Earlier today, Prefix posted a story from the New York Post on a Dylan memorabilia lawsuit and counter lawsuit involving Peter McKenzie, the son of the the man who lent his couch in New York to a 19-year -old Bob Dylan in 1961. The tone of the Post article, and the Prefix post, we must confess, leaned strongly in favor of McKenzie, due to the lack of comment provided by Jeff Gold on the matter. But now, Gold has given his side of the story on his own blog, and the details he provides are pretty damning:

 

One day McKenzie mentioned he’d bought something on Ebay and the amount he’d paid, and so I went online, found the listing, and saw his Ebay user ID. I was spending a lot of money with him, had become concerned, and thought it prudent to keep an eye on his Ebay purchases (which is publicly available information.)

A month or so later I saw that McKenzie had purchased three vintage Dylan albums in a short time on Ebay. I asked myself “If Peter McKenzie had known Dylan and had all this memorabilia, why would he be buying a copy of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” and two copies of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan ?”

An alarm bell rang a few weeks later when McKenzie offered me a “signed and inscribed” copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” which he told me he’d gotten 20 years ago from a mutual friend of his and Dylan’s. When he sent me a photo of it, it appeared identical to one of the copies he’d bought on Ebay a few weeks earlier, with an inscription and signature added. Both album covers had multiple scratches, imperfections, and flaws in exactly the same places—it seemed obvious that they were one and the same.

I had Peter send me the “signed” “Freewheelin’” on approval, and hired a highly regarded certified forensic document examiner (formerly with the US Treasury Department) to conduct a formal comparison of the Ebay “Freewheelin’” to the one Peter was offering me. 

I also had him examine a group of other material I’d purchased from McKenzie, the rare book dealer, and other items from my personal collection. A forensic document examiner compares questioned items to “known examples” to determine whether or not a questioned item is genuine. Another top collector and I were able to provide over 100 pages of known authentic Dylan handwriting samples, including documents, published lyrics, and one of Dylan’s songwriting notebooks.

The forensics examiner concluded that the “Ebay Freewheelin’” was in fact the same album that McKenzie was offering me, with an inscription added after the fact. He determined that some of the items I had purchased from McKenzie and the book dealer were genuine, while others were found to be “not genuine.”

In short order, I hired a lawyer in New York (McKenzie resides there) who called and confronted McKenzie with the bad news. McKenzie denied that anything was not authentic, but asked to speak with me. He insisted he would give me a full refund and implored me to keep this “between us” (something I never agreed to do.) The book dealer, when contacted, expressed concern and made full restitution to me for the “not genuine” items they’d sold me from “Peter McKenzie’s collection.”

In a second lawsuit filed against McKenzie accusing him of selling non-authentic Bob Dylan items, plantiff Reed Orenstein (a longtime friend of McKenzie) states that McKenzie admitted to him that he had forged Dylan’s signature on the “Ebay Freewheelin’.”

While McKenzie has not yet responded to this blog post, it would be pretty hard to rebut these claims if they're true (but with 20/20 hindsight, would be in line with the type of reporting the Post has become known for). It seems that in terms of generosity and honesty, the son has not emulated his father.