Al Abrams is a master of this suspect genre. He had a plum gig as the head of PR for Motown during the company's salad days. A whopper he told about Dylan still reverberates. Abrams has told the tale a number of times, but he lays it out best in his 2011 book Hype & Soul: Behind the Scenes at Motown: "One morning I received a memo from Berry reminding me that Smokey Robinson is one of our nation's greatest songwriters and I should really do something in a hurry to promote him as such in the media because he wasn't getting all the recognition he really deserved." He continues, "I mentioned it to Al Aronowitz, a music writer who was also Dylan's biographer and very close friend. Al said that he had heard Dylan praise some of Smokey's lyrics as being poetical. I asked Al if he would let me get a quote from Dylan about Smokey. Al asked me what I had in mind and I suggested Smokey Robinson is America's Greatest Living Poet. Al thought about it for a minute and said, 'Why bother even telling Bob? That sounds just like something he'd say anyway. Go ahead and do it. If Bob sees it in print he'll think he said it. He's certainly never going to deny it.'"
Abrams confesses, "I will admit that I lived in fear every time I heard Dylan was doing a major interview and might say, 'What the fuck? I never said that.'"