NBC's "The Blacklist" logo riffing on Al Aronowitz's "The Blacklisted Journalist" logo?

[Dylanetics]

The late Al Aronowitz, the legendary journal who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles, has a terrific website with detailed first-hand stories about Bob, the Beatles, the Beats and just about everybody who was anybody in the '60s "scene."

Aronowitz bills himself (and his website) as "The Blacklisted Journalist" (just google it).

The website has a distinctive logo. There is one of those circles with a diagonal bar across it meaning "No" or "Banned" or "Prohibited." But instead of a picture in the center of a cigarette or something, there's a rough sketch of a dark figure walking away in a long black coat. The figure is wearing a big black hat.

Hey, it's the blacklisted journalist, Al Aronowitz!

Now what about NBC's hit crime series, "The Blacklist"? (Note to future: "NBC" was a leading "television broadcasting network" during the second half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st.)

Well, the show's name is certainly similar to Al's, but he didn't invent the term "blacklist." Fine.

But check out the show's logo. It's based on a photo of James Spader as the mysterious protagonist. He's seated, gazing into the camera, looking creepy. Also fine.

Notice, however, that Spader is wearing a BLACK TRENCHCOAT and a BIG BLACK HAT.

Visually arresting, which is no doubt why it was adopted by a leading television broadcasting network to promote the show.

Coincidence you say?

I doubt it. I suspect that some graphic artist or designer was trying to come up with ideas for pictures that would go with "The Blacklist." So s/he goes on the internet and googles the term. It wouldn't take much browsing through website hits or Google Images to run into Al's site.

What happened next, I'll leave to your imagination.

[Dylanetics]

Shortly after Aronowitz died, at age 77, in 2005, Patricia Jungwirth posted the following profile written in 2004.


From Dylan to the Blacklist

By Mike Miliard, Boston Phoenix. Posted December 13, 2004.

Al Aronowitz says the '60s wouldn't have been the same without him. Now the
'Blacklisted Journalist' who's found an outlet on the Internet looks back
from his cluttered New Jersey apartment.

"Of course, now I realize that smoke should never enter the human lung. Not
smoke from a cigarette, not smoke from a marijuana joint, not smoke from
the exhaust of a car, not smoke from a burning match, not smoke from a
smokestack, nothing! Smoke should never enter the human lung! Smoke is
anti-life!"

Al Aronowitz is sitting in a booth at the International House of Pancakes
in Elizabeth, N.J., reflecting on lessons learned. He's thinking back on a
time in his own life when he smoked an awful lot. Specifically, he's
remembering a night, Aug. 28, 1964, in Manhattan's Hotel Delmonico on Park
Avenue. The night when he introduced his pal Bob Dylan to the Beatles – and
introduced the lads from Liverpool to a poorly rolled joint of his own
"evil weed." That night, he'd later write, "I was well aware ... that I was
brokering the most fruitful union in the history of pop music."

Once upon a time, Aronowitz knew everybody. As a cub reporter, he
interviewed Marilyn Monroe. He could phone Frank Sinatra at the Sands. He
traveled to San Francisco to study the burgeoning Beat movement with a
sociologist's rigor and a hedonist's abandon. The unexpurgated, 10,770-word
manuscript of his 1964 article on Beatlemania for the Saturday Evening Post
is a masterpiece of long-form reportage, a kaleidoscopic up-close view of a
seismic cultural shift. (It sold more copies than any issue since Ben
Franklin founded the magazine, in 1728.) In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
his "Pop Scene" column in the New York Post had him rubbing shoulders with
the Stones and the Band, and had people whispering his name when he walked
into clubs.

But Aronowitz did more than just profile his subjects. He became their
friends, and they his. Bob Dylan wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man" in Aronowitz's
kitchen. Aronowitz drove Dylan to buy his infamous Triumph motorcycle (the
one he crashed in 1966 under still-mysterious circumstances). John Lennon
photographed him with and without pants. Miles Davis played him his records
over the phone. Johnny Cash once threatened to punch him out. Aronowitz was
writing about rock and roll before that vocation became a clich?but he was
less reporter than participant. Art Garfunkel called him "Uncle Al, the man
who introduces everybody to everybody."

But things fell apart. In 1972, Aronowitz's wife died of cancer. He lost
his column thanks to conflict-of-interest charges made by his editor.
(Aronowitz suspects there was a personal vendetta at work.) He had managed
middling, money-hemorrhaging rock acts in the 1960s, and it cost him his
house. The mid-1970s country music concerts he promoted in New York City
were bombs. He was freebasing cocaine, dealing drugs, and descending into
something approaching madness. "It all made me crazy," he says. "I was
crazy. Really crazy." Suddenly, the man who had built his life around
others was all but alone. If he wasn't officially blacklisted from
journalism, the effect was the same. No one wanted to know the man who knew
everyone. Not New York editors, not Bob Dylan. And to hear him tell it,
Aronowitz didn't want to know himself.

But then, in 1995, his daughter introduced him to a still-new phenomenon:
the Internet. If magazine and newspaper editors wouldn't take his calls,
then fuck them; here was a new way to publish. In his dark and druggy days,
he'd put out a scattershot Xeroxed 'zine called the Blacklisted
Masterpieces of Al Aronowitz. ("YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE FAITH that this book
will be recognized as an important literary work and a valuable collector's
item to want to pay $100 for it!" trumpeted the 'zine's ad in the Village
Voice. "MORE THAN SIX COPIES NOW IN PRINT!") But this was something else: a
vast, uncharted expanse that a "compulsive writer" could fill with millions
of words, a place where Aronowitz could tell his stories. He cleaned up his
act, and got down to it. "The Blacklisted Journalist" was born.

Ten years later, sitting in his dark and detritus-filled apartment,
Aronowitz, now 76, still writes almost every day, torrents of words
preserving his rock-and-roll memories in cyber-amber. Some would argue the
last thing the 1960s need is more documentation, more solipsistic,
I-was-there-man reminiscences. But his Web site, and his self-published Bob
Dylan and the Beatles: Volume One of the Blacklisted Journalist
(AuthorHouse), a chunky paperback tome that collects the best of
Aronowitz's writing from then and now, offer riotous and rambling time
capsules, comprising detailed vignettes and told in a voice that's direct,
disarming, and self-deprecating. It may or may not be true, as the book's
promo materials proclaim, that FOR AS LONG AS PEOPLE KEEP LISTENING TO Bob
Dylan and the Beatles, PEOPLE WILL WANT THIS BOOK!, but Aronowitz's
anecdotes offer an inimitable inside look at the rock era's biggest
players. (Next up, look for his "Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine," a new
book he says is timed to coincide with – and challenge the authenticity of
– Kevin Spacey's forthcoming Darin biopic, "Beyond the Sea.")

Aronowitz is no longer the bombastic bear of a man who can be seen in
photographs hobnobbing with Dylan and Lennon. After years of drug abuse and
an open-heart surgery, he seems to have shrunk. Enormous glasses enlarge
his sleepy eyes. His posture and bearing are stooped and subdued. Bouts of
phlebitis have him walking with a cane, and his voice is sometimes barely
audible. But make no mistake: Al Aronowitz still has a voice. He's got
stories to tell, and he's sure as hell not going to wait until he's dead to
have them told. "My writing has gotta speak for itself," he says. "Too many
people have judged me, rather than judge my work. I'm not Picasso. Maybe
I'm a prick. I dunno. But this is my love of loves, this is my work. These
are stories of the times. I think they're interesting. That's the job of a
journalist. To make sense of the story. And express yourself."

I meet Aronowitz and his girlfriend, Ida, at his hulking brick apartment
building on the north side of hardscrabble Elizabeth, N.J.. As we make our
way slowly downstairs toward the exit, Ida pauses, remembering that she's
left her purse in the apartment. A gentleman, Aronowitz trudges back toward
the ancient elevator to retrieve it. When he returns, he deadpans like a
Borscht Belt comedian: "I couldn't find your bag, so I grabbed one off the
first lady I saw."

At IHOP, Aronowitz sits across from me in a red Rutgers cap and bright blue
cowboy shirt and starts at the beginning. Born in 1928, he grew up the son
of an Orthodox butcher in Bordentown and Roosevelt Park, N.J. "A lot of
anti-Semitism," he says. "I remember when the marshal came to repossess my
father's [delivery] truck. My mother was beating on his chest, screaming,
'Don't take the truck away!' I was two or three years old." He went to
Rutgers and majored in journalism. "A total waste of time," he says. "I
learned more working on the college paper than I ever did in journalism
class." When he got out, in 1950, the Phi Beta Kappa grad landed a job as
editor of the Daily Times in Lakewood, N.J. Then he moved on to the Newark
Evening News, and finally across the river to the New York Post.

At first, he manned the Post's night desk, "rewriting the New York Times
for the morning edition." But before long, he was doing feature pieces. One
of his first big assignments had him on a plane to San Francisco to profile
the Beat poets. Aronowitz says Post editor Paul Sann wanted a hatchet job
on this bunch of "dumb-fuck pansies posing as poets." Instead, as he would
time and again with other subjects, Aronowitz fell hard for Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, awed by their libertine lifestyle, their
burning fervor. His 12-part series that ran in 1960 fell just this side of
hagiography.

Aronowitz says it was Kerouac's "On the Road" in particular that "changed
my life in many ways. It was about real people. I wanna know these people.
I had visions of being a journalist so I could get to know them! Which is
what I did. I befriended them, and got to know them very well." It was also
during his time with the Beats that Aronowitz first smoked dope. Not long
after, the Saturday Evening Post enlisted him to write a long profile of a
young folkie phenomenon who was drawing fawning crowds to Greenwich Village
clubs. The moment he met Bob Dylan, Aronowitz was starstruck. "I felt
honored," he writes in "Bob Dylan and the Beatles," "to hang out with this
mumbling 22-year-old kid, skinny as a scarecrow and wound up as a telephone
cord."

"I was supposed to write a piece on Paul Newman, but I lost interest," he
recalls. "I never finished the piece because Dylan stole my interest. It
got to the point where I was so hung up on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, side
A, that I never got around to turning the record over and listening to side
B. For months." The two struck up a relationship, and before long were
friends. Aronowitz says Dylan penned "Mr. Tambourine Man" after listening
to Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness" over and over in his kitchen. ("All
night long! I wanted to go to sleep!") He hung out in Woodstock with Dylan
and his wife, Sara. Aronowitz even claims credit for persuading the folk
hero to go electric. "Dylan was a folkie purist," he says with a grumble.
"I hate purists. Purists are like fundamentalists. And fundamentalism is
what's wrong with the world. People who refuse to budge an inch, no matter
what! These red states. These Muslim maniacs. These Jewish fanatics. I
said, 'Bob! Today's pop hits are tomorrow's folk classics!' That was my
argument. And I was right. I know I was right."

If meeting Bob Dylan changed his life, Aronowitz says his role in helping
Dylan meet the Beatles changed the course of American popular culture.
Aronowitz was there at JFK in February 1964, reporting for the Saturday
Evening Post, when the Fab Four disembarked from their Pan-Am DC-8 to
screaming, teary throngs. He knew right away what a cataclysmic moment it
was. "As soon as I met the Beatles, man. The whole press corps were there,
ready to shoot them down, with their poison pens pointed. But they got off
the plane, and they immediately charmed the shit out of everybody."

The Beatles, of course, were swarmed by press, but Aronowitz had special
access, afforded him by the fast friendship he struck up with their road
manager, Neil Aspinall. (In one priceless detail in a Saturday Evening Post
article full of them, Aronowitz spots Aspinall "expertly and flawlessly"
forging the Beatles' signatures on programs meant for the queen.) So it was
that this pop journalist was able to spirit Dylan into the Hotel Delmonico
for a high summit meeting of the U.S.'s and the U.K.'s leading lights.

At first, Aronowitz recalls, the encounter was "very awkward, very demure.
Nobody wanted to step on anybody's ego." So they tried to loosen up. Dylan
wanted cheap red wine. The Beatles swilled their whisky and Coke, their pep
pills in plastic bags on the nightstand. "They offered us pills, and we
offered the Beatnik line," Aronowitz says. " 'Ah, pills are chemicals, man!
You don't wanna put those in your body! Marijuana comes from the ground!
It's natural!' " Still, the Liverpudlians were skeptical. Ringo was the
guinea pig. Remembers Aronowitz in the book: " 'You try it,' John said."

"Soon, Ringo got the giggles," he writes. "In no time at all, he was
laughing hysterically. His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us
started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically.
Soon, Ringo pointed at the way Brian Epstein was laughing and we all
started laughing hysterically at the way Brian was laughing. ... We kept
laughing at each other's laughter until every one of us had been laughed at."

In his cluttered apartment, Aronowitz reclines on an unmade bed with
mismatched sheets, his wizened, stubbly face bathed eerily in the
half-light of a single bulb. "It was all a big laugh," he says wearily,
with a weak smile. "John's code word for getting stoned was 'Let's have a
larf.' Then, later he called it 'Let's Al Aronowitz!' " He chuckles. "But
reporters like to say it was Dylan who turned 'em on. I was the invisible
man."

Still, Aronowitz was always keenly aware of the momentousness of the
larf-fest he engineered. "I was just a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish
matchmaker, dancing at the princely wedding I'd arranged," he writes. "I
hate to think that putting Bob together with the Beatles is the only thing
I'll ever be remembered for, but I think it certainly was the right thing
to do. Hasn't the whole world benefited? Look at all the beautiful music we
have as a result! The Beatles' magic was in their sound. Bob's magic was in
his words. After they met, the Beatles' words got grittier, and Bob
invented folk-rock."

But regrets? He's had a few. "If I had one stinking iota of junk-bond
swindler Michael Milken in me, I would now be worth millions for all the
music mergers I arranged," he writes. "But I guess I wasn't enough of a
hustler and a con man to compete with the sharks, wolves and snakes with
which I had to deal. So now, I'm just a poor, broke, forgotten and ignored
blacklisted journalist who has to give away all my stories for free on the
Internet because I don't want to wait to be published posthumously. Boo, hoo."

Aronowitz admits that he idolized these megawatt luminaries, Dylan
especially. Perhaps too much. "The Cat's Meow, The End, The Ultimate," he
calls him in his book. "I adored Dylan too much to see him through critical
eyes. I was too impressed with his hipness and too humbled by his
artistry." Dylan could have "charmed the bracelets from the tails of
rattlesnakes. I found him to be one of the most beguiling men I've ever
known. ... To be with Bob was always magical. Every word out of his mouth
impressed me as a gem. ... The universe I'd see in Bob's eyes never stopped
jolting me."

He's also honest enough to recognize that these starry-eyed musings might
as well be the study-hall notebook scribblings of a seventh-grader. But he
doesn't disown them. Dylan might sometimes have been a cold and abusive
person, but Aronowitz was willing to subject himself to his barbs just to
be in his presence. "I liked being friends, I liked hanging out with
Dylan," he tells me. "I mean, my God! I was just crazy enough to think he
was the new messiah! We all had that feeling about Dylan. We really revered
him."

But as his own life began to unravel, more and more friends started to fall
by the wayside. He doesn't discount his own failings as a contributing
factor. "Bob is another one of those old friends who have written me off,"
he writes. "I don't blame him. I got to be pretty much of a wreck. I can
also look back at myself being something of an asshole. But then, assholism
seems to be a chronic condition with me. As hard as I try to cure myself,
there's hardly a day goes by without me remembering an occasion as recently
as the day before when I was an asshole again."

Aronowitz was also starting to question the life he was leading, this go-go
go-between, surrounded by supernova rock stars more than a decade his
junior. "My wife was dying, and I didn't want to stay up till four o'clock
in the morning getting high and then come in the morning to write a column,
then come home and do the shopping, and everything I had to do to raise a
family," he says. "My wife was dying, and I had three young kids, and I'm
hanging out with the Stones."

He wouldn't be for much longer. It wasn't until just before he was
unceremoniously stripped of his column and his life started to disintegrate
that Aronowitz even began to intuit that his own personality, brio and
writing chops were making him a semi-celebrity in New York City. "I'm
unaware of all this," he says, still incredulous. "I'm unaware how big a
star this column is making me. They call me a living legend! I walk into a
club" – he whispers behind a cupped hand – "Al Aronowitz is here!"
Oblivious to his own renown, he was happy instead to surround himself with
the glow of stars. "I worshipped these people. I recognized them as
immortals, as giants, as icons." He was building his personality around
others, measuring his self-worth by the caliber of those who kept him
around. But "I liked that position," he says. "It gave me some self-esteem.
Which I was terribly lacking. It never occurred to me that I was worth
anything."

Back at Aronowitz's apartment, you'd hardly guess that the guy who lives
here used to hobnob with rock-and-roll royalty. The place is a mess. "I
never won any housekeeping awards. I never tried for any either," he says
unapologetically. The shades are drawn; the only light comes from a single
wan bulb and a blue-glowing old computer. He putters around this cramped
and cluttered labyrinth of ancient filing cabinets, stacked to the ceiling
with books and files and papers from decades of journalism. Tall shelves
are crammed with vinyl albums, old reel-to-reels of interviews, and studio
masters of the bands he used to manage. He's covered them over with wide
sheets of tattered newspaper, because "people kept stealing my records."
Tabletops are covered with stuff: plastic bags, cassette tapes, orange
prescription bottles, browning bananas, a canister of Ovaltine, a box of
matzo. A transistor radio sits on the bathroom floor. Above one of the
shelves hangs a large color photograph of Aronowitz, a cigarette between
his fingers, his face fringed with Brillo-pad hair and stretched with a
wide-mouthed grin. "Yeah," he says flatly, looking away. "That's when I was
smoking cocaine."

On his desk, half-obscured, is a CD of Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," the
singer's T-shirt emblazoned with the same motorcycle Aronowitz helped him
buy. Propped against a shelf on the floor next to his chair is a vinyl
record of the same album. A screensaver rolls slowly across his monitor,
orange letters on black background: FUCK ... SHIT ... PISS ... CORRUPTION.

Discovering the Internet was "the thing that made me sane," Aronowitz says.
Becoming a cyber journalist offered the chance for a fresh start, "allowed
me to make an end run around the blacklist," to free himself of editors'
restrictions and revisions. Aronowitz hates editors. Not only has nearly
every one he's ever known been a know-it-all, corrupt, or both, but he
suspects one once may have cuckolded him. And they make him curb his word
count.

He thinks back on a conversation he had with Frank Sinatra in the mid
1960s, when Aronowitz was still with the Post. "I called him. He was at the
Sands, getting drunk. He picked up the phone. 'Al, I got $7 million. I
don't need the New York Post. What do I wanna talk to you for? I don't need
you. I don't trust the editors.' Now I understand. I don't trust editors
either. They make me look like an asshole. My whole career! All editors are
arrogant. Every editor thinks they can do it better than you wrote it.
They're all full of shit. Dummies. If they could write, they'd be writers."

"Bob Dylan and the Beatles" and "Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine" are just
volumes one and three in Aronowitz's self-published "Blacklisted
Journalist" paperbacks. (Volume two was penned by poet/firebrand Amiri
Baraka, who's been friends with Aronowitz since the Beat days, back when he
was still LeRoi Jones.) Two more books are forthcoming. One, "Mick and
Miles," remembers when Aronowitz introduced Jagger to Davis. The other,
"For Adults Only," features risqu?ieces from six writers who pen guest
columns on the "Blacklisted Journalist" Web site. Distribution for that one
might pose a problem, however. "Some hick salesman in Indiana said it was
pornographic. His mind is in the 18th century."

On Aronowitz's computer screen are two documents, works in progress, with
just a few sentences and fragments at the top of each blank page. He's got
plenty more stories to tell. Sure, he's no longer surrounded by A-list
stars. He sits at home and writes, watches "The Price Is Right" and the Red
Sox. ("I'm anti-Yankee. I don't reward arrogance, and that's all they have
going for them.") He goes to the movies. He really liked "Ray." "I didn't
see any difference between the Ray [Charles] I knew and the Ray on the
screen."

One wonders if he misses the people he was once so close to. He used to be
a confidant to Bob Dylan; has he ever thought of making an effort to get
back in touch with the guy? Aronowitz just stares at me, bemused. "Why do I
wanna?" He laughs mirthlessly. "What am I gonna ask him? He kicked me out!"
He stares at me again, long and disconcertingly. "If he wants to be friends
again, it's fine with me."

If not, Aronowitz is happy to keep telling tales. "Some writers say, 'I
gotta challenge the reader!' I don't believe in challenging the reader," he
says. "I believe in putting my arm around 'em and telling 'em a story."

Sitting in the gloaming of his tiny apartment, Aronowitz seems glad to have
someone to tell his own story to. As I leave, he grabs a copy of his Bobby
Darin book from a box full of them, and inscribes it with a shaky, old-man
scrawl. "For a good LISTENER! – Al Aronowitz." With his Web site and his
books, the rock-writing pioneer is doing for himself what he once relied on
others, the stars he surrounded himself with, to do for him: ensuring he'll
be remembered. "I was collecting giants," he says. "I was collecting
immortal souls." Then, after a long pause, "I thought some of their
immortality might fall on me."