Victor Maymudes

In his unfinished autobiography, posted on a Web site,[2] Maymudes recalled opening the Unicorn coffee house in Los Angeles. The Unicorn (located on the Sunset Strip next to what would become the Whiskey a Go Go) opened in 1957 by Maymudes and Herb Cohen (later well-known rock manager of Frank Zappa, Tim Buckley, and Tom Waits [3]), was the first of its kind on the West Coast, south of San Francisco. "We had live music and poetry. People would read and play chess," he wrote.

In 1961, folk musician Ramblin' Jack Elliot introduced Maymudes to a Minnesota folk musician five years his junior who had just arrived in New York City's Greenwich Village. "We went to the Gaslight Cafè on MacDougal Street, where everyone hung out," Maymudes wrote. "When we came in, Bob Dylan was in the back room where the performers hung out. He had been typing on an old typewriter in the back room. He was a two-finger typer. He was writing a new song. This one would be a hard rain that was going to fall." Maymudes developed his own reputation in the annals of Dylanology. He was "tall, taciturn" with "penetrating dark eyes, turbulent hair and an uncanny ability to keep his mouth shut," wrote Robert Shelton in his 1986 biography of Dylan, No Direction Home. Photographs show Maymudes playing chess with Dylan and standing enigmatically beside him.

Maymudes died Jan. 27, 2001 at UCLA Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., a day after he was stricken with a cerebral aneurysm at his home in Pacific Palisades.

• "A Dylan Insider’s Back Pages", New York Times, August 7, 2014