A digression...

Tue Jan 2 12:49:52 CST 2007

Dear Friends--

This is off the subject of AtD, but...

I was fishing around in Michael Gray¹s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, which my wife
gave me for Christmas, and ran across a name that gave me a little shiver.
It belongs to Dylan¹s publicist, who it turns out is also the publicist for
(of all people) Paris Hilton and the former publicist for John and Yoko:
Elliott ³Chewy² Mintz. As you can imagine, my Pynchonoidal radar immediately
blipped on Clayton ³Bloody² Chiclitz, president of Yoyodyne. Could Mintz be
the real-life version of Chiclitz? The parallelism in the names is just too
tight to be accidental....

What¹s more, according to John Stodder¹s blog (
http://johnstodderinexile.wordpress.com/2006/02/03/travels-of-elliot-mintz/
) Mintz was a D.J. on the underground radio station KPPC out of Pasadena in
1968 and later held other media positions in the area; the station,
according to this fellow, was the radio home of Firesign Theater and Dr.
Demento  whose humor certainly bears a family resemblance to Pynchon¹s.
Since Pynchon was living in Manhattan Beach and writing Gravity¹s Rainbow
around this time, the identification seems all but certain.

Here are the Michael Gray references:

> ³1970 was [...] the year of the Lennon/Plastic Ono Band track God¹, on which
> he sings I don¹t believe in Zimmerman¹. Some posthumously issued material
> took less innocuous potshots than this. It may be that these emerged in 1990
> on the syndicated radio series The Lost Lennon Tapes¹, hosted by a publicist
> Lennon and Dylan had both used, Elliot Chewy¹ Mintz.² (p. 405)
> 
> ********
> 
> ³William Zantzinger [sic], real life villain of the factually inaccurate but
> socially truthful and artistically inspired Dylan song The Lonesome Death of
> Hattie Carroll¹. Paul Zollo, who secured an illuminating interview with Dylan
> about songwriting, for Songtalk magazine in 1991, despite the disquieting
> circumstances in which, it turns out, it was conducted. (In 1992, when the
> interviewer became the interviewed, we learnt that Dylan¹s publicist, Elliot
> Chewy¹ Mintz, had not only sat in on the Dylan interview but had tried to
> proscribe it beforehand and censor it afterwards. Before- hand, Mintz told
> Zollo not to ask [Dylan] about songs that were so old that he would have to
> wrack his brain¹. During the interview, Dylan made unexceptionable allusions
> to HENDRIX, the songs People¹ and Feelings¹ and NEIL YOUNG, and Chewy wanted
> them all cut out, in case they were offensive¹. Zollo said: . . . he was in
> control of the whole scene.¹ Do you often read anything quite so depressing?
> Does it occur to Chewy that his interventions and proprietism are offensive¹?
> There ought to be a special hell for people like Mintz, who sanitize and
> demean the very personality of the artist they are supposed to look after.
> Eternal fire is too good for them. Eternal tape- loops of Feelings¹ and
> People¹, maybe.)² (p. 520)
> 
> [I particularly like the characterization of Mintz here: very
> Chiclitz-like....]

What do you think?

Joe Hutchison
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Art Degraded,
Imagination Denied,
War Governed the Nations.
William Blake
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P.O. Box 266
24170 Matterhorn Drive
Indian Hills, CO  80454
303.697.3344 phone
303.506.4966 cell
303.697.7778 fax
joe at jhwriter.com
http://www.jhwriter.com
http://jhwriter.blogspot.com
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