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of information one has to operate on. not, these carbon copy troubadours had
paranoid,so rumor filled, that ' s the kind
moniker hung around
the “new Dylan '
Maybe what we need is Rock’n ’ Roll their necks by a public more titan
Rumor Control, designed to dispel silly willing to settle for surrogates,but they
stories about deaths, phony appearances all shared one things in common: none
(/s Dylan rrally gonna be at the Soda of them got very far.
Pop Festival ) and generally straighten Though he ' s now defined a person -
7
out bungled information. ality all his own. Loudon Wainwnght
One thing 's for sure: it ' s nice to have was the unwilling reccpicnt of such
Howlin ' Wolf hack, even if he wasn ’ t attention in the early stages of his
away for long. career People on the New York-Boston
coffeehouse axis marveled at his poten -
Will The Real tial of Dylanesquc acceptance, and the -
talk apparently reached the Master him
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Bob Dylan self. The two met at a then popular Dealers Over
Village hangout called the Kettle of
Please Stand Up Fish, and Dylan gave the young Loudon Barrel In Seattle
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Wainwnght a solid gold harmonica rack
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Ever since Bob Dylan took a motor - and a solid piece of advice: ‘So you re You just can ’t win. The way they’ve
'*
cylce spill in 1967 and decided not to the new me. Dylan said with amuse - got the odds set up today, the game is
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come back for awhile, a series of “new ment. “Well. Im the old me and the going to fuck everybody. no matter
re on.
Dylans ' have marched with thirsty
boots across the face of rock and roll. only me. There ’ ll he no other me but which side of the truncheon you '
*
Take the cjse of some righteous smack
me.so start being you."
Anybody with a vague sense of pcotic Wainwnght took the advice, and has dealers in Seattle. Washington, who
theivcry and the ability to sing con-
sistently off- key possessed the creden - consequently been one of the few to recently discovered that not only has alt
authority been turned upside down,but
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escape an early death. Now who s gonna
tials for candidacy. More often than tell John Pnnc? you can ’t even hit it sideways anymore.
The whole thing began when a local
radio station formed an organization
called TIP (Turn In a P u s h e r I n the
must discriminating spirit of radiclib,
the program was applied solely to
dealers of “hard ” drugs: a 24 hour
hotline was set up at the station, and if
somebody you were pissed off at
happened also to be in the business of
peddling heroin, cocaine, laudanum and
the like to schoolchildren, factory
workers, executives or what have you,
you could obtain not only sweet
revenge, but up to $500 as well with a
simple telephone call.
Once you’ve finked, the call is
processed, checked for validity in some
manner not entirely known to us. and
the resultant leads are sent to the U.S.
Attorney s office. Gendarmes are then
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dispatched to arrest or harass the
subject. If the evidence is sufficient for
conviction , all that’s left is for the fink
to read about it in the local paper, after
which he calls the radio station,
identifies himself by a code name and
receives his reward in unmarked bills
delivered in an unmarked envelope at a
mutually designated time and place.
One must admit that it looks good
on paper , hut as usual in cases of this
type there ’ s a hitch.The program's local
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coofdmutor. Gene Wicker, said that
although lkc\ base had 15 to 20
legitimate calls since the program
started in May. no convictions have
resulted so far. According to Wicker,
almost all of the callers are pushers
themselves who are interested in wiping
out competition. Sighs Wicker: “They
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aren t concerned with the reward at
all. "
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