The Double Life of Bob Dylan. 12: Respecting the Artistic Process

 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
• Part 9: Bringing folk music back home
• Part 10: It’s just a song
• Part 11: How to write a masterpiece

By Tony Attwood

Getting on for half way through “The Double Life of Bob Dylan (page 227 to be exact) Heylin comments on a situation in which Dylan has been recording the “Times they are a changing” album and is told to stop playing another song on the piano because their studio time had run out and another band has booked the studio from that point on.

He comments “So much for Columbia respecting the artistic process”.

The “artistic process” in question is the artist getting a complete recording of each song in a way that he personally feels is satisfactory – and that of course is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Indeed even more reasonable in 1963, when the cut-and-paste technology that exists now was impossible to imagine.

In those days, what Dylan performed in a single take was what was recorded, there was little else that could be done.  It is the situation that amateur songwriters like me live with even now – I sit at the piano with the music in front of me and generally take about a dozen attempts to record a song with only minimal mistakes.  And my standards are far lower than Dylan’s and those of the record company for recordings that millions of people would hear.  A handful of fluffed lines is about the best I can get, so I live with that.

But the order of the day was that you stayed in the studio for the time you had, and then left.  Yet Heylin protests about the artistic process without making any reference to the norms of the day. And although it may well be true that, “Dylan had just recorded an album that will fill Columbia coffers for the next have century…” as Heylin says, their booking was for a limited amount of time, and besides no one really knew at that moment that this album would be that popular.

However much more oddly than that throughout the volume Heylin specifically makes no allowances for the overlap of the artistic process – or better, I would actually say, in relation to that album and a lot of Dylan’s work, “the process of the artistic genius”

I find this an absolute contradiction.  Individuals in all the arts who have a talent way beyond that of the majority, tend to work each in his/her own way, and have personal traits that do not accord to the norm.  Yet Heylin goes out of his way to point out as many of these as he can find in relation to Dylan.

As I have already tried to explain, this is because most highly gifted artists do not, in my view, having studied a few of them, themselves understand how they are able to produce art which others cannot.  And in fact because of this when they hit a period of “artistic block” as most do, whatever the art form, they have no prescribed or pre-arranged way of getting out of the “block”.  It is not a case of working harder or longer – indeed it is often thought that this is the opposite of what is needed.  For many artists, it is a case of walking away and leaving it.

Indeed this is what Dylan has often done later in his career when he has been dissatisfied with a song.  For myself the way Bob gave up on Caribbean Wind was a tragedy, for it is to my mind a fantastic song – but something in it was not right for him at that moment, and he stopped.  He clearly could not find the way to resolve whatever it was that troubled him about the song.

It is something that is not uncommon with artists – whatever their art form – but although Heylin finds he is able to use a throwaway line such as “So much for Columbia respecting the artistic process!” Heylin mostly refuses to understand the impact the artistic process has on the artist.

Heylin, is annoyed that Dylan criticises a journalist for “just doing his job” but is equally determined to put up his own vision of how an artist should work.  He notes the comments of Newsweek reporter Adrea Svedberg who claimed that he had written “Blowin in the Wind” (which of course was nonsense) but then criticises Dylan for not giving credit to those whose work he has developed, saying “It was time Dylan came clean.”

But the reality with the artistic process is such that much of the time some copying is inevitable.  A writer of songs is surrounded by songs all the time, and unlike the writer of novels, is restricted by issues of length, and the fact that there only two musical scales to write in (major and minor), and a limited number of rhymes for each word.   Dylan broke the mould by writing about subjects (such as equality, oppression, the tricks the night plays, etc) which had not been part of popular music before, and wrote songs that billions of people could relate to, and in so doing would inevitably do what other songwriters had done since the start on songwriting, which is copy existing work to some degree.

That we remember all these songs, and some of us often play them, is because in his combination of music and lyrics, timing and rhythm, accompaniment and phraseology, something different emerged which gave us new insights.

Indeed as Heylin admits on the very next page, “Dylan was becoming a mesmeric performer” and adds that Suze later said , talking about watching from the side of the stage, “I watched and absorbed what was happening. We all sensed a sea change.”

Now of course Dylan was not the only person ever to undergo a sea-change as a performer, but the point here is that Dylan had no one tutoring or coaching in the ways of writing songs, refining them, searching for new ideas, performing on stage, putting a collection of songs together for an album or a stage performance… from all that we know these abilities emerged in him, as part of his creative genius.

And yet when we come to the issue of Dylan getting very upset about an article about himself which was snide and vengeful, Heylin suggests the reporter was “just doing his job” and implies Dylan should not have been angry.   And it is almost with relish that he says “The press wars had begun.”

To me this shows once more, Heylin’s total and absolute lack of understanding of and feeling for the creative artist.  And I want to conclude here by expressing that in another way.

If I were a carpenter, as the song goes, and I created a table which was not even but which had one short leg, my table would be a failure, because of that single factor.  No matter how wonderful the inlays and decorations as a table it would not pass muster.

But as a songwriter, if Dylan created a song that mesmerised a generation, that would be a success.

Now that is all fine, but there is a difference.  The table which stands properly on equal legs succeeds as a table because it fulfils its function.   But although I would argue “Mr Tambourine Man” fulfils its function, I have come across people who really don’t like it, calling it too long, laborious, unclear, meandering and so on.  In short, although I can give reasons why Tambourine Man works, others can argue against that because this song does not have an underlying function in the way a table does.  We might argue about the table’s beauty, but in terms of its function, it either is a table on which we can put things without them falling off, or it is not.

With many songs, and indeed multiple works of art in every artistic mode, there is no underlying concept of “does it work or not?”  For me it works as much now as it did in 1964, but for others it is tedious, repetitive, too long, boring, uninteresting, not something one can listen to etc.

Thus the concept that “The image of a genius is that they don’t copy,” is neither definitive, accurate or the slightest bit interesting.  It is an opinion, nothing more.  A genius in songwriting can copy, and if he can then make the final piece something that moves us far more than the originals from which he copied, then he is a success.

Or take an orchestra playing a Beethoven symphony.  To the naive listener, it may be hard to tell the performance under one conductor from that directed by another.  Yet there are subtle differences, subtle nuances that appear with each maestro’s work.

The person who knows little of classical music might not get the differences between one performance of a Chopin prelude and another, but those who truly listen will see what is going on.   Yet are we to say to each pianist who has laboured to express the genius of Chopin’s work that he can never be a genius performer because someone has already performed that prelude? No of course not.

Likewise, if a genius writer took the notion of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson and wrote a brilliant new story concerning the pair, would that never be called a work of genius, because a genius wouldn’t take two existing characters, but would write his own?

I think this is nonsense, and again shows Heylin not understanding the creative mind.  The creative genius can of course direct his/her mind, but much of the time it is the mind that is directing the genius to who knows where.  And if Dylan creates two songs with the same melody, as we discussed before, does that mean that by definition Dylan is not a genius?

Heylin ends the chapter with relish saying, “The press wars had begun,” and within one page of the start of the next chapter he notes Dylan saying in an interview, “Writing letters.  I just never do that,” and then spends time telling us that he most certainly did write letters as if this is in any way important beyond Heylin showing off.

The simple fact is, I find it very hard if not impossible to think of a genius whose pronouncements about his own working life are consistent.  And even if I could, would it matter that Dylan keeps meandering from the strictest accordance with what happened and what did not?  Or are we now to say that those gorgeous lines

The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

are Dylan at his worst because they are contradictory, and a true artist never contradicts himself?

Really, I am left thinking, how bonkers do you want to be?