The Double Life of Bob Dylan: 4. Creativity is a multi-faceted gift

 

I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.

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by Tony Attwood

The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin is a big book. Over 500 pages in fact, and it is only the first part of Heylin’s latest offering on Dylan.   But despite Heylin’s eminence as a Dylan commentator, it’s a book that I think misses the point.

•  Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed

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My point in this series is that Bob Dylan is self-evidently not an ordinary guy – he is in fact a creative genius.  And so expecting him to have behaved as an ordinary guy throughout his life, (especially that bit of his past life when he was struggling to understand what he was and what he could do, while at the same time being pushed around by those in the record company who were naturally looking after their interests rather than Bob’s), is unreasonable.

Of course, Bob didn’t behave like everyone else, not did he adopt the morality of the 21st century, because he wasn’t like everyone else and this was the 1960s.  So although I am sure Mary Rotolo, mother of Suze, was undoubtedly speaking the truth when she said that Dylan “told me so many lies right away… they were stories that were … beyond belief to an older woman,” the reality was that Bob was effectively living in a different world from Mary, both in terms of his experiences and in terms of his thinking..

Few of us ever get the experience of creating something new, different and indeed earth-shattering, but we don’t have to have had that experience to imagine how mind-blowing, unsettling (in the sense of asking “is it really that brilliant, or am I just fooling myself?) and above all life-changing, such an event must be.

But Heylin revels instead, in what he sees as the nastier side of the young Bob Dylan and goes on and on and on quoting people with negative things to say about the young Dylan.   Although he does slip a few hints as to what was really going on as he cites Paul Nelson saying Dylan had “a strong streak of dishonesty and a strong streak of honesty… right together.”  In my experience in the music industry, it was ever thus.

For those trying to break into the music business, what mattered was breaking into the music business.  So the comment “I doubt that he has ever been sincere in his life” said by John Hammond Sr is probably true except for one thing: Bob wanted to make music.    Hammond admits that this perceived insincerity doesn’t detract from Dylan’s creativity, but then throws in another knock by adding “Bob always had fantasies about himself.”  Or as a more generous person might say, “Like so many of us, Bob had his dreams.”   The difference of course is that Bob made his happen.

So what the book offers us is report after report suggesting that when Dylan was charming those with any sense could see “through the layers of charm”.  But on the other hand, full marks to Bob for learning how to be charming.  I’m not sure I learned that until I was well into my 20s.

Thus it continued and we are over 100 pages into Heylin’s book before any serious comment about Dylan and his choice of music, where in passing Heylin notes that Dylan “resolutely refused to drop challenging material,” from his performances and recordings, suggesting that in this regard musically Bob could be quite “Perverse.”

It is an interesting insight, and one wonders why we are forced to read 100 pages about his alleged but mostly unproven mistreatment of his friends to get to this more important bit.   For let’s not forget, the important bit in terms of what happened later, is the music.  Bob will not be remembered for “borrowing” someone’s records, and in Heylin’s eyes remains suspect because he refused to criticize big money makers like Harry Belafonte, Kingston Trio etc.

And this takes us to Heyline’s problem.  He seems to have got hung up on the notion of the impoverished artist, refusing to take the commercial money but instead just sticking with his art.   Somehow he expects Dylan to be like Monet or Gaugin, or maybe William Blake.  I’m not sure if Heylin mentions William Shakespeare anywhere in his volume, but he really ought to reflect that there was a man, considered by many to be the greatest writer of them all, who not only borrowed unremittingly from everywhere and everyone else, but also made a decent enough living in doing so, retiring from writing and productions aged 49.

Mind you it is not just Dylan who comes in for criticism.  John Hammond gets dirt thrown over him for supposedly (there’s no proof) messing up the recording of “You’re no good”, and for commenting that Dylan was undisciplined in the studio.   Somehow Heylin confuses the very basic recording techniques of the 1960s with what is possible today and blames Hammond for not getting a perfect take every time.  Suddenly we find Dylan has been moved from being the kid who took and borrowed without giving, ihto God’s gift to music (which might well be true) in the space of a page or two.

I was (unsuccessfully) making demos a few years after Dylan – although in London, not in the States – and the technology was primitive, not least because the very expensive best gear was reserved for the singers and bands who were already established.   These were the days when anything and everything in a studio was mega expensive, and from a commercial point of view, Bob Dylan was still a risk.  Demos were circulated on 10 inch discs, and they cost money.

Hammond is criticised for making Dylan record “See that my grave is kept clean” three times when the first recording is excellent – but that is how it was those days.  You never quite knew how the original recording was going to translate onto a disc, so you had to have multiple recordings.

But perhaps worst of all, Heylin reserves for himself the ability to read what was in Dylan’s mind all those years ago.  He reports a discussion as to who wrote “Man of Constant Sorrow”, with Dylan deliberately misleading Hammond by referring him to Judy Collins recording of a different song (p107).  But it is Heylin who is wrong.  “Maid of Constant Sorrow” recorded by Judy Collins in 1961 is the same song as “Man of Constant Sorrow”.  Just the sex is changed.

And this is my point.  Only the arrangement changes.  And according to Wikipedia (not always correct I know, but seemingly right this time) it is a traditional song first published in 1913, on which no copyright is payable.

At the heart of all this is the suggestion made repeatedly by Heylin, that Dylan didn’t speak the truth but Heylin knows the truth.   But the fact is that in the 1960s everyone in the music industry who was contemplating releasing the first record by a new artist, wanted a spicy story.  “I went to school, studied classical music on the piano, passed all my exams, worked moderately hard, and at the weekends wrote a couple of songs in my bedroom” was not what was wanted.  They wanted a rambling man moving from town to town, meeting musicians by the roadside, or at the campfire, picking up the old traditions as they travelled on.  They wanted the Rambling Man.  So that is what Dylan gave Hammond – exactly what Hammond wanted to hear and could use in the publicity material.

And here’s a little sidenote that may help explain what Dylan was going through.  I was about to write at this point, “I did the same when trying (but ultimately failing) to get my own musical career on the road, and in fact I wrote a song about that whole idea of inventing a past: Captured by a life that I don’t know that well.”

At which point I paused and thought, “Did I actually write that?” and had to check to see it was one of mine.  And yes I suspect my memory is ok on this one.  But my point is that Heylin is using commentaries from people who were often delivering their memories years later.  And memories, as surely we all know, are not always reliable.

Now I am not trying to argue that Dylan did not make things up.  He was after all trying to break into the music industry where, assuming that the American music industry in the 1960s was like the English music industry, everyone made up stories about themselves all the time, not because they were inveterate liars, but because, well, that’s what everyone did.  My story that “I’m at grammar school in Dorset at the moment, and hoping to go to university in October” wasn’t what was wanted at all, as of course I soon realised.

Given all this, who knows if the story about Dylan being told by Van Ronk, that Van Ronk told Bob he didn’t want Bob to use the VR arrangement of House of the Rising Sun, is true or not.  Maybe it is, and Bob went and used it anyway – but that is how the music industry worked in the 1960s.  Nothing was sacred, nothing was reserved, and no one (at least in England) even thought it might be possible to go to court over such an issue as the copyright on an arrangement.  Everyone “borrowed” everyone else’s.

Dylan however is portrayed as a thief, a person of low moral standing, a man who in Heylin’s own words, “stretches the truth”.  Whereas Heylin is judging Dylan’s actions within the music industry in the 1960s by the legal and moral standards of today.  Certainly the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 clarified all such matters in the UK, but before 1988… well those were murkier times.

Maybe legally and perhaps morally Dylan was wrong, but as Dave Ray is quoted as saying, “If you showed him [Bob] how to do something… ten minutes later, he was doing it.”  Dylan had that ability to listen to music and then reproduce it, and he used it.  And Dylan was not unique in this.  A lot of musicians in the folk, pop and rock field did it then and do it now.  Indeed if people coulddn’t do this, and didn’t do it, how on earth does Heylin think folk music was passed from one village to another in mediaeval times?

As Heylin does himself admit, in these early years “the pace at which Dylan is moving creatively is frightening.”   It is just unfortunate that Heylin doesn’t recognise the inevitable knock-on effects that such creative developments coming at such a speed, will inevitably have.

The series continues…