The Mysterious Case of CBS's Hip-Hop-Hooded Mark Elston:

Bob Dylan's right-hand man or charlatan?

In '95 I was living in London - if you can call it living. During some accommodation
problems, I ended up staying at the home of a guy called Mark Elston, an ex-speed
freak, and his wife because he had a sudden bust-up with someone staying with him,
an army mechanic called Mick he was using as free labour on his van. So Mick needed
his own apartment back, where he was letting me stay temporarily. Mark was one of
the leaders of a rather weird offbeat local variation of a number in south-east London
of a well-known Christian 'fellowship' with a not particularly original name. I had been
invited along to the group and had been a few times. The main protagonists fancied
themselves as being somewhat alternative in their approach to Christian faith and
were into some book called Wild Hope by Tom Sine. I never did read it; I was too into
my Dylan – amongst whatever other things.

As one of the more conventional leaders said to me on my first visit, 'Mark is the one
over there, wearing all the gear.'

White hip-hop gear. We had a good snigger about the poser.

I had moved from a nearby but even shittier part of London. Going by one of the
chapters in Michael Gray's Song & Dance Man III, it seems that I was living extremely
close to Robert Shelton, though it is possible that this was not at precisely the same
time. But it could well have been. And there is a colossal irony in it. I thoroughly
enjoyed No Direction Home in spite of whatever flaws it may technically have had,
and would have loved to have met him. Especially as I was pretty depressed at the
time, and gather he was too.

Anyway, Mark had lived in NY, and regularly gloried in it as if it were some great
achievement. I was unimpressed and just glazed over or did one of my derisory Bronx
impoisonations.

He claimed to have worked for Columbia/Sony/CBS or whatever those 7th-Avenue

'whores' are calling themselves these days. (Congratulations Jeff Rosen on nuking all
the Dylan on youtube, but the stuff is still out there and will return: both while you
are around and after you're dead. Dylan audience recordings will outlive you when the
eye sockets of your skull are food for worms. Yonder Comes Sin.) I don't know if Mark
worked for them in London or NY (if at all) or if he is just a liar. I was never interested
enough to ask or pump his massive ego further.

He was an over-excitable pushy character, and he was strangely fascinated by the

intensity of my (quiet) following of Bob Dylan. When he came over to Mick's place one
time, I think before the time he came over to load up my stuff into his van to move to
his place, he was amused and startled to see a substantial number of Telegraphs from
Wanted Man by the side of my bed. He picked them up and fingered through them for
about half an hour in silence while lying on my bed as if I wasn't there, cheeky
bastard that he was, and said he wanted to read them. Could he take them ALL
home? The question was purely rhetorical. He gathered them all up and took them.
(Does that remind you of anyone who used to steal other people's record collections?)
By the time I was already staying at Mark's, I received some promised Infidels
outtakes tapes in the mail from a guy I had met at one of the Brixton '95 concerts, a
Martin B., an artist who knows a number of Dylan-obsessed painters who doing these
weird 'androgynous' portraits of Dylan which look more like Leonard Cohen. In fact
one of these painters, groupie hanger-on that she is, met Dylan once some time
following the '90-'91 slit-throat sacrificial-lamb-vocals period, and asked him why his
singing had been so shit. In reply Dylan just laughed. (Martin sent me lots of tapes
over a couple of years or so without ever asking for money or even exchanges once
he learned of my limited collection.) I was in the car with Mark with the mail packet
from Martin in my hand as I opened it. Mark said, 'What are they?' When I explained,
he started trying to snatch them from my hand with fist clenched like the Incredible
Hulk or Jaws in the Bond films, as if that was going to enable him to hear them any
sooner. All this while driving. We put one on in the car, and it started with Dylan's
'covering' Sinatra's This Was My Love, an endearing but rather strained affair. Mark
started moaning, saying, 'Ohh! Sly isn't playing properly,' as if he was an authority on
it. The playing is certainly somewhat wonky on that. Couldn't it be Dylan's trademark
wonky playing? Throughout the 90s and 00s it became clearer than ever to me what
Dylan's guitar contributions to his bands are.

The tapes had some Oh Mercy outtakes on too. So Mark was keen to name check
Daniel Lanois. But I found it funny that such a self-styled authority on music and
supposed former employee of Columbia pronounced Lanois's name in an Anglicized
manner: Lanowis. He grinned sheepishly when I suggested it was LanWA, particularly
given that the guy is, I think, Canadian. It was Mick the mechanic who had tipped me
off about the upcoming Brixton concerts, as he had heard an ad on the radio.

Straight after moaning about Sly and/or Robbie's playing, Mark also claimed,
teasingly, to have worked for Bob Dylan.

'You know I used to work for Bob Dylan?'

'Well, you said you'd worked for Columbia, OK, but that is not working for Bob Dylan.'
But he replied that he was the press officer or something, and that he used to get 'all
these calls asking [him] to explain what on earth Dylan was on about in Slow Train
Coming and Saved, could [he] explain it to them because they were so confused? So,
implicitly, it was Mark's job to 'explain' for the taciturn Dylan (who was paying his
wages for this invaluable service) - notwithstanding his Jesus stage raps and verbosity
on the albums.

So that is working for Bob Dylan? His right-hand man? But is any of it even remotely
true? If it was supposedly during Dylan's preachy phase it must have been in the very
early 80s.

Anyway, soon I had my own bust-up with Mark. It was over some missing belongings
of mine after I had been away for a few weeks. When I got back, some of them
weren't there anymore. I called him a charlatan, which left him pretty shaken up. And
his last words to me were, 'Fuck you'. In Jesus' name, of course.

'Mark, are we still friends?'

Actually, I don't care. But he did behave rather as if he was my producer or

something. Can anyone on here who might have worked for CBS confirm whether or
not Mark was a liar or did indeed work as a press officer or similar either in London or
NY?
One thing Mark did tell me that stuck with me was that I should be a writer. Were he
to know what I have since become a writer on, I'm sure he would be most intrigued.
But I'm a little cagey about saying on expectingrain. Going by my previous and first
upload, a lot of people read it (I've had over 2000 reads in under a day, though I
don't think it's really more than a third of that); and I don't like not knowing who is
reading or what they are doing with the information. You know, it's such a cutthroat
business. Wouldn't want it to get into the wrong hands. Maybe I should use an alias -
what do you think? ...

I'd standardize my spelling and punctuation to a sort of mid-Atlantic-but-really-tipped-

to-US style like Sounes did or his publisher had him do (which I thought looked very
naff). But I'd want paying for that. So I decided to stick to an arrogant shit-Brit
Grayesque fuck-you-all-Dylan-really-belongs-to-the-Brits-so-why-the-fuck-should-I-
tailor-my-spellings-for-an-American-audience approach.

Oh, I almost forgot. Mark was highly amused when I mentioned that Dylan had some
band in his youth called Elston Gunn.

He also grossly caricatured the extent of my possession of Dylan audience recordings

which I was very new to at the time and even now have insufficient patience to get
embroiled in. He said in front of some people, 'If you want Merillville 3 January 1990
this guy's got it'. Well, I don't. Rather it's the people who have been reading
expectingrain since the start who would have that ...

I just checked on Facebook. This looks very like him, but it is fifteen years on, so I'm
not certain. But he does call himself mad hippy, which certainly fits (though when I
called him one his wife got upset and said she saw him more as hip-hop) ...

Mark Elston of CBS, or Elston Spunn?