Heylin: getting the basic facts wrong. The Double Life of Bob Dylan part 8

 

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

This series so far…

• 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
• Part 7: The Moral Delinquent

By Tony Attwood

From my perspective, the way Heylin describes the evolution of Bob’s early bands is pretty much what happens to a lot of young people when they form bands.   The reason they are there is the music and their desire to show other people what they can do.   What they have had no training or experience in is how to organise anything – in this case a group of a few teenagers who want to make music together and show others how good they are.  Most schools are based on the notion that the teacher organises, and the pupils and students follow.  If we are ever taught how to organise, that comes much later.

Indeed teenagers were not (and as far as I know still aren’t) helped to understand the concept of group dynamics any more than they are taught how to write successful songs in the contemporary or any other style.   School curricula across the Western world still seem to be stuck in the teaching in facts and an understanding of the past, rather than how to research, and how to do stuff in the present.

Part of this problem is discovered by all young aspiring artists who genuinely do have a particularly high level of creative ability, whatever their art form of interest.  For what they find is that most people are not only not travelling on the same bus as they are, they aren’t even travelling in the same direction (or even dimension).  Thus part of the work of the young genius who wishes to have his art accepted is to find a way to link between what he/she feels and what other far less talented people will accept.

Bob was clearly learning this in his first attempts to play with a band, which in turn explains why Bob had difficulty finding himself a band that he would find acceptable and which would accept him.   Combine this fact with the point that people of genius generally wish to push forward the ideas that so deeply affect them, and may have little time for other people and other ideas, and we can understand what happened to Bob with his early musical ventures far more clearly than through all the tiny points of detail that Heylin, having researched, feels utterly obliged to publish.

But Heylin loves the throwaway line which comes without explanation.  Take for example the claim that the popular song “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, “would later for the basis for Dylan’s own radical reinvention of rock, “Like a Rolling Stone”. (Page 168).

I have oft mentioned here and elsewhere that I started my working life as a musician, and that I still play and still write music, and from a musical point of view (which I feel qualified to offer) I think this is stretching things a bit far.   Heylin gives no explanation for this comment and seems to have picked it up from the internet and just written it in order to knock.

There are a lot of versions of La Bamba…

…but the point is that La Bamba was a Mexican folk song from the 18th century, as far as I know, and there really is nothing culturally or musically to link Rolling Stone with La Bamba in any way at all.  It’s an internet myth.  Indeed one can hear this in five seconds.

So why does Heylin put this odd comment in, without any validation?  One can only assume that he read elsewhere that La Bamba is the source of Rolling Stone, and without pausing to play the two pieces either on record or in his head (if he is capable of such a thing), he just wrote it down.

It really is nonsense – although one of those bits of nonsense that gets repeated and repeated and which today (in the UK at least) we call “fake news”.  Or perhaps better said, nonsense, gibberish, tripe…. (and there is some more of that later, if you can stay with me).

But Heylin is most insistent that Dylan was part of the world of artists bastardising a folk song and then claiming it for their own.  And it is true that this is what people did at that time and yes if we want to know the origin of some of Dylan’s songs that is a point worth following. But to decry this process and to make it seem that Dylan was a thief is just a form of “presentism” – judging the actions of those in the past by today’s standards and norms.  We might feel ourselves superior, because in my country today, women have far more rights and equalities than they had 100 years ago, but if one only judges the past by reference to today’s norms we get only a fractional understanding of the past.

So maybe Paul Nelson is correct when he said that Dylan had told him that, “he had used topical songs as a vehicle to get to the top and always considered them as a means to an end.”  But we should view this comment with the awareness that Nelson said this in 1965 and if we make a judgement, it should include being aware of the norms of the day – something that seems quite beyond Heylin.

The same applies to understanding the comments between musicians and producer that have been preserved from the Dylan recordings of the mid-60s.  Put in black and white without any context, as Heylin does, they sound awful, but certainly when I was trying and failing to make a breakthrough in music in the early 70s that is how people spoke in the studio.

At the same time everyone copyrighted everything, even when it was copied from someone else.  The idea was that if we didn’t copyright this arrangement, someone else would do so, and take our work.  So we were not so much simply stealing other people’s works, we were trying to protect ourselves (usually unsuccessfully) from subsequent theft.  In the UK, and I imagine the USA too, it took a few laborious legal cases and a new Copyright Act to get the mess finally sorted.  That Act (the Design Copyright and Patent Act) became law in the UK in 1988 – before then all copyright was a minefield.

So this is my on-going complaint about Heylin: he judges the actions of Dylan in the 1960s by the mores of today, and that is a ludicrous approach.  Of course, we might note that “you couldn’t get away with that today,” but history is about understanding not just what happened in the past, but the context of the past – and this is where Heylin is a non-starter.

I mean, I could spend my time commenting negatively on the fact that Heylin will use the split infinitive in his writing (as in “Columbia had failed to really follow through on the single.”)  In formal English grammar that is certainly very poor writing, and although I try and avoid something like “to really follow” people do write that sort of thing, so it is accepted.  In short, if we do note such things, we should also note that in the standards of English writing today, “to really follow” is considered ok.  Otherwise, we would spend all day commenting on grammar and not getting anywhere.

And this brings us to a major failing of Heylin.  He spends all day analysing the past, from the perspective of the present, and using this as a stick with which to beat Dylan.

That is foolish in my view, but that’s not all – for Heylin’s writing is awash with unjustified (and quite honestly I often find unjustifiable) personal comments.   So commenting on a series of recordings that surely most of us would never have had the chance to hear, he says “The best of the bunch – Oxford Town excepted – was a “come all ye call to join the march of progress, “Paths of Victory.” And that comment really needs to be clarified

As I noted in my review of the piece on this site the song was a re-write, and Heylin admits this, but still throws us his remark that this was just about the best of the bunch without a justification.   Heylin says, he seems to suggest, and so it is.  To contradict the mighty Heylin, would be, well, foolish, it is implied.

However, in the real world, there was still a disconnect between what Dylan could do with a song and what he could do with a conversation – and this is an interesting point when we look towards Dylan’s career as he started to make records.

We get and insight into this from a meeting between Judy Collins and Bob Dylan in 1962.  By then Collins was a great admirer of Dylan’s work, but after meeting him said, “This guy’s an idiot, he can’t make a coherent sentence.”

Heylin quotes that but then jumps into saying “Collins was still smart enough to co-opt Dylan’s better discards,” implying that in some ways Judy Collins herself was stupid to make the comment about Dylan’s speech.   Whereas what Judy Collins was quite possibly noting was that like so many geniuses, Bob could express himself perfectly in one form (the song) but not in others (such as the interview, or the conversation).

It is a perfectly legitimate, and indeed given that it was so early in Dylan’s career, when he had hardly been called upon to do interviews, very valid comment, and should lead to some consideration of the nature of Dylan’s artistic genius.  For although a few geniuses can or could work in multiple forms, many can’t, or won’t or don’t.  Why this is, and what his observation leads us to think when, for example, considering Dylan’s poems and books, is another matter – but given the size of Heylin’s book, it most certainly could be considered therein.  But at least for the moment, he is content to publish a put-down and leave it at that.  How typical of the man!

In fact it is this sort of trivial throwaway that really does annoy me.  I know these are points of detail, but if one is writing a two volume affair that runs to around 1000 pages surely there is a duty to get some easily checked facts right.   For when Heylin makes grotesque errors of fact in his book when he is not talking about Dylan, it does suggest that Heylin, his editor, and his publisher really don’t care about facts, or details – and thus may well have got some of the bits about Dylan wrong as well.

And I say this knowing that I make mistakes quite often.   But this is a blog written by me, and not checked (nor even proof read) by anyone else.   Heylin’s two volumes is different – it is presented as important, and it is a book published by Vintage, part of one of the biggest publishing firms in the world.  There should have been checkers of the historical facts.

And yet despite the status of the publisher, and indeed the status that Heylin likes to afford himself, he can say, and is allowed to get away with (by his editors and publishers) the statement that soon after his meeting withJudy  Collins, Dylan “headed for London, capital of Albion since the Romans…”

Now Heylin doesn’t have to say that bit about Albion and the Romans; but I’m a Londoner and I know where my birth city is, and I suspect so does every reader of his book.   And because I’m a moderately well educated Englishman I know it is nothing short of mindless gibberish, utter garbage and total tripe to write “London, capital of Albion since the Romans”.

Of course it’s a throwaway line from Heylin not checked either by himself, or (worse) by his editor, (or proofreader or publisher).  But he gets this wrong.   And if he gets that wrong, one thinks, how much more is wrong?   (Well actually we have already found out, quite a lot, and I am only up to page 185 of volume one).

Now I don’t expect people to know about the history of my home town – I know it because I am proud to be from North London.  And to come back to Heylin’s wild ravings with the Albion stuff, you only have to go as far as Wikipedia to get the facts.  Or come to that any other book on London’s history.

For in essence the capital of England for centuries was Winchester but was moved to London in the 12th and 13th centuries and from that point was seen as the capital by convention, although not statute.

As for Rome, in the fifth century, Rome was sacked by the Vandals and shortly after the Western Empire ceased to exist.

Here’s Wikipedia on the topic – it is a shame that Heylin couldn’t get even that far in checking his facts….

“The capital of England was moved to London from Winchester as the Palace of Westminster developed in the 12th and 13th centuries to become the permanent location of the royal court, and thus the political capital of the nation.”

Thus London became the capital of England 750 years after the Romans left.

OK that’s not important when considering Bob Dylan, but I would make the point that if Heylin, his editors, his proofreader and his publisher can’t get that bit of detail right, it is perhaps not surprising that he gets so much else wrong.  After all, with the issue of the capital of England, I think the details do appear in most history books concerning the country.  And its on Wikipedia.  One only has to look it up.