The Double Life of Bob Dylan part 6: Utterly missing the point

 

 

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
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece

There is, in Heylin’s work some positive mentions of the fact that from early on Bob Dylan is noted as “a distinctive, highly personal stylist.”  This of course was and is true; Dylan transformed both pop and rock music, and our appreciation and understanding of folk music.  But at the same time, Heylin remorselessly criticises Dylan for not living up to the standards that Heylin himself proclaims as normal and basically “right”.  And as with so many moralists who criticise others, he sees no contradiction in this.

At the same time, although he packs his work with personal opinion, he criticises anyone who dares say something without back-up evidence.  So when John Hammond is quoted as saying “We nearly didn’t release the first album at all,” Heylin dismisses this because, “not a shred of evidence” exists for this, and accuses the speaker of “self-aggrandizement”.

The fact is that in fast-moving and highly competitive industries such as the music businesses, talking oneself up is part of the business.  In my experience everyone does it.  The quiet mouse not only doesn’t make a record, his songs are not recorded, he’s not a producer or arranger or anything.  It is an industry where to survive, one has to have a story, and indeed push that story forward.   Otherwise, even when creating wonderful music, you won’t get anywhere.  (It’s not the only industry like this – writing is the same, and indeed so are all the other creative arts that I know about).

Thus being pure, open and honest is not a recipe for success in the world of music, nor as far as I know, has it ever been.  Thus when Heylin writes about a “traditional blues Dylan was looking to claim as his own,” that makes Dylan sound like an out-and-out cheat; a man of no morality at all.  But the fact is everyone was doing that at the time; the old blues tunes had been considered common property for decades, and it was the arranger who claimed the ownership of his own version.

And indeed there was a validity in this, because it was often a new arrangement of an old blues song that could suddenly make the song popular.   However arrangements were hard to copyright, so copyrighting the song was what people did.

What Heylin does do however is admit that in these early years around the time of the first two albums, Dylan was “prepared to listen to anything” and this is an important comment (page 129) because that was clearly a fundamental in allowing Dylan to explore so many styles across the years.   Dylan, we are also told would also “play with anyone” and seemingly anywhere, and this too must have had a major impact on his work.  He rejected the idea of being put into a box – although yet again Heylin cannot let this obvious truth go (obvious in the sense that one only has to listen to a small number of Dylan compositions to realise just how varied his work has been from the start).

So Dylan is quoted as saying, “They were trying to build me up as a topical songwriter.  I was never a topical songwriter.”  To which Heylin instantly replies, “Sounds like semantics to me”.   And I am left thinking, “What is the point of this?”   Indeed is this a book about Dylan, or a book about Heylin’s view of the world, what is morally correct, how music is to be defined etc?  Increasingly I think, the latter.  That Dylan did not want to be a topical songwriter is an important point, and one to consider in reference to his compositions of the early 1960s – compositions which certainly reveal the truth of this point.

And this gives us a problem.  Dylan is quoted as saying that “Blowin’ in the wind” was just one song in the production line that was his song writing.  And then of course Heylin disbelieves him, suggesting Dylan “must have thought that there was something about the song because untypically he kept tinkering with it.”   And yet that “tinkering” (a put-down word if ever there was one) is what Dylan does and has always done.  That’s how the songs have been endlessly re-written and re-arranged on the tour.  You only have to see him in concert once to know this.

The fact is Bob Dylan had, and most likely still has, an incredibly active musical brain that was able to produce songs at the drop of a hat, and the more he wrote, the better they got.  But what we find in Heylin is that as he moves on, he recognises masterpieces like “Boots of Spanish Leather” and describes in interesting detail what the song relates to, but he seemingly cannot understand that to get to that sort of level of creativity, one needs to write hundreds of songs, perform hundreds of other songs, have thousands of experiences, and indeed makeup hundreds of stories.  Nothing is created out of nothing, and indeed if the tales told in songs then get used in everyday conversation, is that such a crime?

What Heylin does properly recognise is that Dylan was, in these early days, leading up to the second album, writing at an extraordinary rate.  Indeed if you look at our file of  Dylan’s compositions of the 1950s and 1960s you’ll see a vast number of compositions – and we have only listed those of which we could find a decent recording.   And that is the core element of Bob Dylan and his work.  There was a lot of it, especially in these early years.

And maybe this is just me and my prejudice, but when Heylin simply skips over this incredible achievement as a songwriter and instead tells us without any real evidence that “The legendary thousand dollar pay off to buy Dylan’s already expired contract with Leeds Music – mentioned in Scaduto’s 1971 biography and reiterated, almost verbatim, by Dylan in Chronicles, never happened,”  I am once more saying “I don’t care.”  Yes mention this in passing, but only if you are also going to mention in a lot more detail what Dylan was really doing as a composer at this time.

Thus overall I come from the position that people who are utterly outstanding in their field of endeavour are often accompanied by personality and behavioural traits that, like their work, are not everyday.  Suggesting as Heylin does (page 139) that Bob’s “later autobiographical song, “Simple Twist of Fate” shows a similar lack of moral compass,” is maybe of interest as a passing note, but is not the dominant issue of this moment.  The dominant point is what Dylan was creating, and how he came to create.  And on this Heylin is silent.

Put another way, does anyone care if JS Bach, Mozart and Beethoven each had a moral compass that is in keeping with Heylin or anyone else?  No of course not.  It is irrelevant because what is relevant is the music they created.

Which raises the question, why does Heylin write like this?  The only answer (at least the only answer I have found by page 139 of the first volume) is that Heylin has no serious understanding of creativity per se, isn’t a musician, and is more interested in what he can find which casts Dylan in a poor light (in his mind) than how the songs came to be, how the songs break new musical ground, what the lyrics are about, how the lyrics use new phraseologies and how those lyrics and the music accompanying them, work in different ways.   For all the use this approach is, Heylin might as well also tell us about whether Dylan mowed the lawn at his or his parents or his girlfriend’s house, how often he went to the toilet, and where he put the change from a dollar bill when he bought a new biro to write with.

The series continues …