DISGRACELAND - Bonus Episode: Trust, Mythmaking, and Twin Joyrides

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

This week in the After Party, Jake talks trusting our institutions, myths and conspiracies, the new Disgo Book Club, this week's DISGRACELAND episode on Bob Dylan, and of course your emails, texts, DMs, and voicemails. What story from pop culture do you call BS on? Get in touch at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod, and come join the After Party.To hear an extended version of the After Party with a story about yet another motorcycle accident in Bob Dylan's vicinity, and more from the DISGRACELAND community, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Hey, discos, you can listen to an extended version of this afterparty episode by becoming a member of Disgraceland All Access. Just go to disgracelandpod.com slash membership for more details and to sign up. Hey guys, welcome to Disgraceland, which is brought to you by Double Elvis. This week, we have a brand new episode on Bob Dylan. That's in the Disgraceland feed.

and for our All Access members in our Patreon and Apple subscription feeds, don't forget that we've got a brand new episode for you on Chris Cornell, so be sure to make sure that you're all signed up for our all-access content, either on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon, to hear that, along with all of our other exclusive episodes and content that we have over there. And also over in the feed for The Singers Talk, that's the latest show from my company, Double Elvis, in partnership with Volume.com,

where host Jason Thomas Gordon talks with some of the most iconic singers about their voices. I've got a brand new episode this week with none other than Roger Daltry of the Who. How cool is that? So go check out Singers Talk. Hey, discos. Need a little more disgrace land in your life?

Just a touch to get you through? Yeah, me too. This is the podcast that comes after the podcast. Welcome to Disgraceland, the After Party. Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode. A little thing we like to call the After Party. This is the Disgraceland. the show after the show, the party after the party, the bridge to get you from one full episode

of disgrace land to the other, the backyard to dig into the dirt. On this bonus episode, we are talking about this week's brand new episode on Bob Dylan, the sources that we've used for this episode, which helped us uncover a wild story about another motorcycle accident that we weren't able to include in this episode. And of course, your voicemails, your texts, and more. As always, a whole lot of rosy. All right, this goes, let's Get into it. About two or so months ago, I posted a reel onto Instagram,

a short 90-second story about the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory. This is, of course, the theory that we covered in part two of our Paul McCartney episode on the Wild Rock and Roll Conspiracy that purports that Paul McCartney died back in the mid-60s and was replaced by an imposter.

Now, this theory is, of course, complete and total bunk. And I thought it was pretty clear in the video that I'm presenting the case of the conspiracy theory. It's not presenting the case as one that I believe in. My whole tone is like, yo, there's this thing that happened, and here it is. The video has been viewed over a million and a half times. It has about 1,000 comments, a lot of them critical, a lot of them angrily disputing the false claim that Paul is dead, which to me is so obvious, I can't understand why anyone would waste energy being angry over it. But then there's also a lot

the comments that sincerely back the theory, which is perhaps even more shocking to me. We live, as we all know, in an age where, for better or for worse, information travels at nearly the speed of light. This is also a time when our major institutions, the media, the government, academia, they're more profit-driven than ever, and as such, more beholden to narrative than they ever were before, and therefore, I think they're more corrupt than ever. We are lied to constantly, by the very people that we are told we should trust the most. And when we are being lied to, we're being spun, we're being manipulated by the information that's flying around us at light speed.

I mean, what the hell are we actually supposed to believe? I can't blame those who actually do believe that Paul McCartney died, nor can I blame those who think that Diddy is innocent, or that Taylor really loves Travis, or that Bob Dylan actually did get in a motorcycle accident. Okay, those last two are at the very least debatable, but my point stands, what the hell are we supposed to do? How do we make heads or tales of what we are being told to believe?

Where does the truth lie? The truth of the story, the real story as it is, is often a theme in the episodes that we cover. It's part of this recent Bob Dylan episode. It was certainly part of the last two Marilyn Monroe episodes. And it's at the heart of the Blink 182 episode that I'm currently researching, which is more of an episode on UFO and UAP disclosure and governmental manipulation of information than it is on three-core punk and fart joke. So you can see why this topic is rolling around in my head.

head this morning. Has Bob Dylan been building his own myth for the past half a century plus? How did Marilyn Monroe die? Why do people think Diddy is innocent in the face of all the evidence that is right there in front of our eyes? Is the government running along Kong on Tom DeLong through manipulation and disinformation? Why do the American people still, to this day, trust their government and the media that is so clearly in its pocket, despite the historical facts that prove that our most Powerful institution continuously lies and manipulates us. The facts are right there. The Gulf of Tonkin, Project Mockingbird, the Warren Commission, Watergate, Iran-Contra,

blowjobs in the Oval Office, weapons of mass destruction. And I'm not even going there on the past two decades of lies for, I'm not just not going there, not touching it, okay? And I'm obviously only just talking about the government's lies here. But are our artists and our entertainers any different? Are they immune from myth-making? Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Ice Cube, Taylor Swift, What's Real, What's Narrative?

At the end of the day, do we really care? Do we really care whether or not Bob Dylan actually got into that motorcycle accident, or do we just care about it being part of his legend? Another badass marker on his myth. Do we really care whether or not Taylor loves Travis, or is it just too good of a romance playing out in the public eye for us to even question? Do we really care whether or not Paul is dead, or do we just want to argue about it in the comments? I care.

I question all of it. It's a funny thing about this job, about doing all this research so frequently and so consistently. You start to see patterns emerge in the historical record, ways in which certain facts are reported or not reported, what types of books remain in print and which ones do not, where libel and litigation come to play or don't, You start to be able to read between the lines in ways you couldn't before, and you start to recognize where certain facts might not be facts at all and might indeed be fiction. Some of an innocent myth-making, a lot of it's straight-up bullshit. I like to think that I've developed a pretty serious bullshit detector when it comes to the facts as they get presented, and a lot of it is based on historical precedent. If X lied to us about Y 10 years ago, then why wouldn't they be lying to us about Z now sort of thing?

That's just common sense, though. And common sense tells me that Bob Dylan, the subject of our latest episode, is one of pop culture's greatest bullshitters. And when it comes to Bob, I use that term bullshitter with affection. Bob's lies, or myth-making is probably a better word for it. It's far more innocuous than ditties or the governments

or next week's disgrace land subject are Kelly. Dylan is an unreliable narrator, and honestly, it's made him more interesting, which I guarantee was the point. Who wants anything to do with an uninteresting pop star? Not me. Bob is an enigma. He's an idea.

Bob Dylan is his very own conspiracy theory, so much so that I believe that if he were to hear me say that by some stroke of mad fortune for yours truly, I think that he would actually appreciate it because Bob Dylan is and always has been in on the joke. So, this week's question is this. What story from pop culture are you?

you calling bullshit on. It can be anything. The ones we've mentioned, Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident, Taylor and Travis's relationship. You can go way back. Did Buddy Holly's gun actually go off in that plane? And is that what brought it down? Did Tupac really die on that night in Las Vegas? Or you can keep it current. Did he do it? And let's think beyond music, too, what really was behind Aaron Hernandez's death? And what was the real reason behind Michael Jordan's 18-month hiatus from basketball? Why did Tom Brady take a hammer to his cell phone if the flake gate was all made up. What pop culture stories, explanations, narratives are you calling bullshit on? What stories have you heard and just step back and said,

nah, something doesn't smell right. 617-90666-3638. Hit me on voicemail and text to let me know. I'll be back in a flash. Okay, so a little bit of an announcement here. We're doing this book club, this disgraceland book club, this to-be-named Discreased Land Book Club. This popped up.

I think I mentioned it in the last after party. It popped up over on the Patreon chat. And we're going to be doing our first one on June 3rd at 8.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The book that we are going to be discussing is the book that we are currently reading, which is The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Okay, so check that out. I also want to talk about the movie, if you've seen that as well,

because I think it's a really interesting conversation and which is better. That's all I'll say about it here. But anyways, we're all going to be on a Zoom, I believe Zoom or the Google version of Zoom, whatever that is. And I'm going to post the details on Instagram shortly and in the Patreon chat if you're over there. And I'll shoot it out elsewhere on social media. But again, just so you know, so you hear it here, June 3rd, 8.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time for our first meeting of the Disgraceland Book Club, which we will be giving a better name than that at some point. I hope you can join us. You got a week to read this book.

It's a great book. It's a page turner. You can definitely do it if you're just jumping in now. I encourage you to join us. I'm stoked to talk about this and other books going forward. All right. Let's talk about the sources right now that we used for this Bob Dylan episode. Lots of sources for this one.

Bob Dylan, perhaps more than any other musical icon from the last 50 years, contains multitudes to quote both Walt Whitman and Bob himself, who wrote a killer song called I Contained Multitudes on his most recent album, but I'm digressing. So in order to wrap our hands around all these multitudes, we consulted the following books. One, the double life of Bob Dylan, a restless, hungry feeling, 1941 to 1966 by Clinton Halen. Clinton Halen is one of the leading authorities on Dylan. He's written numerous books on Dylan, including the latest one, which came out a few years ago. And the cool thing about this book is that it was written after the author was allowed to

sift through Dylan's personal archive, which Dylan had recently sold to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma for something like $22 million. Clinton Haleylin got to check out a ton of unseen documentary footage, recordings, Dylan's own writing, a lot of which changed how he saw Dylan and inspired him to write this updated take on a very specific part of Bob Dylan's life, which is his birth up until his famous motorcycle accident in 1966, which brings me to book number two. This one called Small Town Talk, Bob Dylan, the band Van Morrison, Janice, Joplin, Jimmy Hendricks, and Friends, in the Wild Years of Woodstock by Barney Hoskins. This book focuses on the scene in the Woodstock area, Woodstock, New York, that is, on the 1960s,

which has taken on this near mythical status, of course, is the place where Bob Dylan disappeared into following his mysterious motorcycle accident, and also, of course, being the place where the band really became the band where they jammed with Dylan and created the basement tapes and their own seminal debut. Lots of great details here that helped us flesh out

the second half of this week's episode. So I encourage you to check out Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskins, all right? The third book is Positively 4th Street, named after one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, Positively 4th Street, The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mom Dylan, Mimie Baez, Farina,

and Richard Farina by David Hajdu. This book chronicles Bob's Time as a folk musician in New York with Joan Baez, as well as her relationship with Joan's sister and her husband, Richard Farina, who at the time was also a songwriter and a poet who also was involved in a motorcycle accident the same year as Dylan, 1966.

But unlike Bob, Richard Farina tragically did not survive his crash. So why this book? Why am I mentioning? Well, one of the biggest takeaways from this book was the revelation that Dylan was not booed at Newport because he went electric, but because the sound system was shitty and not designed to handle electric instrumentation and therefore the audience could not hear anything.

Okay, myth-making. You can hear more about that in the full episode. I encourage you to check it out if you have not heard it already. Okay, and the fourth book, which actually turned out to be far more useful than we thought it would at first is Robbie Robertson's memoir, testimony, which he wrote about seven years before his death.

Robbie Robertson, of course, great guitarist, one of my favorite guitarist, primary songwriter for the band, who were previously known as the Hawks and who was there on the front lines of the extremely stressful and combative tour that Dylan embarked on in the UK in 1966. Robbie's got incredible insights into that life,

including stuff that wasn't available anywhere else, details about the party in the Melbourne Hotel, about how everyone was concerned about Bob's health, how he was subsisting solely on tea, honey, lemon, and pills, pills which Robbie described as smoother than Dexies, Benny's, Black Beauties, that they were half up,

upper half-downer, just very specific, very vivid. This book is also where we got the story about Johnny Cash hiding out in the closet of Bob Dylan's London hotel room and about how Dylan went catatonic after the final show of that UK tour at the Royal Albert Hall and how he and Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, had to put him in a bath to help him get back to reality, okay? So many great books. And they all helped us paint this picture of the man who contains multitudes. So what did you think?

Which parts about Dylan's life? Do you believe? Do you disbelieve? What part of the motorcycle accident's story do you think is actually true? Do you think it went down the way that we described it in the episode? Or do you have other thoughts?

Let me know, 617-906-66-38. Just like this person from the 334. Greetings, disgrace land, down low in the 9-20. I hope you all keep through playing these historic deaths from all of those who care. My first year

wedding anniversary to my wonderful wife was darkened by the day Michael Jackson died and we ate our wonderful stakes watching the news. The second one

that hit my wife harder was George Michael's death. on Christmas night. The one that hurt me the most was Robin Williams. He made me laugh, and I know the depth and despair, which makes me cry.

Rockerola. Yeah, Tom Petty, Tom Petty's death touched a lot of people, messed a lot of people up. I know for me, I was lucky. this before. I get to see him right before he died pretty much a couple months before that, and I feel very, very lucky for it. A lot of people have called in as well, and they've left voicemails mentioning Michael Jackson, and that makes me think about the conversation we're having right now.

There's some smoke around Michael Jackson's death and what the cause of death actually was, and I wonder if you guys have any hard thoughts about that. Did we get the right story? I tend to think we did, but I've heard a lot of people sort of think otherwise. And this has come, I've seen stuff online, obviously, but I've heard stuff in private too that kind of shocked me. But that's happened to me in the past, too. I hear things in private that shocked me, and I think, no way, that's happened.

And then boom, ditty. So there we go. All right, 7-8-1 writes in, Hey, Jake, it's Kelly from the 781. I think Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt is better than 9-inch nails. I love the 9-inch nails version also, but the way he did that song at the end of his life, after everything he bent through brings tears to my eyes,

still to this day. Great cover. Thank you. Disgracing is my favorite podcast of all. And I do shout it out to everyone that I come in contact with. Love you, keep up the awesome work. You're truly the best. Kel and the 7-8-1, you rock.

And I think I agree with you. I really do. I think, I don't know if we talked about this before, guys, but I really, that cover in particular, we have this ongoing conversation about which covers are better than the originals. And I think that one really, really personifies the cover that's better than the original, which is Johnny Cash,

version of Trent Resner and Nine-Each nails is hurt. So for sure. 864 writes in, hi, Jake, it's Laney, celebrity musician deaths that affected me deeply, Taylor Hawkins and Chris Cornell. People forget they are real people with real emotions and oftentimes their mental health, substance use and abuse and self-care is an afterthought. Lainey, you're totally right. I cannot agree with you more. Interested Lany to hear what you thought of our Chris Cornell episode. Hit us back and let us know. All right, guys, 617-906-6.6.6. If you want to call in, leave a voicemail. You want to send me a text on anything.

I'm interested this week and hearing from you guys on which stories about entertainers are you calling bullshit on. 617-906-66-66-6-638. Hit me up. I'll be back in a flash. All right, we are back. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, we got this wild story about another motorcycle accident regarding Bob Dylan. This one, a fatal accident. But unfortunately, we didn't have time to include it in our episode.

But here's the thing, though, if you want to hear all about this story, which in a way adds some other depth to the Bob Dylan Motorcycle saga, you can only do that as a member of Disgraceland All Access. You've surely heard me gabbing about this for the last couple of months, right? If you haven't, here's a deal. It's super easy to become a member. All you got to do is go to disgracelandpod.com slash membership for just five bucks a month, even less.

If you sign up for an annual membership, you will get exclusive weekly bonus content, like the extended version of the after party that we're talking about. where you're going to get that extra story. Plus, you get an exclusive scripted episode every month, a full episode, like the brand new one we just dropped on Chris Cornell. It's waiting for you right now. Plus, you can listen to it all, everything. Everything in the disgrace land archive you can listen to, add free.

You can sign up on either Apple Podcasts or Patreon, and if you choose Patreon, you also get immediate access to our members-only chat, which is always on. I'm in there talking with fellow discos constantly. there cutting it up about all kinds of stuff. We're launching this book club. I talked about that all happened over on Patreon.

You don't want to miss this, all right? Disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Get in here with us. All right. Back in a flash. All right, let's recap, shall we? Number one, there's more after party to listen to right now. All you got to do is go to disgracelandpod.com slash membership and sign up to

become an all-access member. But if that ain't your bag, then number two. Right now, in your feed, this week's brand new episode on Bob Dylan. Number three, coming tomorrow a rewind episode on Johnny Paycheck. Number four next week in the disgrace land feed a brand new episode on R. Kelly. Number five, my number 617-9066666-663-8. Call me on the telephone or text me. And finally, remember, no one cares about the music that you love more than you do.

And well, that is a disgrace. And now, my moment of bliss, in honor of this week's episode on Bob Dylan, me reading you, the Billboard Hot 100 chart from the week of July 23, 1966. the week that Bob had his motorcycle accident and seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet. Number one. Hanky-Panky. Tommy James and the Shondells. Last week.

One. Weeks at number one. Two. Weeks on chart. Eight. Number two. Wild Thing. The trogs.

Last week. Two. Peak position. Two. Weeks on chart. Five. Number three. Lil Red Riding Hood, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

Last week, nine. Peak position, three, weeks on churn, seven. Number four. Hyde Piper, the Tristan, St. Peter's. Last week, peak position, peak position. Weeks on churn. Weeks on churn. Number three, seven.

Number five, you don't have to say, and talking and start mixing.