By Larry Ryan
Time then for another odd website dedicated to the meeting of two 20th century icons. Last week it was Elvis and Nixon, now it's an all together more icy tete a tete between Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan.
First published last August, "Bob Hates Andy" is a monthly comic strip imagining conversations between the pair; Bob all enigmatic and poetic, Andy all detached and ironic.
Bob visited Andy in his New York studio, the Factory, in 1965 and was filmed for a Screen Test (which you can watch here and here). By all accounts the pair didn't exactly hit it off with Dylan unimpressed by Warhol and his coterie, though Warhol did present him with one of his silver Elvis paintings.
Rumour had it that Dylan alternately used the painting as a dartboard or attached it to a motorbike and drove it round Woodstock, though it seems ultimately he traded it for his manager Albert Grossman's couch, which, in the long run was probably a financial error.
Further rumours suggest Dylan "hated" Warhol because of Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol's "Superstars". Dylan may have blamed Warhol for Sedgwick's descent into drug addiction. Drowning in a sea of hearsay and conjecture Dylan had a putative relationship with her and she may have been the inspiration for the songs "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat", "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Just Like a Woman". In turn, Warhol perhaps resented Dylan for Sedgwick's departure from the Factory set in 1966.
The Sedgwick/Warhol/Dylan story was tackled in a heavy-handed manner in the execrable biopic Factory Girl. A film which moved Lou Reed to declare; "I read that script. It's one of the most disgusting, foul things I've seen - by any illiterate retard - in a long time. There's no limit to how low some people will go to write something to make money".
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