Beatle Bob: The World's Most Obsessive Fan

The thing you have to understand about Beatle Bob,” says Jenni Sterling, who has spent much of the last three years working on a documentary about him, “is that there is a kernel of truth to everything he says. The house flooding is true, but it happened 10 years ago—and it was at his grandmother’s.”

“I take Beatle Bob with a grain of salt,” says Lisa Andris, the former owner of the St. Louis club Hi-Pointe, who says she knows Bob better than anyone. “He’s a very sweet, pure, thoughtful person, but there’s no point in trying to drag Bob into reality. Bob has his own reality.”

Bob is widely rumored to be a kleptomaniac with a penchant for shoplifting CDs, though he’s never been charged with a crime. Andris says Bob would frequently take CDs out of her office, but his stealing, she maintains, is a largely irrational compulsion, and not for profit. Asked about Bob’s job as a social worker, she laughs.

“He answered the phones at Acid Rescue, like, 20 or 25 years ago,” she says. “He doesn’t work. It’s a full-time job being Beatle Bob. The amount of energy he puts into his life is probably equivalent to any Fortune 500–company vice president. There’s no way to factor a job into that.”

So if Bob doesn’t work, how does he survive? Apparently, for a time he was able to travel the country on airline buddy passes supplied by a friend. Now he takes public transportation to shows around St. Louis or bums rides from friends, particularly when heading out of town.

“He occasionally emcees festivals and gets paid small amounts,” Sterling says. “I think that covers his cell phone and his storage space. But I worry about Bob constantly, especially since I’ve been done filming. How is he going to feed himself if I’m not there to take him to dinner? Where is he sleeping if I’m not there to take him to his mother’s?”

The one point about Beatle Bob’s life that everyone agrees is true is the one that seems the least likely—the fact that he’s been out to see music every night for more than a decade. What’s more, according to Andris, Bob remembers nearly every show. “Bob will say, ‘Remember when you had Sylvain Sylvain at Hi-Pointe, Wednesday night, June 3, 1992?’ I couldn’t tell you what year I did any show. He’ll know what the weather was.”

Such behavior is one of the things that has led some of Bob’s friends to suspect he may have Asperger’s syndrome, a high-­functioning type of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists the symptoms of Asperger’s as including “preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus … apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals … repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements).”

“I think a lot of his lies are just compensation, because he’s always known deep down that he’s not normal,” Sterling says. “He comes up with these elaborate stories, so he comes across as being just like everyone else. It’s the way he socializes. Music is how he connects to the world. When he’s dancing, that’s the closest to normal he ever feels. That’s why he’s so obsessed.”

Bob denies all of this—the lying, the stealing, the joblessness, the homelessness and the Asperger’s. Confronted with the truth, he compounds his original lies with new ones; when we ask him about the possibility that he has Asperger’s, he says it’s a subject that’s been broached with him before: “I don’t see any symptoms that would make me believe I had it.”

Perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway—even if Asperger’s explained Bob’s bizarre behavior, what matters more than where he lives or how he makes a living is his all-­consuming enthusiasm for music.

“Isn’t it kind of refreshing,” asks Andris, “to see someone who never wavers from their mission? I find it inspiring: He’s a purist. Whenever people start lashing out at him, I go, ‘It’s like hating a child.’ His soul has the same purity as a baby’s.”

A few hours after being hustled off the front lawn of the house that he’d claimed belonged to him, we meet Bob in the lobby of the hotel where Blender is staying. His arms are filled with cardboard boxes overflowing with papers.
 
“I make a Christmas compilation each year that I send out to about 150 of my friends,” he explains. “I like to do handwritten liner notes about each song, and I have a friend at Kinko’s who gives me a deal on making copies of them.”

He begins to animatedly outline the unwieldy process of putting together the compilation from CDs, records and old 45s, packaging it and mailing it off. As he details how he chose each song, he waves his hands around, jabbing his finger in the air to emphasize a particular point. At the mention of each artist’s name, his face lights up. Suddenly, he pulls out his cell phone and glances at the clock. He lets out a small gasp: In all his excitement about the seasonal mail-out, he’s nearly forgotten something more important.

“We better leave if we’re going to catch Ralph Stanley,” he says. “The show starts in less than half an hour.”