The Double Life of Bob Dylan 11: How to write a masterpiece

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

By Tony Attwood

Heylin, in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” has a chapter called “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy” – a quote of course from “The Life of Brian” movie (although I am not sure Heylin actually acknowledges that; he probably assumes his readers watch the same films as he does).

But that raises the question, how do we define naughtiness? In most families, naughtiness is, in fact, defined by parents as they go along and basically incorporates the child doing things that the parents don’t want the child to do, either because they assume the child knows what is right and what is wrong, or have expressly told the child not to do a specific thing.

And, although it is true that certainly in my country (and I suspect many other western countries) many parents will often agree what is “naughty” and what is not, there is also an awareness that not everyone agrees what is naughty. Thus some for example may value creative thinking while others focus on obeying rules without question.

Sadly, Heylin doesn’t face this issue, and so for him, taking the melody, or lyrics from an acient folk song and then reusing this in part or whole for a new tune is Dylan being a “very naughty boy”. And yet it has been the essence of the folk tradition for centuries.

What’s more (and again Heylin doesn’t seem to get this) something like half of all pop and rock songs are based around the same chord structure, using chords I, IV and V from the major scale. And more than that, using them in the same order, most notably in what we call the “12 bar blues” format. So Heylin sees Dylan using the melody of the Patriot Game for “With God on our Side,” as some sort of crime, rather than being the essence of how folk music works.

Except that what Heylin either doesn’t know or at this moment conveniently forgets (and if I may say, if he doesn’t know, he really, really should not be writing a book about Dylan’s early career in which folk music played such a central part) is that “The Patriot Game” is (and here I will quote Wikipedia, which I am sure Heylin must have heard about) “an Irish ballad with lyrics by Dominic Behan and a melody from the traditional tune “One Morning in May”. (Other more detailed reports of the origins of English folk songs are available on the internet).

The earliest versions of One Morning in May come from the late 1600s and it existed in many different parts of England at that point. It was also often called “The Nightingale”.

Now if you are not well versed in English folk music from 400 years ago you might listen to this version below and think “that’s nothing like God on Our Side” but in fact although it is sung at a much faster speed the essence of the song’s construction is the same, and of course due to the lack of reliable tape machines in the 17th century no one actually knows what speed it was sung at.

Try this…

The chord sequence is somewhat different, but of course they didn’t have chord sequences in those days, because there were no instruments that could play chords – chords came into use with Baroque music in the late17th century through different melodies being played at the same time, but the only chordal instruments at first were the very primitive church organs. Before then it was all just a vocal line and some rhythm.

So when Heylin says Bob “was obliged to admit he was using the same tune an earlier workshop performer, Jean Redpath, had employed for “The Patriot Game”, and this was possibly why “Dylan refrained from performing “Masters of War,” Heylin is as ever giving us a shorthand version of reality. This was one of the oldest English folk songs, for which there was no chord sequence, but just a melody and lyrics. Lots of composers had used it over the past 400 years. It’s a shame Heylin missed that.

Interestingly Heylin on the same page also refers to Dylan as the “upstart crow” – another phrase that I suspect he throws in without actually understanding it’s meaning. Indeed for if he did understand he would surely never use it, given the way he knocks Dylan for copying. Allow me a moment to explain…

“An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”, is a line from Robert Greene in his work “A Groats Worth of Wit” written in the late 16th century, in which he criticises the work of William Shakespeare who was then an up and coming playwright and thus a rival of (and already in many people’s eyes a rival to) the established Robert Greene.

And how ironic it is that Heylin, probably inadvertently (although of course I can’t be sure how much he knows about the evolution of English literature even though it is a contemporary writer of English literature that he is contemplating in his 1000 or so page work) is using a phrase to criticise William Shakespeare when criticising Bob Dylan. Ironic not just because both were exceptional writers of their day (and I am not trying to compare Shakespeare with Dylan here) but because both borrowed extensively from the work of others.

But to be clear on this point (because I suspect Heylin doesn’t really know too much about this sort of thing, and you might be interested) I am not saying Dylan is the new Shakespeare. Shakespeare for example invented words and phrases in a way that I don’t think Dylan has ever done. “All the world’s a stage” is one of the most famous inventions of Shakespeare, as is “Brave New World”. And then so are words like “Bedazzled” and “Critic”. Indeed in relation to Heylin I might at this point be tempted to say “Good riddance” which first turned up in Troilus and Cressida.

Indeed, quite possibly when looking at some of Dylan’s more convoluted lyrics Heylin might even be tempted to say, “It’s all Greek to me” (although of course I don’t know if that phrase is widely used outside of the UK, where I live, but most English people will know it). That turns up for the first time in Julius Caesar.

Anyway, what we can gather is that Heylin doesn’t seem to know his Shakespeare, any more than he knows too much about the origins of folk music in the Western world. But this never stops him from criticising any and every aspect of Dylan’s work and life – even down to the way he looked, “in tattered jeans and a black jacket three months on the far side of a haircut.”

And of course it is not just Dylan who gets Heylin’s ire. Joan Baez gets put down for promoting Dylan’s songs. And as for those songs, do not ever dare to think that they came out of Bob’s deep thinking and analytical view of the society into which he had been born. “When the ship comes in” was written (seemingly, according to Heylin) following an argument “with a hotel clerk… over Dylan’s shabby attire.” (Although quite how Heylin knows that this was a cause and effect, we are not told).

But perhaps the biggest of all the problems we have within Heylin is that for him, everything has to have a meaning and an explanation. So where Dylan has an interest in seeing somewhere he once worked, this isn’t just nostalgia, it is something that “continued to bother him”.

And this for me is where Heylin really does get the human psyche wrong – and if you will stay with me for a moment I’d like to give another simple example from my own life.

I lived in London until the age of 11 when the family moved 150 miles away to the country. Many, many years later I found myself with time to spare and in the part of the city where I was brought up, and I parked my car and did the walk I did each day as a child to and from school. Then I just stood at the gates of the school looking at the playground for the first time since I left the school, and found myself crying. Not from sadness but from the overwhelming emotions that were roused by seeing this place, still a school, still looking much the same as it was as a child some 55 years later. I had the complete flashback experience and it was overwhelming.

Now I don’t think there is anything wrong with my doing that, nor the emotions that suddenly overwhelmed me as I tried to put my life from the age of 11 onwards into context and perspective. And I can fully appreciate Dylan going back to where he worked as a “nobody” and now was looking on as a famous singer-songwriter. But, it seems, Heylin doesn’t get emotion – which must be partly why, of course, he doesn’t get Dylan.

To Heylin, everything seems to have a meaning – but that’s not right: some things are just emotional. And emotions are absolutely not logical and thus don’t always have meaning.

The point is, we are the sum of our experiences, although some people do turn away from their past more than others and try to create life anew. And this “sum of experiences” then gives us our approach to the world. If Dylan were to have become a historian, he would have been interested in exactly what happened at various times. But he didn’t, he became a singer-songwriter, and so he plays with reality, as all poets do, and we are entertained.

Yet Heylin says of Dylan. time and again, phrases such as “the facts of the case were yet again as chaff blowing in the wind”. Quite possibly so, because Dylan is a songwriter, not a historian, and I find myself asking “How on earth could Heylin miss this fundamental point?” (And why does he make the same point over and over again?)

So when Heylin considers the cane that Zantzinger was carrying, as he sings the song about Hattie Carroll, he (Heylin) gets very worked up about the fact that it was a hollow toy cane, not the cane Dylan describes. And to my mind this is as irrelevant a fact as is the way Shakespeare portrayed Richard III as a hunchback. We know the king was not, but do we ceaselessly drone on and on about Shakespeare getting it wrong? No, at least not in the books that I have read. (Although I suppose if Heylin were writing about Shakespeare, he probably would).

And to be clear I am not comparing Dylan to Shakespeare (and I do know a little about Shakespeare, not just from school, but because I happen to live about one hour’s drive from Stratford on Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and have had much pleasure in watching productions there), but rather pointing out that our greatest playwright of all time, played with the facts just as much as Bob Dylan. It is what playwrights and songwriters do, and it is quite amazing that Heylin hasn’t got that. (It is of course possible that Heylin has watched some of Shakespeare’s historical plays and taken them to be truthful representations of the past – which would be really spooky).

So when Heylin writes, (and I quote exactly) “What he [Zantzinger] was to Dylan’s closed mind, was guilty”, it is Heylin who actually has to accept the guilt, for it is Heylin who is guilty of failing to understand the nature of poetic lyrics in a song. Songs are not about truth, they are expressions of the world from an emotional point of view. A song that was utterly factual would be horribly boring, and of no interest to anyone (although if Heylin wrote songs those would probably be the songs he would write).

Thus Heylin’s statement that “the facts of the case were yet again as chaff blowing in the wind” says far more about Heylin than about Bob Dylan. In the end all one can say is “IT’S A SONG Mr HEYLIN, IT’S NOT BIOGRAPHY”. Just as many novels use real-world situations in a fictional way. I thought he might have got that.

Indeed to suggest, as he does, that Dylan had then or indeed any other time “a closed mind” is probably the most ludicrous statement I have ever read about Bob Dylan.

In fact, to understand Heylin fully we need really look no further than page 225 where he writes that Dylan “preferred jabbing listeners in the ribs with a near-lethal dose of moralizing”. In reality, Dylan, like so many artists before him, was doing what artists generally do. He was showing us the world from a different viewpoint.

I suppose in his own defence, Heylin could say he was doing the same, but he does so in a book that seems to proclaim itself as a truthful representation of the facts, whereas in reality, it is an interpretation of what happened; an interpretation that seems for much of the time to forget or ignore how creative people work, and what art actually is.

In fact Heylin sees the work of composing and recording songs as mechanical – a fact that can be gleaned from his statement that having recorded one set of songs, he went back to the studio the next day “convinced that he’d wasted almost a whole afternoon at Studio A.”

What Heylin seems to fail to get is that writing and re-writing in the studio was what Dylan did. Indeed in the early days it was the producer that was getting Dylan to try songs over and over. Now it was Dylan who was doing it.

Here’s the simple fact: in the early days of writing a song, and then learning how to perform it, no two versions are ever the same. (Indeed the same is true of an orchestra rehearsing a Beethoven symphony in order to perform it or record it. There is a lot of going forward and back to get it right.)

One can only assume that Heylin just writes his books and never goes back to re-think what he has said – and thus expects other people to do the same when creating artistic works. And in fact, now I come to think of it, I suspect that might well be exactly how Heylin writes. It would certainly explain a few things.

The series continues

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