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A simple twist of fate - 'lost' memoir by Dylan confidant to be
published next year
Liz Thomson • 30 September 2013
With a week to go before Frankfurt, Adam
Gauntlett of Peters Fraser & Dunlop is
selling a book that offers a unique insight
into the life and career of Bob Dylan, by
the man who was his friend, confidant and
tour manager.
North American rights have already been
snapped up by George Witte of St Martin's
Press. A UK deal is expected this week, and
eight publishers are looking at the
proposal. Rachel Mills, PFD's International
Rights Director, is reporting "tons of
international interest", with particular
excitement in France and Germany. A Danish offer has already been tabled.
The book is a memoir by Victor Maymudes, a legendary figure in Dylan circles who first met
the young singer-songwriter in the Gaslight Café, Greenwich Village, in 1961. Daniel Kramer's
celebrated photo (above) shows them playing chess in Woodstock, New York - there were
frequent all-night sessions, with Dylan (right) reported as being an excellent tactician.
Maymudes was at the wheel of the Ford station wagon that took Dylan and his merry
pranksters across the US in 1964, a pot-infused road trip during the course of which Dylan
played to striking coal miners in Kentucky and visited poet Carl Sandburg, ending up at the
Carmel Valley home of Joan Baez and along the way writing such seminal songs as "Chimes of
freedom". The trip was chronicled in-depth but necessarily second-hand in New York Times'
critic Robert Shelton's No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Omnibus
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Press/Backbeat, 2011). Maymudes was there when Dylan first met the Beatles - and, fuelled by
grass and booze, passed out in their suite at the Delmonico Hotel. He was at Newport in 1965,
when Dylan went electric, and in Europe for the celebrated Don't Look Back Tour; and, in 1988,
he joined what would become known as the Never-Ending Tour when Dylan rescued him from
bankruptcy.
Another Side of Bob Dylan is based on tapes recorded by Maymudes as the basis for a book
begun in 2000 and bought by Witte, then as now at St Martin's, for £100,000. But Maymudes who in 1955 opened a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard that quickly became the epicentre of
the burgeoning west coast counterculture - died suddenly following an aneurysm before he
could complete the manuscript. His son Jacob, then 21, who personally removed the life
support, was devastated, too broken to return to the project. Then, in January this year, the
family home burned down, and among the very few items salvaged from the charred wreckage
was a box containing the tapes: "Twenty-four hours of personal stories, philosophy, ideology
and more importantly his voice had survived. That was my tipping point and I would decide in
the months to come to finish his book," writes Jacob in the introduction to the outline, seen by
BookBrunch. He would do it "not for financial gain, not for vanity, for one simple reason: so I
could show my kids who their grandfather was and the slice of history he had a had in".
Gauntlett, whose first book project this is (he holds PFD's theatre portfolio), first spotted the
story online, a piece in Rolling Stone which told of Jacob's attempt to raise funds for the
project via Kickstarter. He told BookBrunch that Maymudes was keen to retain control of the
project and to write the book he felt his father had wanted to write. "I got in touch, we talked
and I persuaded him that he would be able to keep creative control." Maymudes is now writing
at his home in LA, and the plan is to publish next autumn, the fiftieth anniversary of Dylan's
album Another Side of Bob Dylan. It is not yet known whether Dylan will write a foreword, but
Gauntlett said that key figures in the story would be approached.
There are a great many such figures (among them Baez, whose first concert he promoted;
Dennis Hopper; even a young Meg Ryan), for the book is not simply about Dylan - it will in a
sense read like a group biography in the style of, say, Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road: Twenty
Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. It is the story of a particular time told by one man
who had a very particular take on the era and on the shaping forces of a generation.
In addition to the audiotapes, there are "cans and cans" of 8mm film footage shot by
Maymudes, most of it previously unseen, which his son intends will form the basis of a
documentary. Rights for that are being handled by Jonathan Sissons at PFD.
The book, "by Victor Maymudes and co-written and edited by Jacob Maymudes", will run to
some 80,000 words and will contain several plate sections. Its announcement comes at a time
when interest in the Greenwich Village era generally is about to be boosted by the new Coen
Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, due for UK release before the end of the year.
Maymudes' trailer for the book can be seen here.
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