The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Part 7 – The Moral Delinquent

 

 

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
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point

By Tony Attwood

There is a moment where Heylin comments on the morality he perceives in “Corrina Corrina” and in relation to it suggests that the lyrics suggest “a standard to which he [Dylan] was disinclined to hold himself.”

Now there can be some sort of justification in writing such a thing – for example if Heylin, in admonishing Dylan on page after page for being a womaniser, a liar, a stealer of other people’s music, a copyrighter of work he had no right to copyright, were to be found to be copying other people’s work in his “Double Life of Bob Dylan” without acknowledging the fact, then I guess some of us might want to point this out.

But Dylan is not an author, he is a song writer.   When a song writer writes lyric such as, “Baby I love you,” no one takes the lyrics as a serious representation of the lyricists frame of mind, since we all know what a song is.  To express it clearly, a songwriter is somewhat akin to a short story writer, except where there might be a plot there is instead music.

Although maybe no Heylin. While for most of us songs are fictional miniatures, fragments of life expressing one or at most two emotions usually (but by no means exclusively) in the space of three minutes.

Quite honestly it is beyond me how any adult might not get that. True, most of us who are Dylan fans like to think that when Bob wrote “Masters of War” he didn’t do it because protest songs were all the rage, but because he really felt it.  Just as (going back to my most recent article on this site) on the subject of Lenny Bruce, I take it that Bob admired Lenny Bruce, and didn’t write the song just because the record company said that a song about a contemporary artist’s death will boost sales.

But that does not mean that every song Bob has ever sung or indeed written, carries within it a message he believes in. It might be the case, but we don’t know because Bob doesn’t tell us.

The problem for Heylin, which I am fairly certain (given the way he writes) he has never realised, is that just as an actor who is totally sane can play Macbeth, so a songwriter living in perfect harmony with his wife and children can write lyrics along the lines of “My Baby Left Me” a) because they fit or b) because he can’t find any others or c) because the record company has been banging on about needing a new song and the composer still hasn’t come up with anything.

Writers are, after all, notorious for coming up against writer’s block, so why not songwriter’s block?   For as I have repeatedly said, although in my early days I did have hopes of becoming a commercial songwriter, it didn’t happen. However because I enjoyed the activity and because I thought some of my songs were quite good, I carried on songwriting. The results are only heard by myself and a very small very select group of family and friends, so there is no pressure on me at all. And yet despite this lack of pressure and the fact that I have written around 300 songs that I have felt good enough to keep (and occasionally play to others), I can go through weeks and weeks where I can create nothing, no matter how hard I try or how relaxed I am. And for me of course there is no pressure. If I don’t write any songs no one particularly notices. I write songs because I enjoy the process.

Oddly, Heylin does recognise this creative drive in reverse as he notes that, “Dylan was in a good space creatively.”  And this is a most telling phrase because it shows for once, Heylin recognising that being creative is different from most other aspects of human endeavour, given that for most creative people creativity is not something one can turn on or turn off at will.

Indeed Heylin describes in a little detail how Dylan wrote at this time, and it has nothing to do with the way most of us earn money. For Heylin describes Dylan sitting around until an idea struck and then typing it all out. And yet, through the book Heylin still demands that Dylan should act and behave like everyone else. Heylin even notes that Dylan was “oblivious to any hubbub around him,” which although hardly an in-depth analysis of what it means to be a creative person, is at least a start. Although Heylin can’t avoid suggesting that Dylan had no insight whatsoever into how good or otherwise any song might be. Playing the newly created “Hard Rain” to a passer-by he was apparently told he ought to record it. Dylan was unsure, replying, “think I should?”

If it happened (and by now one begins to wonder if anything in the book happened – but that’s probably just me getting frustrated) it is an interesting insight. But immediately we lose sight of this as Heylin with no justification or explanation describes the events of 26 October 1962 the “so-called missile crisis”.

And here I pause again, for “so-called” is a phrase that generally means that the writer or speaker thinks the name or term is inappropriate. If one writes “Bob Dylan, the so-called folk-singer” it generally suggests that one does not think that Bob is worthy of the title “folk-singer”.  So is Heylin saying that there wasn’t a crisis in Cuba? He also says the song, “Made its ‘official’ live debut at a multi-act show…”  The inverted commas around official suggest that here again the language isn’t being used properly.  So a couple of times in one page, Heylin is suggesting that most of us use language inappropriately, while he is by implication the arbiter of how one should write, speak, compose etc.  Which is odd enough, but when it is done without explanation or justification, it becomes downright weird.

What we actually have here is a writer who not only sees himself as the absolute source of information about Dylan, he is also the arbiter of everything from what is, and what is not a good Dylan song, to what is and what is not a nuclear missile crisis that could have destroyed half the world, while taking in the fact that “Bob never really accepted Hibbing as home” (page 152) in passing.

Apparently that latter point was because of the “pervasive sense of torpor and irremediable decline…”

And what is particularly interesting here is that Heylin gets this message from one paragraph of an early draft of “Tarantula” which Dylan calls a highly ambiguous work. But seemingly not at this point – although how Heylin knows that the ambiguity stopped just as Dylan decided to write about his home town I’ve not been able to fathom out.

But it is nevertheless fascinating as Heylin, having totally failed to recognise in the first 150 pages or so of his volume that the creative genius has a different sort of brain (at least in terms of the way it works) from most of us, just as the brilliant athlete has a set of muscles that work at a different level from those of most of us, so he seems to imagine that somehow Bob ought to have a moral code that was the same as everyone else’s.

And because of this it appears that “a lot of the time he [Dylan] didn’t necessarily  feel like letting even his family in,” which really feels is worthy of criticsm. For if Heylin had thought about it, the world that Dylan was exploring in his music was utterly different from anything his parents would have been able to understand.

The fact is of course that Dylan knew early on that he was different, just as the 14 year old who spends every evening writing songs, or painting portraits, or practising long-distance running, clearly realises he or she is somewhat different from the multitude around. These children are outsiders, and unless they are very lucky, will often find they have no one who can really get a grip of where they are and what they are doing.  After all, how does any parent know whether their 14 year old who has no interest in doing tonight’s homework but is instead ceaselessly listening to the blues, is  a) lazy, b) psychotic or c) a genius?

Heylin quotes Dylan as noting a series of songs, the sound of which “made me feel like I was somebody else and that I was maybe not even born to the right parents.”  It is not uncommon to hear creative teenagers express that – and in fact even more common if they find themselves in a school where obedience to the norm rather than creative expression is not just expected but utterly required. If you ever heard the phrase “You seem to think the rules don’t apply to you,” you’ll know what sort of institution I mean.

But Heylin himself will have no neutral ground from which he can take in various accounts and reach an argued judgment. When one of Bob’s fellow-performers speaks of the band’s ambition, Heylin jumps in saying that another band member “rightly disses his account”.   And we are left wondering, how does Heylin know that this dismissal is the correct and accurate view?  Indeed how does one ever really understand the ambition of another?  How does he know that the notion that “we really wanted to do stuff” should “rightly” be dismissed?

It is simply one person’s view against another on that most difficult thing to judge: creative brilliance. And throughout this book the one person who is allowed to judge is Heylin.  Could it be that Heylin has never in his life come across one of those young performers and writers who shine for a year or two, and then fade away, destroyed by their own creativity? (I’m at this moment thinking of Syd Barrett, you may well find another artist springing to mind).

In fact Heylin’s portrait of a young Dylan with ambitions but a fanciful mind. If something Bob is recorded as saying fits in with Heylin’s vision of Bob the fantasist then that gets quoted. If someone says the opposite, it is dismissed. There’s no evidence, except the fact that Heylin says so. And so we get the impression, if Heylin says, then it is.

Thus when Bob  Dylan sets up a three piece band (The Chords) it includes Bob himself, the “hottest guitarist in the school” and Lenny Hoikkla “who liked to hit things”.  It is from such sentences we learn more about the author than the subject of his book.

The series continues.