Bob Dylan's Dumbest Move Ever, By a Mile

In 1966, the singer traded a Warhol for a sofa. Estimated price today: $50-75 million

Barbara Rubin was a complex individual. While still in her teens, she directed a celebrated—more accurately, notorious—film entitled Cocks and Cunts; she was a close colleague of Jonas Mekas, the dean of New York’s avant-garde filmmakers, and that’s her mussing Bob Dylan’s hair on the back of Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.

Rubin, as I wrote in POP, my 2009 Andy Warhol biography, “was a groupie with a cultural agenda.”¹ Rubin’s sometime boyfriend Allen Ginsberg (yes, Ginsberg swung both ways) called her a “visionary.” As Ginsberg told an interviewer, Rubin considered himself, Dylan, Warhol, and the Beatles “heroes of a cultural revolution involving sex, drugs, and art” (she wasn’t far off), whom she considered it her job to put in touch with each other.² Whatever her accomplishments—one critic called Cocks and Cunts (which she was persuaded to rename Christmas on Earth) "an essential document of queer and feminist cinema”—Rubin was not much more than one of her day’s countless self-appointed seers with a nutty agenda. The difference was that she had access to the goods.³

The omnipresent, semilegendary Barbara Rubin and preoccupied friend (see above paragraph)

Dylan and Warhol, for instance, not to mention mere demigods such as Lou Reed (Rubin brought the Velvet Underground to Warhol’s attention). She was a habitué of Warhol’s studio, the Factory, at 231 East 47th Street, an abandoned remnant of the neigborhood’s light-industry days (it had been a hat manufacturer’s). Warhol never bothered to replace its creaky elevator, whose gated door took repeated shoves to open, nor its payphone. The Factory’s signature piece of furniture was a badly sagging couch that Billy Linich, Warhol’s ex-lover and chief factotum, had lugged in off the street. One Factory regular complained that he’d gotten crabs from it. Billy responded, huffily, “I was never aware of anyone getting crabs from it. If they did, it was after it had been used in movies where people were screwing on it.” (Billy was referring to Warhol’s 1964 film Couch, in which Warhol’s chief assistant, Gerard Malanga, anally penetrates a young woman, the film’s most sexually explicit scene, but not by all that much.)

Barbara Rubin’s most notable matchmaking coup came one day, probably in January, 1966, when Bob Dylan, his consigliere Bob Neuwirth and his road manager, Victor Maymudes, parked Dylan’s station wagon across 47th Street from the Factory and rode the nasty elevator upstairs.

The Factory’s walls were lined with works, in various stages of completion, in Warhol’s go-to medium, the photosilkscreen. Andy had made his first photosilkscreen, in which one applies paint with a squeegee to a silkscreened photograph, in 1962, of Roger Maris slugging his 61st home run. Baseball (Warhol probably didn’t know who Maris was) was black-and-white, squeegeed with printer’s ink. Before long, Warhol was working in bright colors, the brighter, the more garish, the better.

Of the medium’s virtues, one in particular factored into the commercially savvy Warhol’s attraction to it.⁴ An artist can make dozens, or, as Andy often did, hundreds, of versions of the same image, each slightly different: variously colored, for instance. Many were sloppily made, intentionally. (“He wanted a bad technique. He’d say, ‘Oh, I love it this way. Let’s leave it,’” said Floriano Vecchi, Warhol’s silkscreening mentor.)⁵ On the market, a photosilkscreen’s multiplicity matters not a bit. There are more than 900 variants of Warhol’s 1964 Flowers series, its source photograph a two-page spread from the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography. Today a Flowers sells in the millions, and not the low millions.⁶ Warhols were already expensive, for their day. By the 1970s, Warhol was painting dozens per year, jetting around the world to photograph his latest subject, usually a celebrity, from Prince to Diana Vreeland. He charged $25,000 for a single print and $15,000 per copy, his take essentially financing all other Factory projects. (“Someone’s got to bring home the bacon,” he told a colleague who complained about his frequent absences.)

Right, then: Dylan. Apart from the hippest of hip 24-year-olds’ desire to be on top of everything countercultural (a term not then in existence), the singer many have had a more complex motive, namely, gamesmanship. Dylan and Bob Neuwirth (who shared the mid-’60s Dylan’s sardonic, not to say sadistic, sense of humor; who is, in fact, widely considered its source) were “out to walk all over Andy,” felt Malanga: ie. to demonstrate Dylan’s superior cool.⁷

Warhol’s motives were more innocent. He was one of the 20th-century’s great celebrity hounds, and here was a true superstar. In 1964, by way of easing into a new medium (he started making films in ‘63), Warhol began an ongoing project, the Screen Tests. These were not literal screen tests, but three-minute films, impishly titled, of Factory visitors and regulars. Warhol snapped his sitters with the underground filmmaker’s tool of choice, a 16-mm Bolex, (cheap and pint-sized, ie. you could take it anywhere). The Screen Tests’ length was not dictated by aesthetic reasons; three minutes was as long as a reel of Bolex film lasted. Subjects were instructed to move as little as possible. The Screen Tests, which eventually totalled almost 500, were Warhol’s ingenious, or eccentric, updating of the painted, and photographic, portrait. In any case, Andy would have died to shoot a Dylan Screen Test, which Barbara Rubin arranged, no sweat.

“Warhol may also have felt an affinity with Dylan’s purpose and achievement,” I wrote in POP.⁸ “With his most recent albums, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the singer was usurping the role of so-called legitimate poetry by setting imaginative writing to a rock & roll beat.” As Taylor Mead, another Factory habitué, said, “The minute I heard Bob Dylan with his guitar, I thought, ‘That’s it, the poets have had it.’” Warhol and Dylan were fellow mandarin topplers, intent on erasing, or dynamiting, the wall between high and low art.

For all of its potential as a seminal encounter of two ‘60s titans, Dylan’s Factory visit was, or started out as, “a nonevent,” in Malanga’s words. “The elevator opens, and Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth walk in. Dylan is acting pretty cool. He had this way of saying, “Welll, yeahhh.’” Barbara Rubin was there, and a number of others. (The Factory was as well-populated as a clubhouse. It was a clubhouse, with constantly shifting in-groups and outcasts, all vying for Andy’s approval.)

His screen test completed, Dylan sauntered over to one of a number of 22 photosilkscreens Warhol had made in 1963, Silver Elvis (Ferus Type), their source photograph a publicity shot for Presley’s 1960 movie Flaming Stars: Elvis in a gunfighter’s crouch, ready to fire. Dylan’s choice was a Double Elvis—there were several variations of Silver Elvis, with different numbers of superimposed Presleys.

Above: Bob Dylan sits for his “Screen Test”

Below: Dylan, Warhol, and Warhol’s Double Elvis, which Dylan extracted as payment

As another Factory regular, the playwright Robert Heide, recalled, when Dylan’s screen test was done, “he got up and walked over to one of the panels of Elvis with the gun and said, ‘I think I’ll just take this as payment, man.’ That was the only time I ever saw Andy blushing, just cringing.”⁹

Shouldering the big canvas into the elevator, Dylan and Neuwirth rode down with it and walked it across 47th Street, where they and Maymudes hoisted it atop Dylan’s station wagon and drove off, Factoryites crowding the fire escapes watching in disbelief at Bob Dylan’s chutzpah.

Above: Dylan, Bob Neuwirth and Victor Maymudes attempt to wrestle the Elvis into Dylan’s stationwagon

Below: Their effort unsuccessful, Dylan & Co. drive off with the painting on the station wagon’s roof (shades of Mitt Romney and the family dog).

Once back home, Dylan took an immediate dislike to his new acquisition. Eyeing it distastefully, he grumbled to his manager, Albert Grossman, “I don’t want this. Why did he give it to me?”¹⁰ And he swapped the picture with Grossman for a sofa.

In 1988, Grossman’s widow, Sally, sold the Elvis for $720,000. Warhol didn’t live to have the last laugh; he died in 1987. But somewhere, Andy’s ghost is laughing harder today, much harder. In Warhol’s catalog raisonne, the painting that Dylan traded for a sofa is listed as Double Elvis 4 (Ferus type), #407. (The Ferus was the West Hollywood, CA gallery where some of the Elvises were initially shown.) I’m unable to track its provenance, but I do know this. A Double Elvis (Ferus type)—in other words, a very similar work—sold at a New York Sotheby’s auction on May 8, 2012 for $37,042,500.¹¹ It’s safe to estimate that by now, the painting that Dylan snorted at would bring $50 million, or more, due to its first owner’s tremendous celebrity.

Dylan is reported to have acknowledged, “I once traded an Andy Warhol Elvis Presley painting for a sofa. I always wanted to tell Andy what a stupid thing I’d done, and if he had another painting he would give me, I’d never do it again.” Shoulda got it right the first time.

1. Tony Scherman and David Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York, 2009). All interviews by Scherman, unless otherwise indicated. Non-footnoted quotes are from Scherman interviews.

2. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by Gerard Malanga, November 17, 1982.

3. Daniel Belasco, “Barbara Rubin: The Vanished Prodigy,” Art Signal, (May 2007), pp. 44-49. Rubin came to a sad, premature end. A convert to Hasidism, she moved to France and died in 1980 of a postnatal infection after delivering her fifth child. She was 35.

4. As Thomas Hess, the editor of Art News, wrote in 1965, “Underneath his turtleneck disguises—white wig, black glasses, deprecating shrugs in frugging bashes—you sense a diamond-sharp mind.”

5. Scherman and Dalton, ibid, p. 110.

6. More than one photographer objected to Warhol’s unauthorized use of their work, including the photojournalist Patricia Caulfield, who shot the photo that Warhol screenprinted for Flowers. (Gay Morris, “When Artists Use Photographs,” Art News, January 1981, 104-5.) Not only had Caulfield not given Warhol permission to use her snap; she hadn’t even known that he’d appropriated it, but happened across a poster of Flowers in a bookstore. She immediately threatened to sue. The parties settled out of court, with the artist giving Caulfield two copies of Flowers (a $6,000 value at the time), and a small royalty for any future uses Warhol made of the image (as we’ve seen, he made many). Caulfield was still upset 15 years later. “The reason there’s a legal issue here is that there’s a moral one,” she told Morris of Art News. “What’s irritating is to have someone like an image enough to use it, but then denigrate the original talent.”

7. “…walk all over Andy”: Gerard Malanga, interviewed by John Bauldie, in John Bauldie, ed., Wanted Man: In Search of Andy Warhol (London, 1990), p. 68.

8. Scherman and Dalton, ibid. p. 298.

9. I interviewed Robert Heide, Gerard Malanga, and Billy Name several times each: Heide on March 28, 2001 and February 11, 2003; Name on May 7, 2001 and January 15, 2003, and Malanga on July 17, 2001 and March 3, 19, and 22, 2003.

10. Howard Sounes, Down the Highway (New York, 2002), p. 199.

11. George Lerner, CNN, May 10, 2012.