It is automatically assumed that every Bob Dylan album is an event, and Desire is certainly no exception. It is not, however, the event that it might appear to be. It is not an event because of the inclusion of several drearily rambling Marty Robbins cum Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid sagas of outlaw's progress from cantina to cantina. This album is a landmark neither because of the back-cover slice of imitation Patti Smith poesy by (presumably) Dylan, nor because of the offensively portentous liner puffery provided by a senile Allen Ginsberg, who ironically was one of Dylan's major influences back when Ginsberg was perhaps the premiere American poet and Bob on his way to being declared that by people who didn't know any better (like me, for instance) .

We can't even assign historic import to Desire on the basis of "Hurricane," the undeniably powerful single which, in a controlled spasm of good old rabble-rousing, spits an inflammatory account of the railroading of Rubin Carter, onetime contender for the Middleweight Boxing Championship of the World, on a mid-sixties murder rap.

If you feel yourself responding cynically when someone relates that "Dylan's returned to protest songs" as if it's exciting news, it just may be that your instincts are in healthy working order. Look at it this way: every four years Dylan writes a "new" protest song, and it's always about a martyred nigger, and he always throws in a dirty word to make it more street-authentic. I don't use the word "nigger" for effect or to make myself look hip, but rather because just like our fathers before us that is all Jackson and Carter have been to him: another human life to exploit for his own purposes.

HE AINT'T NO DELINQUENT, HE'S MISUNDERSTOOD

Dylan doesn't give a damn about Rubin Carter, and if he spent any more than ten minutes actually working on the composition of "George Jackson" then Bryan Ferry is a member of the Eagles. Dylan merely used Civil Rights and the rest of the Movement to advance himself in the first place; The Times They Are A-Changin' and "Blowin' in the Wind" were just as much a pose as Nashuille Skyline.

Which actually was not only kosher but a fair deal, because the exchange amounted to symbiotic exploitation — the Movement got some potent anthems, Dylan got to be a figurehead, and even if he was using his constituency art is more important than politics in the long run anyway.

But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he's having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that's why ; either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him.

When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as it was about its subject matter, and l remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose was the ridiculously spiteful "Idiot Winds," 1 found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that l was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome;

I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: "Goddamn, he's still got it!" Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan. But I persist-: ed, there was something there that mattered to me, and I ultimately found out what it was. I discovered that I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with — we would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home, and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album, playing it over and over, wallowing in Dylan's wretched reflection of my own confusion: "Women — who can figger 'em?" I imagine it was also a big hit with the recently (or soon to be) divorced.

At length I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be. Which was simply not enough.

So I looked forward to Desire. Maybe Bob had managed to figger the critters out in some flash of revelation, or could at least provide some helpful tips for the rest of us involved in the great Struggle. Perhaps, at last, he had something honestly uplifting to say about men and women, male bonding, pet training, and all the other baffling forms of interpersonal relationships known to this planet. So if it seems like I'm hard on him now, if I seem unduely vitriolic, it's only because (a) everything I say is the truth, and (b) I myself was such a sucker I still looked to him to tell me something and now must suffer the embarrassment which is my just desserts.

Because Desire is a sham and a fakeout. Ignoring the "El Paso" rewrites and ersatz Kristofferson plodders like "One More Cup of Coffee" (which is easy), we come at length (and it is reflective of neither generosity nor inspiration that side two of this album is almost 30 minutes long) to "Sara," wherein Dylan, masks off, naming names, rhapsodizes over his wife in mawkish images ("sweet virgin' angel...radiant jewel"), cheap bathos (when in doubt, drag in the kids playing in the sand on the beach), simple groveling ("You must forgive me my unworthiness"), and, most indicatively of Desire as a whole, outright lies. To wit: "I'd taken the cure and I'd just gotten through/ Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin' 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you."

Bullshit. I have it on pretty good authority that Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady," as well as about half of the rest of Blonde on Blonde, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the session men sat around waiting on him, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. It has been suggested to me that there are better things to do with albums than try to figure out what drug the artist was on when he made them, but I think this was one case where the chemical definitely affected the content of the music. Those lyrics were a speed trip, and if he really did spend days on end sitting up in thq Chelsea sweating over lines like "Your streetcar visions which you place on the grass," then he is stupider than we ever gave him credit for.

Now. I know I stand at this point in possible danger of plunging quill-first into fullscale Webermanism, but I do think that if you are going to assert that a piece of music is the unburdening of your soul down to the personal pronouns, then you should tell the truth. I also think that if he is capable of lying about and exploiting his own marriage to make himself look a bit more pertinent, he is certainly capable of using the newsy victims of his topical toons with even less attention to moral amenities. "Hurricane," like many Dylan Songs of his distant past, purports to be a diatribe expressing abhorrence of racism, but there are many forms of inverted, benevolent prejudice known to the liberal mentality, and I find a song like "Mozambique" rather curious:

/'d like to spend some time in Mozambique...

All the couples dancing cheek to cheek

It's very nice to stay a week or two...

There's lots of pretty girls in Mozambique

And plenty time for good romance...

Magic in a magical land

And when it's time for leaving Mozambique

You'll say goodbye to sand and sea

You'll turn around to take a final peek

And you'll see why it's so unique to be

Among the lovely people living free

Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique *

Ah, yes, a beautiful, simple people, aren't they, Mr. Christian? Unfettered by the corrupting complexities of civilization, no? So primitively pure and natch'1, just fuckin' and a 'dancin' barefoot there on the beach. Maybe that's what enables Rubin Carter to sit "like Buddha in a prison cell."

Which brings us to Dylan's demonology, and the biggest lie of all. Now, just like Blood on the Tracks was ultimately redolent of little more than mixed-up confusion as regards romantic obsessions, so a line like "All the criminals in their coats and their ties/Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise" is not exactly going to enlighten us as to the subtleties of social injustice today. Because the processes of oppression, however brutal, are subtle, Ralph J. Gleason was right when he extrapolated old Dylan lyrics into "No more us and them," and Dylan himself, in the mid-70s, is still playing cowboys and indians.

I said earlier that Dylan was merely using Carter and George Jackson as fodder for the propagation of the continuing myth of his own "relevance." It's difficult to prove that from "Hurricane," in part because the performance is so drivingly persuasive, in part because Dylan does seem, at least superficially, to have his facts down: a man was framed for a crime he most, likely didn'tcommit, and the probable reason he was framed was that he preached black liberation in an atmosphere of white supremacy. Of course, the fact that he was framed doesn't prove that he was innocent of the crime, either; but for once Dylan's simplistic broadsides seem to have coincided with reality, justice, and Rubin Carter being on the side of the angels.

But I have to make a confessipn: I don't give a damn about Rubin Carter, whether he is guilty or innocent, or about racism in New Jersey. At least for the purposes of the present inquiry, all I care about is Bob Dylan, and whether he is being straight with me or not. I don't think he is, anywhere, and I think you can find all the evidence you need in Desire's longest cut, the ponderous, sloppy, numbingly boring elevenminute ballad "Joey," about yet another folk hero/loser/martyr, mobster "Crazy Joey" Gallo, who w§s murdered in a gang war in Little Italy in 1972.

New York City readers may not believe this, but it's probable that most of the people, especially young ones, who buy this album across the rest of America do not know who in the hell Joey Gallo was. Since this song is hardly going to help them find out, is in fact one of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellently romanticist bullshit ever recorded, let me preface an examination of Dylan's most transparent dishonesty with a brief bit of history:

During the Sixties, there were five Mafia "families" dividing up the pie of various turfs and rackets in New York City, under the control of one Godfatherlike "boss of bosses." Although the modern Mafia encourages more of a "businessman" image and tires to play down the bloodletting, the families are usually fighting among themselves for greater power and influence, and one of the most successful families during the Sixties was the Profaci family, which later became the Colombo family. In intermittent but very bloody opposition to them were the Gallo family, led by the brothers Larry, Joey and Albert "Kid Blast" Gallo, who were never quite able to attain equivalent power even though they remained the overlords of one small section of Brooklyn. According to a detailed analysis of mob warfare by Fred J. Cook in the June 4, 1972 New York Times, "The severe bloodletting in the Profaci-Colombo family begari; when the greed of the Gallo brothers set them lusting after [the former's] power. Indeed, it touched them with the kind of madness that drives a shark berserk in a blood-stained sea," and the Gallos tried every lethal ploy they could think of to muscle their way into a bigger piece of the action. In October, 1957, Joey Gallo, acting on a Profaci contract, blasted the notorious Albert Anastasia, onetime lord of Murder, Inc., out of his barber's chair in a celebrated rub-out, thus paving the way for Carlo Cambino to become, and remain, boss of bosses through the Sixties and early Seventies. But the Gallos never found any more favor with Gambino than they had with his predecessors, so they embarked on an all-out war with the Profacis that lasted from 1961-3; though there were no real winners, the Gallos were no match either in numbers or tactically for the Profacis, and the war ended in early 1962 when Crazy Joe Gallo was sentenced to 7 to 14 years in prison for extortion, and, a few months later, Joseph Profaci died of cancer.

While Joe Gallo was in prison, he

TURN TO PAGE 63.

THE BOVS

"I don't worry about the future, I never stay in anything stale, none of the guys would. I mean I want them,to be secure, but like me, they all have other dreams. I'm really lucky, each of the guys give me so much. The best talks 1 had with Dylan were about the group, because he told me how lucky I am ... he thinks about havin' a group. But see, it's gotta go two ways. It just can't be four guys behind Dylan who love Dylan. Dylan's gotta love the four guys."

Lenny Kaye: lead guitar.

"Lenny is getting so crazy lately, he's so spaced out. He used to be so organized, lately he says, 'Patti, I don't know what's happening.' Sometimes he'll be sitting around and he'll be so soulful, there's nothin' better than watchin' Lenny. Once me and Ivan came into the room and Lenny was sittin' there playin'his Strat, watchin' TV, so totally into it. He's like a true Rastafarian. .. fie just goes off into his own world, gets really stoned . .. trying to sail off as far as possible. " (P. Smith)

Alan Lanier said that Lenny was a "big ham." A once seemingly mild-mannered rock critic, those of us who've known and loved Lenny for years could not help but be aware of the rock guitarist inside fighting to get out. ("They laughed when I sat down to the piano . . .") He's perfectly skinny, and so tall he had to remove some of the ceiling in the Boston club so he could stand up straight onstage. Lately wears the ever-present white shirt, black vest, three rings (he's always worn them) and an assortment of pins ... a Rastafarian button given to him by Patti, three silver horses, and a "Free John Now" relic to hold his guitar strap in place. I know him too well so maybe I better stop now, but I've been waiting for years to write that he likes white bread with pimentoes, artichoke hearts, and mayonnaise. . . together. (L.R.)

Ivan Krai: rhythm.

"Ivan totally flowered in the studio. He's really the group's guardian angel, he's so aware and definitive. He wants to do great, and one of the ways he'll help me is by playing as good as possible, but he'll always sacrifice his own playing in order to make me look better. If he hears me — as he's playing a solo, or just playing, period — and he hears that I'm straining my voice, he'll run and get me a drink. Or he'll look to get me if I slip. On 'My Generation' he has important guitar to play, but he'll always check to see if my microphone is right . . ." (P. Smith)

Ivan is gorgeous, and of course (a prerequisite for this band) he's skinny. His hair has been getting darker lately, someone said Patti got an entire band that looks like her... He wears skintight black corduroy pants, striped t-shirts, stands totally still onstage. He hates communists. (L.R.) Richard (DNV) Sohl: keyboards.

"DNV is so young and jaded, he has his own fantasy life. All he cares about is sex and music, so for him rock and roll is a twenty-four hour job. It takes care of everything, you know ..."

(P. Smith)

DNV (whose name is Richard Sohl but who got this nickname from the movie, Death in Venice; figure it out for yourself) most recently was "too lazy to shave" so he called it "the Robert Mapplethorpe look." Very silent, occasionally appears to be half asleep onstage as his head rests on one hand while he plays keyboard with the other. Long, naturally curly hair, sexy, wears Tibetan shirts and is starting to look more and more like a gypsy. (L.R.)

Jay Dee Dougherty: drama.

"There's a certain humility in the group that I don't ever want to go. Every one of us is a rock and roll fan, and is honored to be doing something in rock and roll. You know, Jay sort of reminds me of Todd Rundgren when I really knew Todd. Real neat, he's into all these electronics. . . into devebping his mind . . (P. Smith)

Jay Dee Dougherty is sweet, shy, has incredible manners. I like when he wears white shirts and a thin black tie, because it looks good early British bands — like The Kinks — and doesn't look too cute. He has great white trousers, sometimes wears short-sleeved t-shirts (he'd look great drumming in some of those short sleeved regular men's shirts) and suspenders. Formerly was with Lance Loud's Mumps which is a totally different kind of band than this is. (L.R.)

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 51.

read extensively, becoming a sort of jailhouse intellectual, and when he was finally released in 1970 he began to cultivate contacts'™ the literary and show business worlds, who welcomed him to their parties and obviously considered him an exotic amusement indeed. Jimmy Breslin's book The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight had been inspired by the legendary ineptitude of the Gallo family in their early-Sixties bids for power, and Joey developed close contacts with Jerry Orbach, who played a character corresponding to him in the movie based on the book, and his wife Marta, with whom, in the last months of his life, Joey began collaborating on various autobiographical literary projects. Out of Radical Chic bloomed Mafia Chic; he became something of an above-ground social figure, and told columnist Earl Wilson that he was "going straight."

Apparently that was a lie, however. While Joey was in prison, his gang languishing and awaiting his return, a new figure had arisen from the Profaci ranks to bring New York mob power to a whole new, all but avant-garde level: Joe Colombo. Colombo founded the Italian American Civil Rights League, an organization ostensibly devoted to deploring and "legitimately" opposing the "prejudice" which caused most Americans to link mob activitie$ with citizens of Italian descent. Between 150,000 and 250,000 Italian-Americans ultimately joined the League, and the impact on politicians was considerable, which was how Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay ended up having their pictures taken with underworld toughs. Joey Gallo returned from prison with his power on his own turf intact, but of course completely cut out of the Colombo empire. On June 28, 1971, Joe Colombo was gunned down by a supposedly lone and uncontracted black man in front of thousands of his horrified followers at a rally in Columbus Circle. The consensus was that Crazy Joey was behind it, especially since he'd perplexed other mafiosos by hanging out with black prisoners during his stay in the joint, and ostensibly aimed to start a black mob, under his control, when he got out. According to many inside sources, there was a contract out on Joey Gallo from the day Colombo died, and on April 7, 1972, as he celebrated his 43rd birthday in Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, an anonymous hit-man walked in off the street and shot Crazy Joey to death much as Joey had murdered Albert Anastasia. It

was the end of a gang war that had lasted almost a decade and a half — a few more of their henchmen were disposed of, and the Gallo family was decimated, their power gone. Mobsters in general breathed a collective sigh of relief — the Gallos had always been hungry troublemakers — and went back to business as usual.

It is out of this fairly typical tale of mob power-jostlings that Dylan has, unaccountably, woven "Joey," which paints a picture of Joey Gallo as alienated antihero reminiscent of West Side Story's "Gee, Officer Krupke" lyrics "He ain't no delinquent, he's misunderstood."

Always on the outside of whatever side there was

When they asked him why it had to be that way

Well, the answer — just because*

Joey Gallo was a psychopath, as his biographer, Donald Goddard, confirms, although the analyst who examined him while he was in prison diagnosed Joey's disease as "pseudopsychopathic schizophrenia." Joey's answer: "Fuck you. Things are not right or wrong any more. Just smart or stupid. You don't judge an act by its nature. You judge it by results. We're all criminals now...Things exist when I feel they should exist, okay? Me. I am the world." Towards the end of his life, his wife routinely fed him Thorazine, which he docilely took, even though it still didn't stop him from beating the shit out of her.

Dylan then goes on to paint a romantic, sentimental picture of Joey and his brothers in the gang:

There was talk they killed their rivals

But the truth was far from that

No one ever knew for sure where they were really at

W'ell, according to the D.A. at Joey's early-sixties extortion trial, "In the current war taking place between the Gallo gang and established interests, there have been killings, shootings, strangling, kidnappings and disappearances,1 all directly involving the Gallos. Interestingly enough, since the defendant's being remanded on November 14 in this case, there have been no known offensive actions taken by the Gallos in this dispute. This would give some credence to the belief that Joe Gallo is, in reality, the sparkplug and enforcer of the mob." But who believes D.A.'s, right? Okay, try his ofttimes enormously sympathetic biographer:

. "Almost all the charges ever brought against him, even in the beginning, were dismissed. No witnesses. Once people got to know that careless talk was liable to bring Joe Gallo around to remonstrate and maybe make his point with an ice pick, witnesses in Brooklyn became as scarce as woodpeckers.

Once the story got around that Joey had gripped a defaulter's forearm by the wrist and elbow and broken it over the edge of a desk to remind him that his account was past due, the Gallos had very few cash-flow problems with their gambling, loan-sharking and protection business."

Most interestingly of all, his wife tells the story pf how she became innocently entangled for a moment with a member of Joey's gang as they drunkenly tried to pull their coats off the racks of a nightclub cloakroom. Later, in bed, Joey accused her of kissing the guy, and she responded that that was absurd because, for one thing, he was wildly unappetizing. But Joey hounded her about the matter, convinced that her confession would prove that he had seen what he had convinced himself he had seen and was therefore not insane. Finally, to prevent further harrassment (to perhaps, in fact, save her own life) and reassure him as to his sanity, she "confessed." The next night, as they lay awake together in bed again, he casually remarked, "Say, listen — you remember that guy at the club? The guy you were fooling around with? He's dead. I forgot to tell you...Yeah. Last night. He had a terrible accident on the bridge. His car went out of control...That's a terrible thing. He was a nice guy:"

Later in the song Dylan asserts that "The police department hounded him." Considering the number of rackets that the Gallos were involved in, nothing could be further from the truth. Goddard:

"Right from the start, relations between the Pizza Squad [NYC antiMafia cop team] and the Gallo gang had been imbued with a grudging professional respect, which, in certain cases, shaded into something close to affection. They played the game by the rules." Adds a cop:

"They're a peculiar mob...They knew what we had to do and they weren't going to question it. They treated us like gentlemen. That don't make them good guys, but they had a little more savvy [than the Colombos]. It was like 'Why stir the pot? If you're going to be down here, let's make it pleasant for both of us,' It's a game. If you get caught, you get caught."

Perhaps most curiously of all, Dylan says that "They got him on conspiracy/ They were never sure who with." Funny, because everybody from Goddard to the courts and cops agree that Joey's downfall came when, early in May 1961, he tried to muscle in on a loan shark named Teddy Moss. Moss resisted, and, in the presence of undercover cops, Joey said "Well, if he needs some time to think it over, we'll put him in the hospital for four or five months,

and that'll give him time."

But how can Dylan have a martyred Mafioso without an evil judge:

"What time is it?" said the judge to Joey when they met

"Five to ten," said Joey

The judge says, "That's exactly what you get. "

This is what, for want of a better phrase, must be termed poetic license. The truth is that Joey's lawyer was as lame as his gang, and never made it up from Florida for his trial, and Joe refused to have anything to do with the two other lawyers appointed to represent him, choosing to stand mute while the D.A. delivered a steady stream of evidence that was pretty solid in the first place and never disputed. That Joey allowed this to happen suggests, not that he was railroaded, but merely that he was incredibly stupid. Goddard:

"Readily concurring that Joey was 'a menace to the community,' Judge Sarafite chalked up the first victory in the Attorney General's [Robert Kennedy, who once branded Joey Public Enemy No. 1] assault on organized crime by handing down the maximum sentence of seven and one-quarter to fourteen and one-half years' imprisonfnent."

Dylan: "He did ten years in Attica/ Reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich." He also read Freud, Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, John Dewey, Bergson, Santayana, Herbert Spencer, William James, Voltaire, Diderot, Pascal, Locke, Spengler, Wilde, Keats, Shakespeare, Goethe, Will Durant, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Clarence Darrow, and Louis Nizer, as well as taking part in a homosexual gang rape about which he bragged at a cocktail party after his release:

"He described how, with several other convicts, he had spotted a pretty young boy among a new batch of prisoners and laid in wait for him. Dragging him into the Jewish chapel, they ripped his pants off and were struggling to hold him down when one of them heard the rabbi talking in the next room. A knife was immediately put at their victim's throat with a whispered warning not to cry out, and the rape proceeded in an orderly fashion, each man taking his turn in order of seniority. They wanted this kid, Joey said, while his asshole was still tight."

This was most likely not, however, the reason that (according to Dylan) "his closest friends were black men." It was "Cause they seemed to understand what it's like to be in society/With a shackle on your hand." And alsb, as previously stated, because Joey for a while entertained dreams of launching

a black Mafia when he got out. The psychoanalyst who interviewed Joey in prison voices agreement with Dylan in more clinical terms, but adds "Joey was a terrifically prejudiced guy...on a strictly, and deeply, personal level, he was a knee-jerk nigger-hater," and also allows that it was "entirely possible" that "I was conned by one of the greatest con artists of all times."

After Joey is finally sprung, Dylan has him blessing both the beasts and children: "'Twas true that in his later years/He would not carry a gun." Of course not; no Mafia chieftain ever has, unless in unusually dire fear for his life. The cops would like nothing better than to send one of these guys up on a carrying concealed weapons rap, and anyway that's what the wall of protective muscle that accompanies them everywhere is for.

'"I'm around too many children,' he'd say/They should never know of one.'" Again true — mob leaders have always been scrupulous about keeping their wives and children universes removed from the everyday brutality of their work. Anybody who saw The Godfather knows that. But as for Joey's magical touch with children, let his daughter, Joie, speak: "He would come home and say, 'Make me some coffee.' And I would say, 'Daddy, I have homework. Can I do it later?' 'No. Now.' It was like I was refusing him, and nobody ever did that. He was the king, and I couldn't stand it...He used to abuse Mommy terribly, and I resented him coming between us. He broke her ribs once...I used to complain to Mommy about him and bug her to leave him. 'What a man you picked,' I'd say. 'Who'd want to live with that maniac? You've got to be crazy to put up with this.' So then I'd divorce him as my father. I'd take a piece of paper and draw a very fancy certificate that said, 'I, Joie Gallo, hereby divorce Joey Gallo as my father.'",

But who but a biographer would let a goddam kid mouth off like that anyway? A good slap in the puss and they hie to their place. Which is where they belong when the fast bullets fly, as Dylan's vocal lurches to the denouement of his most mythic of sagas:

Yet he walked right into the clubhouse

Of his lifelong deadly foe Emptied out the register Said "Tell them it was Crazy Joe" One day they blew him down in a clam bar in New York He could see it cornin' through the door as he lifted up his fork... Someday if God's in heaven Overlookin' His preserve I know the men that shot him down Will get what they deserve And then, for the last time, the chorus

that drones through this whole long, boring song:

Joey, Joey...what made them want to come and blow you away?*

There are several theories in answer to that question. The most prevalent was that, since most people took it for granted that Joey was behind the shooting of Joe Colombo almost a year before, there was an open contract out on Gallo by the Colombo family, meaning that Joey had effectively commited suicide in having Colombo rubbed out. Two other theories advanced by investigators extremely close to the case have Gallo once again trying to muscle in on territory occupied by other, more powerful mob factions. In one case , he could have told two thugs to crack a safe for $55,000 in Ferrara's Pastry Shop in Little Italy, a landmark frequented by Vinnie Aloi, at that time a very powerful capo in the New York Mafia. This would certainly have been the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to the mob bosses' patience with Gallo's hustles, as would another incident reported in the June 4, 1972 New York Times:

"Three weeks prior to Gallo's getting killed, he Frank (Punchy) Illiano and John (Mooney) Cutrone went out to the San Susan nightclub in Mineola, L.I., in which John Franzese [another powerful capo in the Colombo family] is reported to have a hidden interest. Joey is reported to have grabbed the manager and said, 'This joint is mine. Get out.' In other words, he was cutting himself in. This was the first sign we had that Crazy Joe was acting up again."

In any case, any of these courses of action (and Gallo may well have undertaken all three) amounted to signing his own death warrant. An interesting sidelight is that at this time Joey was broke, practically reduced to the shame of living off his bride of three weeks; his mother had already mortgaged her house and hocked her furniture to pay for bail bonds. Meanwhile, of course, he had begun to hang out with what Goddard calls "the show-biz, tablehopping cheek-peckers' club": Jerry and Marta Orbach, the Ben Gazzaras, the Bruce J. Friedmans, Neil Simon, David Steinberg, Joan Hackett and her husband — people that, as his bride Sina warned him, "might be exploiting him for the thrill of having a real live gangster empty their ashtrays and talk about life and art." Marta Orbach told him Viking Press was interested in publishing whatever literary collaboration he could cook up with her, so they began making daily tape recordings of his reminiscenses at her house. At first it was supposed to be a black comedy about prison life, but then there was talk of an outright autobio-

graphy and even a meeting with an MGM representative to discuss selling it to the movies — so there is also the remaining possibility, as a final theory, that just about anybody in the underworld, getting wind of this, might be nervous enough about possible indiscretions to want him snuffed.

The two key points here are that (a) by this time he was totally pathetic (Goddard: "He had outgrown the old life. To allow himself to be forced back into it was unthinkable — a submission to circumstance, a confession of failure. As for his new life, the prospect was hardly less humiliating. It entailed another kind of surrender — to showbiz society and public opinion. His selfesteem would depend, not on his power and sovereign will, but on how long an ex-gangster could stay in fashion. Like an ex-prizefighter, he might even be reduced someday to making yogurt commercials."), and (b) Dylan got even the very last second of Gallo's life wrong: "He could see it cornin' through the door as he lifted up his fork!" Gallo was shot from behind.

So all that remains now is the question to Bob Dylan: Why? And since that is one I doubt he is going to answer (his new collaborator, Jacques Levy, already put in a defense to the effect that Dylan wrote about Billy the Kid, so why not Joey Gallo), the only thing remaining is to suggest antihero fodder for future Dylan compositional product: Elmer Wayne Henley, William Calley, Arthur Bremer, and that kid who tried to rob a bank at 13th St. and Sixth Ave. and ended up dtunkenly requesting replays of the Grateful Dead on the radio. Certainly they all qualify as alienated victims of our sick society, every bit as much on the outside as Joey Gallo.

One does wonder, however, what Gallo would have made of Dylan's tribute to him; and one receives a possible answer in Goddard's book, where Gallo's ex-wife describes borrowing a hundred bucks from Joey's father to buy records so that the Prince of Brooklyn, always a fan of contemporary music, could catch up on what had been happening in soundsville during the decade he'd been away reading Reich in the slams: "He got especially mad over a Byrds album called 'Chestnut Mare' that I wanted him to hear. 'Listen to the lyrics,' I said. 'They're so pretty, and so well done.' 'I don't want to hear any fags singing about any fucking horse,' he says — and he's really venomous. 'It's not about a fucking horse,' I said. 'If you'll listen, it's about life,' But he doesn't want to hear about life either.. .Next thing I know, he jumps out of the bathtub, snatches the record off the machine, stomps out in

the hall stark-naked and pitches it down the incinerator."

9* ©1975 Ram 's Horn Music