A Credo

This is close to any religious beliefs I might have. From Bulwer Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii: The gods! Speak not thus vaguely; perchance there is but one god! My brother! What if the sublime faith of the Nazarene be true? What if God be a monarch- One-invisible-Alone? What if these numerous countless deities whose altars fill the earth, be but evil demons, seeking to wean us from the true creed? This may be the case, Ione! Alas! can we believe it? or if we believed, would it not be a melancholy faith? answered the Neapolitan. What! all this beautiful world made only human!-the mountain disenchanted of its Oread-the waters of their Nymph-that beautiful prodicality of faith, which makes everything divine, consecrating the meanest flowers, bearing celestial whispers in the faintest breeze-wouldst thou deny this, and make the earth mere dust and clay? No, Apaecides; all that is brightest in our hearts is that very credulity which peoples the universe with godsl

Debunking The Biblical Creation Myth

Debunking The Biblical Creation Myth: Water Vs. Dirt by R.E. Prindle One of the great conflicts in the course of the development of the human intellect is that of science vs. religion. The conflict should not be confused with Evolution that relates to physical changes, while science and religion are mental approaches. Both science and religion have existed through out history. As science requires physical confirmation and religion doesn’t science has developed more slowly. Again science requires confirmation while religion is ‘revealed.’ Thus the Asiatics of the East End of the Mediterranean tended to be religious while the Egyptian and the Greeks tended toward the scientific, as primitive as it might appear. Somewhen in the Pisces side of twelve hundred BC the notion of what the religionists are pleased to call monotheism was determined, which was supposed to invalidate polytheism, was adopted as the official stance of the Jews, or Hebrews and succeeded as the official stance in subsequent Western history. Polytheism is actually primitive science with each god representing a facet of reality. Naturally rather than disappearing polytheism was transmogrified into the Godhead and the ten emanations or Sephiroth. Thus the Gods and Goddesses coursed through history gradually becoming what is called collectively Science instead of the Godhead while the various scientific disciplines replace the Emanations or Sephiroth. Zeus, for instance became the Godhead transmogified and the minor gods and goddesses became the Emanations. Fundamental actually. A major problem to the human intellect is the problem of life and that involves the elementals-earth, water, air and fire. The Greek Pre-Socratics wrestled mightily with this problem while the discussion was universal which also involved the Jews. In their mythical history they opted for earth as the primary material of life as they saw dirt and humans as solids. This was a serious error in science, but no problem in religion, as human life is actually based in water being something like 98% with the other 2% composed of atomic elements. Jewish theory was hobbled by their religious belief that the earth and universe was created at the beginning of the Age of Taurus. Ludicrous on the face of it. Thus all of existence had a very short period for development or evolution. The Jews, or their Hebrew Semitic ancestors, splintered off from the Semitic main body in Mesopotamia at the cusp of Taurus and Aries while retaining the beliefs current of Taurus. The main body that retained the science of the Sumerians who they replaced in Mesopotamia, were aware that civilization went back a hundred thousand years and before that the age of the Earth was indeterminant. Circumstances shackled the mind of Western man to the Jewish version of creation, that is of the years of the Taurian Age. ‘God’, that is the Jewish version of ‘God’, said the Jews, came into existence at the same time and he created Man by picking up a clod of dirt and sculpting an image of himself breathing life into it. So I look like God, you look like God, right?, unless you’re a woman and then you are a clone of the first man fashioned from the material of his rib right? As I say, circumstances foisted this ridiculous nonsense onto the mind of Western man universally as fact until some time in the eighteenth century of Pisces when the science of geology demonstrated the impossibility of the planet being only four thousand years old at that time. Subsequently we have come to accept, based on scientific rather than religious grounds that the planet may be four and a half BILLION years old. Thus the Semitic religions fall to pieces. Here’s a problem that worries lots of people: where did water come from? The prevailing ‘scientific;’ explanation is that water came from outer space. Comets dropped it off. This raises the problem of why are oceans of water floating around in outer space looking for planets to make a real splash down on? Personally, I accept the science that water is made right here on this planet. Space cats are going to have to come up with real proof. The fact is that the giant iron core of the planet rotates at a different speed than the outer layers. The outer layers are unstable slipping around the core at a lower speed. The friction between the core and the slipping outer layers. The slipping creates a magnetic field called gravity. The heat and pressure generate chemical changes while the outer layers transmute the different elements into different substances. Hydrogen and oxygen being the two elements that combine to make water. The water, then, is extruded onto the surface. Even today great subaqueous springs continuously extrude to refresh and replenish the water supply. The low lying lands slowly filled with water to create the oceans. The water evaporated, as water will do, and various gases including oxygen constitute air. In the process the elevated part of the planet came to know fresh water. Here is an astounding fact: In one billion years, prepare now, the Sun will be 10% brighter making it hot enough for Earth to lose enough hydrogen to space to cause the planet to lose all its water. (Fact taken from Wikipedia.) Thus while oxygen may remain there won’t be enough hydrogen to form H2O. There is no need to look to outer space to know where water comes from; it is a natural process of the planet. Thus the oceans were formed. In the process of extrusion the various elements (iron, copper etc.) were dissolved in the water. Therefore water (hydrogen and oxygen) has many trace elements of which about eighteen are used to create life. This can only happen in water. Rabbi Loewe, a fifteenth century European Rabbi formed the monster called the Golem, whose role was to kill anti-Semites, out of dirt that he breathed air into its nostrils and brought it to life. This is magic of the highest order. Neither ‘God’ or Rabbi Loewe ever created life that way. So, all of these elements were floating around in the primordial soup, that is to say oceans, where they bumped into each other forming various combinations that bonded into primitive one celled organisms that began to mutate and change into various forms. Life began in the oceans. There originally was not much oxygen in the atmosphere but when it reached about 21% life became possible. How long ago that was isn’t known. We know it was when the atmosphere became 21% because that is the percentage needed today to sustain life. If the oxygen were reduced sufficiently the various forms of life would become sluggish and inefficient; if the oxygen content rose life forms would burn oxygen more brightly and expire. Thus, humankind evolved in water and assumed the appearance of solidity. As Isaac Asimov (who was Jewish by the way) said: Humans are just big bags of water. No dirt involved. Another Jewish myth debunked.

A Review: The Double Life Of Bob Dylan

A Review: The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin by R.E. Prindle Heylin, Clinton: The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, 2021, Little Brown & Co. All good things come to an end and Bob Dylan’s ‘Never Ending Tour’ terminated in 2020 after the Great Magical Virus of 2019 arrived. The world was put in lockdown. Bob returned home. He will be 80 years old this May 24th. I think it doubtful that he will return the road. Hopefully he will sit down and draft a second volume of his chronicles. Probably not. Vol. I was criticized and he doesn’t like criticism. Strange that he would put out a three volume set of Sinatra songs. It almost seems malicious that Clinton Heylin would release yet another biography on Bob that details his early career from 1960 to 1966 when Bob’ personality disintegrated under the strain of too much fame. Bob was born in 1941 , making him thirteen in 1954, the seminal year of our times when the Supreme Court issued the famous decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka. Thus the disintegration of the United States began that is almost complete today. Thus Bob and I were present at the creation of seventy some years of racial turmoil. The Black-White situation would be central to Bob’s musical career. To this point in time there has been only one permissible opinion of the importance of that Judicial decision. I view here my interpretation of that momentous decision and its aftermath. The matter was not handled correctly but as the starting point of the Negro Revolution reaching a crescendo today the matter should have been thought out better. The Supreme Court of 1954 was the very opposite of the Supreme Court that Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited in 1933 at his inauguration. Then the Court consisted of men born during the Gilded Age, anathema to FDR. As they continued to reject liberal edicts, one might say revolutionary policies, he became frustrated and made an appeal to pack the Court with enough Liberal judges to override the existing Court and rubber stamp his policies. As he was always willing to use any means necessary no matter how illegal the country was horrified at the idea of overturning the democratic process. But then a couple Justices died, a couple advisedly handed in their resignations and the Court became Liberal as FDR refilled the vacant seats. After twenty years of treason, as Joseph McCarthy phrased it, appointments by FDR and Harry Truman turned the Court so Liberal it was nearly Red. It shifted from interpreting the law to making law, thus usurping the purpose of the House of Representatives, the so-called legislative body. While I don’t understand Heylin’s notion of a double life of Bob Dylan I do understand the double life of the United States of America. That double life was the Negro nation vs. the White nation. All other problems are secondary to that problem for which there is no resolution other than the elimination of one people or the other. It sounds harsh but it is a fact. Absurdists today have totally exacerbated the problem insisting that Black people on their arrival in 1619 have been the reason for the success of the US to a point ten years earlier than 2021. First there was slavery, then the Jim Crow period that ended in 1954 then to the freefall of today. I was in the tenth grade in 1954 when the Brown decision was announced. I gave a little shudder as I realized what was ahead for the country. As I say, the racial problem can only be resolved by the extinction of one race or the other, that is a genocide, that genocide will be achieved through sexual miscegenation. The direction of the genocide today is against the Whites. Whiteness must be removed from the planet they proclaim. Could anything be plainer? This may seem improbable or impossible as Whites vastly outnumber Negroes. Not as big a problem as it may seem as will be revealed. Few, if any, recognized Brown as the opening shot in the Negro rebellion conducted by asymmetrical methods as well as violent revolution. Nor, was anybody aware that everything had been planned for the attack. My home town, Saginaw, Michigan had two high schools, Saginaw High and Arthur Hill. Saginaw High in 1954 was fully integrated being half Black and Arthur Hill was all White. I attended Arthur Hill as I lived on the then White West Side. Within days days of the Court decision a gigantic Black Guy, easily forty years old claiming to be a high school student, showed up at my French class. It was clear to me that he had never finished school. I have no idea why he came to converse with a French teacher. Perhaps Mrs. Jacobson was a member of NAACP or affiliated in someway, hence a co-conspirator. I was astounded by the urgency of the guy’s presence while it seemed that the two were acquainted. At one point I blurted out that he wasn’t a student for which I was physically threated by this giant. As he was a foot and half taller than myself and four time my weight I chose to make discretion the better part of valor. When we were playing football with Saginaw High their all Black team was well over eighteen year old semi-pro players. Fortunately they were more intent on beating up White kids than winning the game so Arthur Hill miraculously won the game but limped and crawled back to the West Side. Saginaw was an industrial magnet so there was a steady stream of both White and Black migrants from the South moving North of which Saginaw got its share. Now, you can say what you want about a Mississippi education vs. the North but the White emigrants had no trouble meeting educational standards and blending right in while the Black emigrants from, say, Mississippi, could not meet educational standards but blended in perfectly with the Black population. Both were equal within their respective race. I, therefore, concluded that there were inherent differences of intellectual capabilities since Mississippi was alleged to have the most wretched educational system in the US; while, on the other hand, the cultural differences were so deep and apparent while reinforced by social separation that I realized that it would be decades, if ever, that any integration could take place. However, the Blacks were not disposed to wait but wanted social and intellectual equality if not supremacy. The only result could be the dumbing down of the educational system. At that time reparations was not an issue but when they did become one it became apparent that the only acceptable reparation would be the enslavement of Whites to Blacks. I took a deep breath figuring the future was going to be impossible and I have been proven right. War is hell and the race war began with the Brown Board of Education decision backed by the full military force of the US Government, tanks and all. Blacks may have been inferior in numbers but the full backing of the military and Judicial System the Whites were cowed. Bob Dylan, the subject of this article lived away up North on the Canadian border in Hibbing Minnesota, just below Duluth on the Iron Range. US ore deposits were exhausted because of FDR’s stripping the country of its mineral resources to be deployed in foreign wars not only supplying the entire continent of Europe but the teeming millions of China and Far East. FDR was a wastrel without a grain of common sense. Hibbing was in full decline. The town apparently had no Negroes but was populated by a variety of European immigrants, at that time first, second and third generation. Bob was part of the Jewish segment numbering three or four hundred people. His parents were Orthodox Jews, his father representing the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The commercial life of Hibbing was in the hands of the Jews so that there was some hostility, perhaps more than anyone wants to discuss, between the two factions. One gathers that Bob’s father was aggressively Jewish and was resented by the non-Jews. Consequently Bob had a rough time growing up. Pictures show him just as an ordinary middle class kid rather preppy and chubby wearing penny loafers. An emasculated kid’s gear. At the same time he is described as a wild kid and rather hoody. Hard to recognize the one style in the other in the pictures. Certainly in New York he assumed the scruff character. This latter description would square with his account that he was sent to reform school at Redwing, Minnesota on highway 61. On the other hand when he had married Sara Lowndes and was living in Woodstock he reverted to the preppy style he had in Hibbing. After replenishing the earth with four offspring according to biblical requirements he reverted to the scruff personality and went back on the road to resume being the real Bob Dylan. In 1961 he left Minnesota for the Big Bagel, New York City to make it as a folk musician. I haven’t seen any of his biographers give him credit for this but the move was both intelligent and quite nervy. In order to make it in the music business in 1960 New York City was the winnowing site. The recording industry hadn’t yet surfaced in LA although it would begin to do so soon so it was impossible to get attention anywhere else except maybe Nashville if you were Country. So Bob took on the Big Bagel and succeeded gloriously. Rather than just show up in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian center of the US located in lower Manhattan, with the rest of the arriving Greenies he chose to take a couple months to scope out the scene and plan his attack. Good strategic move. I don’t know whether they still do it but every year a contingent arrived from smaller locations in the US where their life style wasn’t accepted, i.e. they were homosexuals or there was no future where they were. NYC absorbed them all. Now, this is incredible, Bob says that to make ends meet he became a male prostitute, what Heylin calls a ‘rent’ boy using British terminology. Heylin, like me, is incredulous, however one would think that such activity would be the last thing one would admit, true or false. Thus, I have to take Bob at his word in this case although the history of himself that he related to his fellow folkies was pure fabrication. Bob arrived in New York as the Negro Revolution was reaching an early apex, only seven years after Brown. While scoping out the scene he quickly realized the Village was a Jewish, Left and homosexual scene and that a Negro revolution was going on that had to be catered to. Whether his work on 42nd St. came in handy isn’t known. It was known that he was a complete womanizer. However Bob’s musical education was rooted in Country and Western. Having read many biographies, I see this aspect of his background, if noticed, passed over. I am three years older than Bob born on May 26, 1938 while we both came from the same record listening background. We both have nearly identical mental catalogs of Country/Hillbilly songs. If you want to notice the importance of his C&W background notice that after he came back from his nervous breakdown in 1967 John Wesley Harding was as a country singer and on his Nashville Skyline album he tips his cowboy hat with a howdy and I’m just a C&W singer look. He didn’t write that out but that was the import of the picture. Bob was ideally placed for radio reception of the great Country stations in Hibbing that blasted up from the South and Mexico/Del Rio Texas. (www.THERADIOHISTORIAN.org/xer/xer.hdml) The station had the best C&W going while the ads touted the most amazing stuff you’ve ever heard and there were lots of items. Another great station operated out of Waterloo Iowa also with the greatest ads ever. Moving slightly East, maybe not so convenient for Hibbing Minnesota was the fantastic WCKY-WCincinnatiKentucky. I could get a staticky Wheeling West Virginia that played the real mountain music. Bob and his biographer always mention Shreveport Louisiana, home of the Louisiana Hayride but the reception was too poor for me. I lived in Saginaw, Michigan, son of a hillbilly as the Southern Whites and Blacks came North for jobs. Hillbilly music was despised. I mean you didn’t mention you listened to it or you were blacklisted. Black music was not heard or listened to except for a few White Negroes. Even Detroit, that heavily Black city only played a half hour show that I tuned into a few times but Black music was too foreign for my tastes. Ertha Kitt and Harry Belafonte were popular Black performers but their music was no way related to Black music, nor was that very popular Black group, The Platters. The first Black artist to break on through to the other side was the incredible Little Richard. He blazed a trail that Black artists could follow. Little Richard unbuckled his seat belt in 2020 at the age of 87 heading for the Top 10 in the sky. He claimed that he was the inspiration for James brown and many others. Brown never really broke through, as James Brown and His Famous Flames of the mid-fifties he was going nowhere. Then, about 1960 Berry Gordy came up with a successful formula for Black music. When Bob says that back in Hibbing he had been into R&B, other than Little Richard, I don’t believe him. His Hibbing radio station was totally middle of the road. His Rainy Day Women off his Blonde On Blonde album was his version of Little Richard’s breakthrough Tutti Frutti, very nearly as astonishing. So, when he got to NYC he had a lot of catching up to do. It was right about the time he reached NYC that CBS released the two Robert Johnson LPs that began to turn White bluesmen’s heads. It should be borne in mind that as important as Johnson’s records are touted to be absolutely no one in the general population ever heard of him and still have never listened to the records as late as 1970 and possibly ever. Outside of a very limited circle he was unnoticed. Blues artists may have imitated him to some extent but Johnson inspired no one at the time. Dylan however says he listened to the albums a couple times and was ecstatic. Don’t try to find too much Johnson in his music though. Remember that he recruited Mike Bloomfield, a notable Blues guitarist to play for him then told him not to play that Blues shit but to be more country. When you’re listening to Bob you’re listening to transmogrified Country. Once Bob hit his stride with Bringing It All Back Home I loved his stuff. Back to NYC Folk Music, the most boring stuff ever recorded. Race is central to understand the US. New York City was a Jewish town. It had the largest colony of Jews anywhere in the world. The Jews looked on NYC as the New Promised Land. It was theirs. Sitting in NYC and despising anything South and West as all New Yorkers do, or did, they looked out at the hillbillies and country folk and laughed as considering them less than human but listening to the music they played from a musicological point of view they thought that they may be dopey but they sure liked the music but that it should be altered to Jewish tastes. And they were right about the music but wrong about the people. That is another matter but let’s look at it anyway. Social attitudes have been altered completely since 1950-60 which period is involved here. The old country and Hillbilly people have disappeared today subsumed in modern culture but at the time the Hillfolk were considered great comic material. Al Capp was foremost with his Li’l Abner comic strip in which he was quite vicious in demeaning the country he called Dogpatch. At the same time the Barney Google comic strip laughed at the hill people. The great Gasoline Alley strip laughed at Urbanbillies. The most demeaning of all was the two books of a creep called Erskine Caldwell. His books were Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. They were positively evil and ‘cultured’ people accepted them at face value while the characterization of the impoverished White formed the image of ‘ignorant’ Whites that persists to this day. Caldwell was indelible moreso than Al Capp. The persona adopted by Dylan, ironically himself a Jew, was that of the despised Hillbilly. An Okie, the likes of those who invaded LA and Bakersfield/Fresno during the Dust Bowl and Depression. So, New Yorkers discovered Hillbilly music and Southern Black music at the same time. They revered Black music that was just as or more eccentric as Hillbilly while the Black people were more acceptable than the White Hillbilly. No matter they altered the Blues as well as Hillbilly. Actually both were closely related but done in a different way. Jewish musicologists grabbed their bulky primitive recording equipment and headed South to record these precious musics before they were papered over by the hand of time. Most of this was done during the thirties of the Roosevelt years. If a Black guy was singing some pop song they’d never heard before they threw down their machine, handed the singer a microphone and said Sing into that. Coming from NYC there was a lot they didn’t know but they weren’t aware of that. If the Blacks weren’t totally up to date they weren’t hanging back either. It was that they talked as funny as the White Hillbillies but with a different accent. The Southerners came from the English/Scottish Border country primarily during the eighteenth century and spoke the uneducated English of their time which was then picked up by the Negroes and became their standard English. Remember these people came direct from Africa and learned the English the Southern Whites were speaking at the time. The Negro dialect that sounded funny in the twentieth century was the same English spoken by most of the English of the eighteenth century. The tapes or records came back to NYC and these Jewish gentlefolk were appalled by the appearance of the singers but liked the songs that they turned down in their originals then adapting the music for Jewish tastes. They made it pretty boring stuff. Their crap was going nowhere until Little Richard Redux in the person of Bob Dylan showed and put some life into them. It was easy, wasn’t it Bob? There is some discussion of when Bob decided to go electric. That is to abandon NYC folk and play the pseudo Hillbilly music that he loved. When CBS, the label that signed him to promote his first album he came up with a raucus something that was a cross between Sun Records and Little Richard in his hokey Okie voice called Mixed Up Confusion. In the lyrics he confesses that his mind, is mixed up and confused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH2hyQeZo1U Bob would later confess that the Folk thing was a shuck. In slang shuck means to deceive and manipulate. He also said that he chose folk as entry point because it was vacant at the time meaning there was little competition at that time and it was a surreal time in which all the rules were suspended, which was true. If the folkies could be wowed by songs like Masters of War and God Is On Our Side, the whole act was vacant and beneath notice which in 1963 was exactly as I saw it. Bob used the scene as a stepping stone and it worked. The miracle is that while appearing talentless in 1960, 61, 62, 63 and part of 64 he was able to put together a supreme act for an audience of limited appeal. What he considers his two song masterpieces, Positively Fourth Street and Like A Rolling Stone are vindictive and nasty in tone, possibly for that reason pulled from Top 40 radio. The two songs were strong variations of Mixed Up Confusion. This was not music for general public and for that reason for all the noise Bob made he didn’t sell all that well. He really wasn’t in the same league as the Beatles. It is hard to understand the milieux in which the Beatles and Dylan became celebrated. One is led to believe that there was something out of the ordinary or different to the tremendous buildup the two acts received. For a couple years nearly every move they made was broadcast worldwide on television news channels. And one must remember these were acts- shucks. There may be something to the notion that the world wanted relief from the events surrounding the period of the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps that even presaged the end of an epoch and the beginning of another. Perhaps when the Beatles emerged from the plane it was the annunciation of a new epoch. Perhaps it represented the end of the Roosevelt reaction to the Gilded Age. In 1958/59 the mob backed singers Fabian and Frankie Avalon received the same buildup. Of course, they were Mafia backed with no performing background, non-singers as it were, who needed the buildup to recover the mob investment. The Beatles and Dylan were authentic acts before their wild promotion. So far as I know Fabian was the first of the buildups and except for young girls, at whom his career was directed, he was a non-entity. There was a difference in the build up of the Beatles and Dylan. The Beatles were a proven commodity in Great Britain while when their LP was released in the US on a minor label it was a failure. Certainly the Beatles were surprised, even amazed, by their reception in the US at the NYC Idlewild airport. It was like people, young people at least, were looking for a savior. The Beatles English record label EMI’s US subsidiary Capitol Records was ordered to pull out all the stops to make the Beatles a smash and Capitol did. A trainload of girls was recruited at the airport to give the Beatles a screaming reception. These four guys stepped off the plane looking like four ordinary yobbos (British for punks), gazed in wonderment and right before our eyes transmogrified into the Beatles, the saviors of the world. Soon Lennon would make the mistake of announcing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. That’s when their heartaches began. They went away from the US and never again returned. But they still were the Beatles and that long strange trip into the Sixties began. Dylan was another case, he was a beat up homme, fairly thoroughly emasculated as was Lennon. He covered that up with a sort of comic bluster. I refer you again to Mixed Up Confusion. It was even more difficult to explain the media attention that Bob got. He was an American version of the yobbo. Both the Beatles and Dylan had nothing to offer for their sanctity other than a few songs. With the example of the Beatles before them, all the groups who were part of the British Invasion exalted themselves as the bearers of a New Dispensation, and yea verily, we believed it, as did the most prominent of the American groups after 1966 with the exception of the Monkees who were a made up corporate shuck with songs from professional song writers hence not to be taken seriously. They were all yobbos and leaders in that revolution. The loyalty was to the Beatles and Dylan. Being so rapidly exalted, well above their status in life, going from poverty to millions upon millions of dollars, had a devastating effect on their personalities. The Beatles, with the exception of Lennon with his Jesus fixation, handled the fame, the situation well with cool heads, or seemingly so. Dylan had a very difficult time of it. That problem is the central issue of Clinton Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan. Heylin chronicles Dylan’s descent to his nervous breakdown in 1966 when Dylan was overwhelmed by difficulties of fame. Essentially he retired from the business at the height of his fame after composing the three records that indelibly established his reputation as a savior: Bringin’ It All Back Home, Highway ’61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. The Lyrics sounded deep and knowing but meant nothing, reflections on his sex life, while the music sounded new and exciting. Without electricity Bob was dull. If you want to see the real Bob Dylan, reverting in 1964-65 you need to watch the Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back in its original form before Bob suppressed it and replaced it with different material. Pennebaker’s version is an accurate portrayal of the actual situation if you analyze it nearly frame by frame. In the movie Dylan and his yobbo entourage are staying at London’s premier Savoy Hotel. Loaded on booze and drugs the raucous party is disturbing the sedate hotel. I stayed there once, didn’t like it. Now these yobbos are completely out of their element and wish to show their disdain for ‘the rich.’ A couple loonies decide to throw the glass shelves from the bathroom out the window into the street. Dylan completely drops his disguise shedding his entire Bob Dylan persona to return to the emasculated Bobby Zimmerman as he pleaded with them to not do that. Groups were famous at the time for trashing hotels and they were going to trash the Savoy. Very uncool. That is the real personality behind, as Heylin would say, the shades. The situation deteriorates badly when the manager comes up to request that they hold it down. Naturally the yobbos start taunting the guy. Only Dylan’s reputation and perhaps Grossman’s intervention save Dylan from being expelled from the hotel. So, Robert Zimmerman had to develop and then had to maintain the character of Bob Dylan that Zimmerman had created. He became increasingly distressed as he realized his dream augment by massive does of alcohol and drugs. Alcohol had been a problem since high school. Some say he was a heroin addict and I’m sure he dabbled but his main drug was the drug of NYC, methamphetamines. As far as amphetamines went Bob was violating no laws. Amphetamines were legal to 1967 a year after Bob broke down. NYC was awash in amphetamines. Andy Warhol’s crowd at the Factory lived on the drug until that scene too crashed, worn out by exhausting agitation. Several Dr. Feelgoods, led by Max Jacobson who injected then president Jack Kennedy, a true meth head, and everyone who was anyone. Jacobson’s history is very interesting. Read Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes, Dr. Feelgood: The Shocking Story of the Doctor Who May Have Changed History. Jacobson had combined meth with vitamins in his massive shot. It was apparently believed that the vitamins negated the deleterious effects of the amphetamines. Many were the celebrities who discovered otherwise. As Bob was headed to his confrontation with the realities of fame and its obligations, the whole of the rock scene, the hippies, what was known as the counterculture was also dealing with harsh realities and not doing it very well. Bob, at least, realized his limitations thus relying almost completely on the integrity of his manager, Albert Grossman who was betraying his trust as he found otherwise. In the early years of his success he refused to deal with monetary matters leaving them up to Grossman. Dylan wisely wanted to concentrate on building his career of song writing on which, after all, his career rested. An artist’s obligation is to his art and there isn’t time or space in his life to trifle with mundane matters. Grossman like all managers was seduced by the huge amounts of money he was dealing with and like Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker he wanted a bigger and bigger percentage and finally Parker and all other managers cursed their unlucky star that they couldn’t have it all. With Parker and Elvis the day of reckoning never came; with Bobby his eyes were opened with the inevitable feeling of betrayal. Unlike most managers Grossman didn’t necessarily make Bob as Bob proved himself a major talent. The raw material was there but it had to be made accessible. Bear in mind this is a Jewish affair. Bob surrounded himself with his fellow Jews while his fellow Jews sought him out. Bob at one time was associating with the notorious terrorist unit the Jewish Defense League and the criminal Jewish Defense Organization. Bob’s performance and voice would have depressed his chances had not his song writing saved him. Now, in the music business song writing royalties is where the money is. BMI and ASCAP are the two organizations that monitor and collect the royalties distributing them to the writers, after skimming the top of course. That is they get paid 50% of the royalties and writers share is 50%. Grossman’s deal with Dylan was a 50-50 share of the remaining 50%. That is each was to get 25% of their 50%. Then in violating Dylan’s trust Grossman also took 50% of Dylan’s 25% share of the whole leaving Dylan with just 12 and a half percent of the 100 percent. When Dylan was finally convinced that Grossman would do this to him the split occurred. Now, put in terms of a gold mine Dylan was the goldmine. Grossman was the extractor and refiner. Grossman did work like a beaver and got Dylan’s songs into so many cracks and crannies that he fairly earned his twenty-five percent but an extractor and refiner has nothing to do without a gold mine. Grossman was a prospector who found the mine and wanted all. But, all artists get screwed by their managers either intentionally or inadvertently. Some say Grossman made Dylan. The fact is Dylan might never have made it without Grossman’s management. By 1966 Dylan was worn out and knew that he was at the end of his rope and then he learned that Grossman, perhaps wisely believing that one should make hay while the sun shone, lined up a string of dates that when Dylan saw it he knew he could never make it through. He hit the wall. I can’t be certain that I detect a note of glee in Heylin’s literary voice but he does cut the story off there. Bob Dylan the First was dead. He was no longer busy being born he was among the walking dead. He retreated to Woodstock, marriage and fatherhood while he reorganized his mind to be reborn. However, his muse had left him never to return. The second Bob Dylan was on a long weary trail when he abandoned his wife to renew the endless search for a new self. During the seventies and eighties he wandered but without a muse was not very interesting. Then in desperation he became a wandering minstrel on his Never Ending Tour. That tour ended in 2019 destroyed by a virus. I earlier in the essay said that I didn’t think he would resume performing. Just a few days ago I received an email from BobDylan.com advising that Bob was going to stream a concert on 7/18/21. Tickets were priced just short of thirty dollars. I bought one.