry I meticulously studied. My thoughts were interrupted by a punch in the head. Could this actually be happening or was it a bad dream? Perhaps it was a combination of both. I didn’t fight back. Instead I tried to calm Dylan down and block his punches. But he was having too much fun to stop so I was forced to bear hug him to the ground. This only riled him up even more and he began to knock my head against the pavement. Finally some local freaks pulled Dylan off. We both got up and I was speechless. Dylan ripped the D.L.F. [i.e., Dylan Liberation Front] button from my shirt, got on his bicycle and rode off into the sunset.

I stood there for several seconds trying to figure out why Dylan didn’t use karate on me. “Maybe that story about his taking lessons from the Jewish Defense League is a lie?” I wondered. The next moment I picked up an empty wine bottle and started running after Dylan. Seconds later I spotted him on his bike, waiting for a light.

I sneaked up behind him and was ready to let him have it with the bottle, Brooklyn-style, but I couldn’t do it. Dylan was right. I shouldn’t have messed with his junk. So I slunk back to the scene of the crime. A Bowery bum who’d witnessed the episode shuffled up to me and asked, “Did he get much money?”⁷

Weberman maintains that the enigmatic singer “remained obsessed by his victory on Elizabeth Street” and that his song “Where Are You Tonight?” from the 1978 album Street-Legal contains a reference to this incident in the lines, “The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean / It felt outa place, my foot in his face / But he should-a stayed where his money was green” – although Weberman incorrectly renders the latter phrase, “where his money was clean”.⁸

“You shouldn’t go through garbage like a pig, man,” Dylan later scolded him. “That puts you in the same class with the government phone-tappers.”⁹ The proliferation of paper shredders and advent of the digital age of paperless telecommunications certainly renders inaccessible much of what, at one time, would have been available through garbological sampling; but, presented with an epoch in which hostile local and federal governments terrorize the public with more than mere “phone-tappers”, is it unreasonable to suggest that the powerful ought to be entitled to no more privacy than they allot to the average citizen? Not everything can be emailed – nor necessarily fed with the ease of a sheet of paper through a shredder. The trash of the likes of Larry Silverstein is probably closely guarded; but can every person of public interest proceed with such prudent paranoia? Is every political donor or banker or rabbi or city councilwoman expecting that someone will go through their trash tonight? Maybe. Maybe not. There is only one way for brave souls to find out!

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

Weberman, A.J. My Life in Garbology. New York, NY: Stonehill Publishing Company, 1980, p. vii.
Ibid., p. vii-viii.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., p. ix.
Ibid., p. 5.
Sounes, Howard. Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2001, p. 264.
Weberman, A.J. My Life in Garbology. New York, NY: Stonehill Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 12-16.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 17.