"Thought this might be of some interest. I was commissioned about a year ago to see if I could locate a specific photo taken during (actually, after) Dylan's visit to Andy Warhol's Factory in 1965. As I would assume most ERs already know, after Dylan's "screen test" that day he was either given or appropriated (depended on the teller) a Warhol silk screen , known as either a "Silver Elvis" or "Double Elvis." According to Warhol, he "gave" an Elvis to Dylan, Other accounts have Dylan and Warhol kind of doing a "you're cool, man," "no you're cooler, man" potlatch dance around each other that ended with Warhol reluctantly giving the Elvis away. Still other accounts have Dylan saying "I'll take that (the double Elvis) as payment [for the screen test]," and Dylan's crew, which included Bobby Neuwirth and Victor Maymudes (sometimes spelled as Maimudes), hustling the painting down the freight elevator before anyone in Warhol's camp could object.
Silver/Double ElvisQuote:
Andy: I liked Dylan, the way he created a brilliant new style... I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I'd ask, 'Why did he do that?' I'd invariably get hearsay answers like 'I hear he feels you destroyed Edie [Sedgwick],' or 'Listen to Like a Rolling Stone - I think you're the 'diplomat on the chrome horse,' man.' I didn't know exactly what they meant by that - I never listened much to the words of songs - but I got the tenor of what people were saying - that Dylan didn't like me, that he blamed me for Edie's drugs.
Bob and a single Silver ElvisSome accounts have the Dylan station wagon as red, other as blue. Almost everyone agrees that Dylan's people strapped the even-then extremely valuable painting to the top of the car and drove off. As noted above, reports eventually floated back to Warhol that Dylan had thrown the Elvis in a closet, had hung it upside down, or was using it as dart board, all apparently designed to show his disdain for Warhol. All accounts - including from Dylan himself - have him later trading the Elvis to his manager Albert Grossman for a sofa/couch. Grossman's widow, Sally, later sold the painting at auction for a reported $750,000.
Quote:
Bob: I once traded an Andy Warhol "Elvis Presley" painting for a sofa, which was a stupid thing to do. I always wanted to tell Andy what a stupid thing I done, and if he had another painting he would give me, I'd never do it again.
The photo was described to me as one or two people from Dylan's posse (Bobby Neuwirth probably being one of them) tying the painting to the top of a station wagon. The shot appeared to have been taken from one of the Factory windows - several floors up - shooting down at the top of the station wagon. But, the person who commissioned me warned me she had only had the photo described to her and her description was probably off. There was also a possibility that the photo didn't even exist, or was faked. One person I spoke to was convinced that it was probably a staged publicity shot taken for the "Factory Girl" bio pic.
Research indicated that if the photo existed, the most likely candidates to have taken it were Nat Finkelstein, Gerard Malanga, or Billy Name. But given the time and the atmosphere, nearly everyone in Warhol's camp shot photographs, and it could have been anyone in the crowd who was there that day. There was a slight possibility that Barbara Rubin, who was filming footage of Dylan that day and who was the person who brought Dylan to the Factory, might have taken the shot.
I won't bore you with details of my ongoing year-long research efforts, which was mostly sending email, making phone calls and either not getting any response or getting answers that confused the issue even more. Suffice to say that the Warhol Museum had never heard of the photo. First-hand accounts by people who were there had Nat Finkelstein following Dylan out at ground level shooting photographs all the while, and Gerard Malanga watching - and possibly photographing - from a window, indicating that Malanga had probably taken the photo I was looking for. But Gerard Malanga's representatives told me that the photo was taken by Billy Name. Name, who now runs a goat farm in upstate New York, said it wasn't his and he didn't know the source. Barbara Rubin told me she suspected Nat Finkelstein was the photographer.
In fact, all the evidence built up to point at Finkelstein, who was the author of almost all the published photos from that day. While I had a slew of Finkelstein contacts/representatives, I wasn't getting any responses from any of them. I finally found a very obscure personal email address for Finkelstein and sent off a message. I got a one-line response from him...
"I have it." ... and weirdly, he attached a photo of a street scene which fit the basic description, except there wasn't any station wagon and no one tying anything to the top of a car. Some further back-and-forth with Nat convinced me he did have the photo but, that for his own reasons, he wasn't going to talk with an intermediary about it. So, I passed on his contact info to my client along with my belief that Nat had the photo, and closed the book on the project.
A few weeks later, Nat Finkelstein passed away. Out of curiosity, I contacted my client and asked if she had been successful in getting the photo. She replied she hadn't, had had a few exchanges with Finkelstein's wife, had been sent some contact sheets from that day, but the photo wasn't part of the group.
More months passed, and I received an email from a research forum where I had posted what info I had about the photo almost a year ago. An intern from a Tucson, Arizona gallery noted, "We have it."
And indeed they do. If you go to Nat Finkelstein's portfolio at the Eric Firestone Gallery:
http://www.ericfirestonegallery.com/art
Look in the lower right corner above the copyright and you can see the station wagon with Double Elvis strapped on top. Dylan is chatting with Barbara Rubin behind the car.http://expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49396&start=0
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