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
- Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
A key point in my argument in these articles is that if one is going to look into the life of a creative person, then recognition has to be made of the effect that a very high level of creativity can have on the individual’s personality, behaviour, energy, opinions etc etc.
Very high levels of creativity inevitable affect the way an individual sees and relates to the world beyond. It is something the individual naturally has from birth, and the individual has to come to terms with the fact that other people don’t see the world in the same way and don’t respond in the same way.
What this in turn means, is that the creative genius often has difficulty in knowing who to turn to for advice and guidance. Heylin, in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” is very good at pointing out how in the early parts of Dylan’s career there were all sorts of people trying to rip him off in terms of royalties and the like, but there is very little about Bob getting solid, unbiased guidance from people who really understood what he was going through, but without an invested interest in his career.
This set of circumstances obviously has an effect. The creative genius of of course knows and feels that he is different from the rest. Then on top of that, he has to put up with those around him trying to rip him off, trying to push him towards this or that type of work and so on.
In this regard, Heylin’s criticism of Dylan for attempting to copyright what Heylin considers are mere “arrangements” rather than actual compositions of Dylan’s, is fair enough in an abstract world – but we don’t live in such a world. In his early working life Dylan was being hyper-active as a songwriter, and the concept of copyright was nowhere near as well defined as it has become since, largely through a series of (won and lost) court cases. To ignore this fact, is frankly ludicrous.
Furthermore, calling Dylan a “song-snatcher” is insulting as well as misleading – because in the early days of pop, rock and commercial folk music songs were built on each other. Indeed one only has to consider the 12 bar blues to see how this works. The format is incredibly simple, and used by hundreds of thousands of composers to create millions of songs, each one “borrowing” the same production line of the blues from all those who had gone before (just listen to the chorus of Rock Around The Clock, to get the idea). Everyone used the format and no one worried about copyright because… everyone used the format.
What Helyin does however, is make himself the arbiter of what is a good song, as well as the arbiter of how the legalities of songwriting should be seen – ignoring how copyright was viewed when Dylan started writing. and indeed ignoring how it still is seen when it comes to such standard concepts as the 12 bar blues.
Worse Heylin then throws into the mix his own value judgements – suggesting that Dylan’s early work is simply a load of blues clichés. But what is and what isn’t a cliché is again a personal opinion. Consider Heylin on “Ballad for a Friend.”
This is a remarkable song and a remarkable performance. Far from being a standard blues, each line of lyrics starts on the second beat of the bar, while the verse starting “Where we go up in that north country” changes the time signature completely to great effect for the “better friend than me” line.
Although Dylan ends the recording by saying he messed up the vocal, what he doesn’t say is that he is changing the rhythm slightly within the verses, which gives that sense of unease throughout, which in turn is perfect for delivering the meaning of desperation and sadness for the events that happened in a world where everything simply moves on as if nothing happened. And yet all Heylin can do is note that Dylan jumps from his actual roots (the north country) “before wrapping it in a bubblewrap of blues clichés”.
To me, that is a totally ludicrous thing to say. The whole point of the blues – like rock n roll that came after it – is that it has clichés within it, which allow us to understand where we are without everything having to be spelled out. These songs last two and a half minutes, and if they don’t have clichés to express where and what they are, we’ll never get to understand the whole concept.
It is as if for all his supposed erudition Heylin has never come across the roots of all this music in the English folk song tradition of the Middle Ages and before. (The first English folk song of which we have a fairly accurate understanding of how it sounded came from the 13th century, (Sumer Is Icumen In) and there as with the blues, the music was simple so that everyone and anyone could sing it. That’s the point!
And it is not just Bob who comes in for this treatment. “Robert Johnson was as brazen a songsnatcher…” we are told, which is gibberish. All the blues were handed down from one singer to another and any notice of copyright was as much intended for the particular arrangement as a whole, nothing more.
What this extraordinary view of early American blues music leads to is that Dylan is said (by Heylin) to be “worryingly proud” of Standing on the Highway. And why should he not be proud? One might equally say that Heylin appears to be worryingly proud of “the Double Life” despite its total misunderstanding of the way the blues worked in terms of copyright. If Heylin genuinely felt that Ballad for A Friend is a “bubblewrap of blues clichés” then perhaps we should feel sorry for him and for all those people onto whom he has insisted on forcing this view onto the rest of us.
One might also add that Heylin has seemingly never come across a creative person who might ask either in discussion or through his/her art “Why tell the truth?” Popular songs, traditional songs, blues songs… they might have some truth within them, but mostly we can’t be sure, and generally people don’t see the singer as trying to express his own life through a song. After all, if Elvis Presley sings “My baby left me” – we don’t take that to be true. Nor do I take it as a personal insult that Elivs sang “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog”.
But Heylin goes even further as on page 119 he says, “As for the highly opinionated François Villon…” which could lead me to be writing “As for the highly opinionated Clinto Heyliin…” but I don’t (except by way of this example) because I take it for granted that much analysis of music is opinion. Yes we can discover the origins of songs and treat that research as fact, but when it comes to evaluating music, rather as when it comes to evaluating personal behaviour, that is a matter of opinion. Certainly if a lot of people reach the same opinion, then that becomes the accepted view, but in the end it is still a view. There are not immutable scientific laws such as we find when discussing gravity or the speed of light. When it comes to discussing works of art we are into opinion. But good discussions of works of art also have some facts to back these opinions up.
But Heylin doesn’t agree and is unrelenting in his assault on Dylan. Take this gem from page 120. “Dylan also gets a number of material facts wrong; not because he didn’t do enough homework, but because he did none.”
Now if Bob was writing a text book on biology I might agree that criticism could be valid if that were the case – but Bob is a creative genius whose gift to the rest of us is his catalogue of 600+ compositions. What on earth does homework have to do with it? If someone tells me that ten years before “Like a Rolling Stone” a composer wrote “Once upon a time you dressed so fine”, then so what? That is an interesting fact, but if composer followed that up with “before you offered me a lemonade and lime, but I said no baby I don’t have the time” I’d think, well, maybe that doesn’t really say much to me.
In short, ideas are everywhere, and as it was explained to me by my first publisher, you have to write the book (or the song) as “there is no copyright in ideas”. I’m writing a review of Heylin’s work by saying that throughout he is missing the point. You could do the same thing and publish it, and I’d have no claim against you. Not unless you started copying my actual text.
Thus my complaint is not that Heylin attacks Dylan’s work although I must admit I don’t like some of it either. It is Heylin’s view that he can dismiss a song (as for example in the line on page 121 “The song was even less worthy, but still gratefully received by Broadside,”) and expect and demand that we agree with him, even though he gives no evidence to back up his opinion.
OK maybe I have now started ranting, and that’s not so good, so I’ll stop for the moment, but really, “The Double Life” is an annoying work of opinion by a man who has little understanding of creativity, only a modest understanding of foik and popular music, and yet sees no good reason to justify anything he writes.
I’m puzzled that you have read the book. When a writer’s description of their own work boils down to, “I am proud and arrogant, and I I think I am God”, then why bother?
Richard, it is because first, the author does have a high readership, and second I prefer to argue from a point of detail rather than generality. Indeed I would say a lot of this website has maintained that standard ideal: argue from detail not broad statements.