Touching the 3rd rail of Dylanology

Can we talk about Edie Sedgwick?

Edie Sedgwick, Bob Dylan’s lover and muse?

Note: I originally published this article on the day before Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. After that happened, I let the issue drop for a while as I reacted to a changed world. In the meantime, I read Edie’s biography and researched the issue further online. I am more convinced than ever that Bob did have a relationship with her.

“I can see her lyin’ back in her satin dress,
In a room where you do what you don’t confess”
–Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot

Unless you are a living saint, we all have things in our past that we are not proud of and would prefer not to confess. I have mine and I bet you have your’s too– especially if you happen to be a red-blooded heterosexual man who survived the high testosterone ages of 16-30!

Let’s be honest fellows. Most of us are guilty of doing our thinking with the wrong head during those years. Ladies be warned. If you haven’t figured it out already, men in heat will say or do practically anything to achieve their goal.

Which brings us to Bob Dylan and his alleged affair with Edie Sedgwick, the “It Girl” of the mid-60s, a fashion and film star at Andy Warhol’s Factory. There is strong circumstantial evidence that some kind of a relationship existed, although Dylan denies it and has actually threatened to sue people who suggest there might have been.

It is surmised by many that Edie was the inspiration for some of Dylan’s early songs, including what is generally acknowledged to be his greatest song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” that was a hit in the Summer of 1965. If you consider the lyrics, it seems to very much fit Edie’s background as Warhol labeled her in one of his movies, the “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

You’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna have to get used to it.
–Like a Rolling Stone

Edie was from a very affluent and prominent New England family. Her Sedgwick forebears landed in Massachusetts in 1636 and were early settlers in Stockbridge, Mass. Her ancestors included Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813) who served in the Continental Congress, the US Senate and was the 4th Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Her father, Francis M. Sedgwick was, by all accounts, a controlling and manipulative person who abused his daughter mentally and perhaps physically. Reportedly, Edie walked in on him committing adultery and he gaslit her and told her it was all in her imagination, slapped her and called a doctor to give her tranquilizers. Not exactly Father of the Year!

At age 13 Edie developed anorexia, a problem that plagued her throughout her short life and frequently required psychological treatment. The resulting waif-like thinness, however, didn’t hurt her career as a fashion icon in the Age of Twiggy. Her look fascinated Andy Warhol who made her one of his first Superstars.

At some point she met Bob Dylan, who apparently took a dim view of Warhol’s brand of “Modern” Art and felt that Andy was exploiting Edie. Many think that Andy was the “Diplomat” that Edie was riding on a “Chrome Horse” with in another verse of the famous song:

You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.
Ain’t it hard when you discover that
he really wasn’t where it’s at
after he took from you everything he could steal?

Since Warhol was gay, there is no hint that his relationship with Edie was physical, and yet after she became involved with Bob, it may have been jealousy that caused him to stop using her in his films. Apparently Bob told her he would make his own films with her and she actually signed a contract with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman with that in mind. That seems pretty circumstantial!

What Dylan’s feelings for Edie were must be read between the lines of such songs as “Just like a woman,” “One of us must know (Sooner or later)” and many others on the 1966 Blonde on Blonde album. Certainly those songs were sung with great passion. There can be no doubt, however, that Edie was in love with the man who she thought was going to make her a movie star.

Unbeknownst to Edie, Bob already had a steady girlfriend who he secretly made his wife in November of 1965. Sarah Lownds was about 7 months pregnant with Bob’s first child when they married. It was also alleged by Edie’s brother that she also became pregnant with Bob’s child during this period, but that she had an abortion due to her fragile emotional state. She was certainly devastated when she discovered that Bob had married.

What a tangled web Bob was weaving! Complicating the matter even further was that at some point Edie became addicted to heroin. Although Warhol was known to use speed, there is no evidence that he ever took heroin. On the other hand, in a 1966 taped interview (ultimately made public in 2011), Bob admitted that he had been addicted to heroin in those days, although he claimed to have beaten it.

As can be imagined, heroin was a very bad drug choice for a person in Edie’s fragile emotional state. It led to a further deterioration of her psyche, multiple hospitalizations and eventually her death at the age of 28. At some point, after the entanglement with Dylan ended, Edie was in an admitted relationship with Bob’s friend and road manager, Bob Neuwirth.

All of this back story is prologue to the strange case of a recent reaction video I did to an outtake from Blonde on Blonde. The song, “She’s your lover now,” was recorded in January of 1966 but never finished. The incomplete versions (16 of them!) were eventually released on a “Bootleg” 25 years later in 1991.

The reason for my reaction at this time was because another YouTuber, Ant Man Bee, had combined 3 of the versions and with the help of AI produced a finished version of the song. Obviously, it is not the way Dylan would have finished it, but it was interesting to have the whole song finally stitched together.

The lines alternate between the narrator addressing a former lover and her new lover. The lady is characterized as being very unstable and the new lover is urged to do something because, “She’s your lover now.”

As I commented in my video, the fact pattern appears to fit exactly with the relationships between Bob Dylan, Edie and Bob Neuwirth. I understand that artists often use material from their personal life as inspiration, and that doesn’t mean that the song is a literal record of what happened, but the similarities are intriguing.

Then a strange thing happened. As I am in the custom of doing, I uploaded a link to my video to a Facebook group called Dylanology Revisited. I am rated as a “Top-contributor” to that page, and normally my posts go right up without needing approval by an Administrator.

My post went up and I sat back and waited for the analytics on my video to show a bump in viewers and perhaps get some likes or a comment, but nothing happened. When I went back to check, I discovered that my post had been removed from the page with a cryptic note that it was, “Under review by the Administrators.” A few days later that note disappeared, but the video remains hidden.

So what happened? Did I get too close to the 3rd rail of Dylanology? I was careful in my commentary (as I am in this article) to say that Dylan denies the affair, and that the only evidence that it happened is circumstantial. Of course, there are many people on Death Row on account of circumstantial evidence!

Were the Administrators of the page afraid of a lawsuit or did they merely seek to protect Bob’s reputation? Let me make it clear, I don’t want to damage Dylan in any way. I am a huge fan and consider him the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare, but artists are not perfect people. Like all of us, they can have very messy private lives, which doesn’t detract in any way from the greatness of their art.

By the way, a movie about Edie’s tumultuous life was eventually made in 2006 called “Factory Girl.” Although the plot appears to put more of the blame on Warhol for Edie’s decline, Dylan’s lawyers reportedly threatened to sue the producers if he was named in it. That led them to change the name of the Dylan character to Billy Quinn, a thinly disguised version of the musician. (If you have any doubt about that, here is a hilarious montage of all the lines in the movie spoken by the Billy Quinn character.)

It is clear why Dylan wouldn’t want his name associated with the tragedy of Edie’s life, especially early in his career. He certainly would have had a lot of explaining to do to his wife, if any part of the story was true. At the time it was surely better to deny the story, but 60 years later, with Bob long-divorced from Sarah, is it still necessary to suppress the story?

Bob Dylan is not only the greatest songwriter ever, but he is a very rich and powerful man. Am I worried that he will sue me? Not really, because truth is a defense, and as a public figure, he would have to show that I have actual malice towards him which I obviously don’t.

Perhaps, before he goes, Bob will finally tell us the full story of what really happened, out of respect for the memory of his troubled muse from so long ago. Perhaps it will be in the long-rumored Vol. 2 of his memoir “Chronicles.” It would probably be better for him to tell his side of the story while he can, rather than have it exposed in a tell-all book after he goes.

I certainly don’t blame Bob for her fate. If anyone is to blame, it is her father who treated her so cruelly as a young girl. The “poor little rich girl” never really had a chance for a happy life. Sadly, in her final years, she learned the answer to this question:

How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
a compete unknown
like a rolling stone

Update: I tried to post this article on the Dylanology Facebook page and it was also suppressed. I waited a month or so, because the Charlie Kirk Assassination had taken all the oxygen out of the world, and attempted to post it on the Untold Dylan Facebook page with a similar result. Apparently there are certain parts of Dylan’s story that must remain untold during his life.