He would smile and tell weird, wonderful stories about people he met in Woodstock and Afghanistan, in the Dylan universe and just around the block in Greenwich Village. But Mitch Blank, one of the world’s preeminent collectors of Dylan material, didn’t get where he was by having loose lips. When he spoke, some great percentage of his mental energy went toward protecting his reputation as someone who could keep secrets—or, as he would put it, a man whose “hipness credentials are still in order and can be trusted in a ruthless society.” When some sensitive matter came up, he fell into a language of thinly veiled hypotheticals and plausible deniability. He would not name names. He himself might have done this or might have heard that. He would use a lot of words to say something, all the while cultivating the air of a man who knew things he could never say without putting his carefully constructed state of affairs in jeopardy. “Understand,” he acknowledged once, “that when I say anything, it isn’t far from the truth.”
