Bob Dylan: Time Machine Stratocaster Scenario
Satire: The plan was to go back in time to the day before Newport.
Realizing that Dylan has destroyed not only Newport, but the folk movement and his career, Pete Seeger realizes drastic action must be taken. To add to his misery, his evil Japanese wife has been bugging the shit out of him. For 15 years he's been promising to put running water and electricity in their cabin and he's never delivered. While she's hauling buckets from the creek, and chopping logs and washing the clothes on a rock, he's off teaching preppy kids how to harmonize on Blue Tail Fly and Kumbaya.
Then there's all the hits that got away from songs he wrote or made famous. The Kingston Trio got Where Have All the Flowers, Peter, Paul & Mary and Trini Lopez did If I Have a Hammer, and the Tokens did the Lion Sleeps Tonight and her husband a master of WASP guilt took two grand and gave it to the dude in Africa he stole it from in the first place.
Realizing the course of nature had to be changed and that his arch enemy the Mighty Grossman had to be taken down, he did what all good commies do and formed a committee, of himself, Theo Bikel, Alan Lomax and Harry Belafonte. He included Belafonte because he felt having a negro along always validated whatever cause he was, plus Belafonte never met a cause he didn't like. The mission of the committee was to get one of Seeger's anti-bomb scientist buddies who actually had worked on the bomb to build a time machine. It was the only way. Just in case the committee didn't work, he added Tom Paxton who had written an article called "Folk Rot" for Sing Out magazine as honorary member hoping that Paxton would write a song about it.
The plan was to go back in time to the day before Newport. Seeger would arrange to have his 1962 Plymouth station wagon break down in the road on the way to Newport. Peter Yarrow, pissed off at the Mighty Grossman for taking Peter Paul & Mary's plane and giving it to that punk Dylan would alert Seeger by radio when the truck was coming. Seeger figured he could take out the driver Victor Maymudes who was always so totally stoned he didn't know what year it was, but just in case hiding behind bushes was a real live Mississippi Chain Gang Lomax had temporarily released from prison to play the festival behind Seeger who loved to sing while swinging an axe. Since they had the time machine to insure the mission would not fail, they went back even further and picked up Leadbelly, a known murderer. Along the way Seeger stopped in 1950, snuck into the Decca Records vaults and destroyed all the masters of the records he made with The Weavers that had electric guitars on them. Then just in case, he picked up the young Woody Guthrie to take Dylan's place at the Festival.
The plan was the truck would stop to help Seeger (Maymudes being the kid of old leftys) the chain gang would grab the strat, destroy the rest of the equipment and the strat would be passed off to Yarrow. Yarrow had been getting regular blow jobs from some gay junkie songwriting poet who hustled on 42nd street and owed him a lot of money for the last two and his life was in danger. Meanwhile Leadbelly who stole the time machine and went forward in time to discover Dylan had stolen his song "Bring Me A Little Water Sylvie" decided to take matters into his own able hands. Fade out to Seeger singing Kumbaya to thousands of garden seeding clean cut preppies.
Hi, do you have access to any footage from the Dylan concert at Forest Hills in 1965? Documentary filmmaker here, www.rexpix.com