I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.
The Double Life of Bob Dylan
- 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
- Part 8: Getting the basic facts wrong
By Tony Attwood
I have suggested a number of times in my review of Heylin’s book “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” that Heylin merges the notion of research with his own personal prejudice and indeed on occasion, with a spot of sheer invention. Some examples of this are trivial, but they do add up. For example, Phillip Saville, the BBC director of the play that Dylan was booked to appear in, and the reason for Bob’s appearance in London, is noted as saying, “At about five in the morning the first night he stayed, I could hear the song, “How many roads…” To Heylin immediately replies “Rather unlikely,” suggesting that Dylan “If Dylan was working on anything” it was “Masters of War” at the time. No evidence is provided by Heylin as to why the commentator was wrong and he (Heylin) is right.
In fact, by this time (page 188) Heylin has spent so long dissing every single witness statement that doesn’t exactly fit his notion of what is what, and when, without providing any evidence to the contrary, I begin to get tired of being told everyone else is wrong. Maybe some people are wrong – but all of them???
In fact of course it doesn’t really matter which song Dylan was working on, on which particular day of the week. But that fact is lost because of the insistence that everyone else is getting every fact and date wrong, and only he, Heylin, the man who was not there at all at the time, (the man who we might recall from my outburst at the end of the last episode, doesn’t actually know much about England’s capital, but utterly asserts big-time that he does) really has THE KNOWLEDGE.
Part of the whole Heylin approach (and forgive me if I have rammed this home too many times already but it is the main thing that comes across in this book) is that Heylin seriously seems to believe that he knows, when in fact, he quite clearly doesn’t. And at this part of the story, as a Londoner born and bred myself, and one who not only lived in London but also worked in a theatre in the West End of London, and spent the days trampling many of the West End’s streets visiting publishers as I tried to develop my career as a writer, I can tell you that when Heylin says that the Cumberland Hotel is “still walking distance from the whole West End” this is just plain silly and written without thought. The Cumberland is on Oxford Street at the junction with Edgware Road, and if that isn’t part of the West End, I am not sure what is. So what does the word “still” mean in that sentence?
To me that looks like a bit of showing off – of saying, “Of course I know my way around London”, which maybe is or maybe isn’t untrue, but it is all part of the “look at me, I know all this, I’ve been there,” approach, through which he tries to get us to accept horrible statements such as (and this one really annoyed me) “Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, both insufferable folk snobs…”
So, if I may, let me offer you an alternative vision of Ewan MacColl, a man revered by many as playing a fundamental part in ensuring the continuity of the English folk music tradition which was in danger of being utterly lost. “Left school at 14, a political activist at 15, founded theatre troupe at 16, on MI5’s* files at 17, godfather of British folk revival at 35…” This is the man who wrote “Dirty Old Town” in 1949 and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1957, and if “Dirty Old Town” is too English for your taste I would urge you to listen to “The First Time,” even if you have heard it before. And then think, this was written by the man Heylin (who as I pointed out in the last episode knows nothing of the history of the capital of England) is seeking to put down.
This is one of the masterpieces of English songwriting, in my view, in terms of its melody, rhythms, and lyrics. Indeed I have had occasion to comment in my ramblings on this site how emotional I am in relation to music, and I have to confess this song can still move me to tears. In fact at this point in Heylin’s book, I had to stop myself from throwing it (the book) out the window (which since I write on the upper floor of my house, and it is raining at the moment, would have done quite a lot of damage to the book – aside from breaking the glass on its way out).
I don’t care what Ewan MacColl said or what else he wrote (although of course I admire much of it), the man who can write this deserves a monument at both ends of Oxford Street. And I can’t even bring myself to put a recording of “The Joy of Living” here – the song that Ewan wrote just before he died, on the site. I need to be able to write some more.
How dare, how dare, how dare Heylin, who (as far as I know) never written a song in his life, dismiss MacColl and Seeger in this way. But I must pull myself together for I am here to consider Heylin not indulge my own views on English music.
But this leads me to another point. Bob Dylan at this time, was not experienced with different cultures, different styles and different approaches to life. Music in England at this time was in total upheaval and not just from the development of a style of music on Merseyside which led to the early compositions of the Beatles, or the folk song revival of which MacColl and Seeger were part. We were still six years from the formation of the Scratch Orchestra (another venture in which I had a tiny part) but the seeds of that revolutionary approach to music were already being sown – which makes the point that by the time Dylan arrived in London the music scene was in uproar and chaos, and no one knew which direction any aspect of music was travelling in.
Dylan’s visit to London was in 1962. England did not have a single pop music station operating through the daytime until 1964 when the pirate station Radio Caroline was launched (although Radio Luxembourg did operate at night with a decidedly dodgy signal on medium wave). The first authorised pop music station (BBC Radio 1) was not launched until September 1967.
So the musical awareness of many people in England at the time was utterly different from that of people in America, and that was something Dylan would have had to get used to very suddenly, and probably without warning. Thus it is very likely that Bob was learning a lot from the live music he was hearing – such as arrangements of Scarborough Fair or Dominic Behan’s arrangement of “The Patriot Game”
This of course is the music that Bob used to composer “With God on our Side” but somehow to suggest that Bob lifted this and that there was something amiss with him so doing, is nonsense, for “The Patriot Game” is performed using the melody of “One morning in May”. But the song probably dates back at least to “The Souldier and His Knapsack”, which is noted as early as 1639, and undoubtedly had been around for decades if not centuries before that.
Thus these songs have a long history, which somehow Heylin doesn’t seem to be aware of, and so in taking such a melody and re-writing the lyrics while amending both melody and accompaniment, Dylan is not in any way stealing someone else’s work, but continuing a tradition of 400 years and probably much more.
Of course not everyone in England would necessarily want to hear an American accent taking a traditional English song and changing it, because this was a time of a lot of musical prejudice, and (as Heylin totally fails to understand, probably because he couldn’t be bothered to do the research) it was a time when the notion that the English nation had no musical heritage was only just beginning to be challenged. The reason for such a view was complex, but to a considerable degree based on the feeling that all the great music of western civilisation had come from such composers as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, while English composers of classical music were very much in the second or even third division.
Traditional folk music in the 1960s in England, was still very much seen as quaint, simplistic and quite often rather embarrassing (being sung by men with funny accents who would put their right hand over their right ear for reasons that were never fully explained).
This was the cultural world Dylan had meandered into, with no one to guide him, a world that was slowly starting to understand that England had an exciting musical tradition of its own. And so when Dylan performed “with his guitar in one key and his harmonica in another” as Heylin puts it (page 196) people were taken aback, but not because in England there was a staid tradition into which Dylan didn’t fit. Culturally at the time England was discovered that it did indeed have a musical tradition apart from Europe, and America had another tradition.
Meanwhile there was virtually no “popular music” on radio or TV in the UK, and when anything contemporary was played, the very powerful Musicians Union controlled how many records could be broadcast. Mostly, music had to be recorded especially for the show – a trade union demand that Heylin seems to be utterly unaware of, but which affected the English folk and popular music scene immeasurably.
Thus in many respects, Dylan, in creating and performing his own new songs and adaptations of older songs, was completely in touch with the contemporary musical situation in England when he visited London. There was only one radio station playing actual pop records, and that was broadcasting from Europe at night on medium wave with a very dodgy signal. Thus the English audience was desperate for new music, and particularly new music which had a link to their own past. It was into this restricted musical scene that Dylan had stumbled, seemingly without anyone around him who could properly guide him or help him understand what on earth was going on. Just three TV channels, three radio stations – and remember the pirate radio stations hadn’t arrived yet.
And it is the utter and complete lack of understanding of London in the early 1960s that leads Heylin to write (page 203) that “the locals were easily impressed by topical songs masquerading as folk songs.” Yes people would have been impressed I am sure – just as I was when Freewheelin’ turned up in my local record store. But not as topical songs masquerading as folk songs, for the simple reason that those of us interested in music beyond what was in the top 20, had been learning about the traditions of English folk music from the likes of Ewan Maccoll and Peggy Seeger.
Suddenly we had that music taken apart and sung in relation to the 1960s. I doubt that many people – even those who were really deeply into folk music – had ever heard “Constant Sorrow” before Dylan performed it, even though the song dates back to around 1913.
That song would have passed us all by. What we first got was Dylan’s version…
And this is what Heylin seems to be to miss completely when he writes about Bob’s visit to England to be part of the BBC recording. English people had never come across anything like this before – not just the singing, but the harmonica approach in which the harmonica could be held being a chord and that has nothing to do with the song, or indeed the key it is played in, as the opening to each instrumental break – as in the recording above.
It was earth-shattering, and it is such a shame that Heylin seems to have no musical knowledge and so is unable to appreciate let alone write about, what is actually going on.
Footnote: *MI5. A branch of the Military Intelligence division of the British government which is focussed on spying within the United Kingdom itself.