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
- Part 12: Respecting the artistic process
By Tony Attwood
Although Heylin doesn’t actually pose the question directly, in a very clear way the whole contents of “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” does indeed raise one fundamental issue: “Does Bob Dylan’s life away from writing, performance and recording actually affect his writing and his performances?”
If it does, then of course it will be of interest to anyone who seeks to understand Bob Dylan’s music, beyond the issue of listening to the recordings and/or going to concerts and thinking “I like that.”
And in that case, the question arises, how does Bob Dylan’s life affect his music (and vice versa)? This is a very different question from the reverse: does Bob Dylan’s music affect his life? If the former (Dylan’s life affects his music) is true then we might study Dylan’s life in order to understand his music better. But if the latter is true (how his success as a songwriter affects his life) we are into very different territory. This is not a topic Heylin seems to want to confront.
Now I have argued before in this little series that people who are brilliantly creative are different from the rest of us in several ways, not least in that one gets the impression from reading about most of them that they don’t know where their unique insight into the world comes from, or how to switch it on and off. It just is there – except when it isn’t (and that can be very frustrating for a creative artist who enters a period when the creativity simply stops happening).
This in turn can, and does, lead to times of difficulty (when the creative ability seems to vanish and there is no way the artist can find to turn it back on again). In Dylan’s case we know there have been periods when he has written (or at least written and kept) very little. We know at times he has seemingly deliberately turned away from recording his own music, to record other people’s songs.
If you want to take a short-cut look at how this works you might care to take a look at the page on this site “Dylan songs of the 1950s and 60s”. There the songs are placed in chronological order and we can see the staggering output in much of the decade until 1968 when suddenly it seemingly stopped.
Dylan did the same in 1972 and 1976 (Dylan’s songs of the 70s), and 1980…. and so on. The output is not just uneven – the songwriting really has stopped dead at certain times.
Of course that is understandable, even the most amazing genius needs a rest every now and then and exploring what causes these non-creative periods (or at least periods of very low output in comparison) could well be interesting. It might just be something that happens to the highly creative person (there is some evidence of that from other creative geniuses) or it might be something else. It is a topic worthy of debate.
And yet this is not something that Heylin gets into – not because he ignores the ups and downs of Dylan’s writing, but rather because he gives us so much tittle-tattle from Dylan’s life that the writing of the songs almost becomes a minor issue, tucked away in between details of whose house he was staying in at the time.
What we get instead of any investigation into Dylan’s creative work, are comments about Bob, such as “He was rarely tender and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs, though occasionally he would exhibit a sudden concern for another outlaw, hitch-hiker or bum”. That is a quote from Joan Baez and is indeed interesting, in that we might speculate that Bob was showing concern for the “outsider” – and one can argue that because of his rare songwriting genius, he was indeed linking their lives to his own, perhaps seeing himself as the outsider, as indeed they were seeing him.
Martin Carthy’s comment that, “Phoney artists bug him,” is another one of interest. It suggests that Dylan was (of course) fully aware of the huge amount of work he was putting into his musical creations, and how (as we can see from his varied level of songwriting year by year) like so many artists he had periods where he found it hard to create new works of significance, sometimes that ability would leave him.
We also know from the musings of many other creative people who become famous for their artistic endeavours, that the attention of fans can sometimes become too much and needs to be escaped from.
All these issues relate to Bob Dylan and his creative work, and certainly for me, are interesting. Indeed when Heylin touches on them. his work is of much interest in my view. But when he describes Dylan and chums careering around the country doing nothing much, (which actually takes up an astonishingly large part of this book) it is far less interesting.
Yet something important does come out of all of this, and that is that Dylan has never had a prescribed approach to songwriting. As far as we can tell, sometimes it happened, sometimes not. For example, Heylin’s almost throw-away comment from May-Lou Paturel (the wife of the owner of Cafe Espresso) that Bob “later moved in with us and started writing. He dedicated one of his albums to us,” is of interest. It appears that the couple gave Bob somewhere he could work without being interrupted or challenged and he valued that enough to dedicate “Another Side” to them.
From this and from Heylin’s detailed review of Dylan’s escapades in driving around the country, we can get the feeling that Dylan (again like so many creative geniuses) could not control his creative activities. They seem to be there, or not, and if not Dylan needed to do something else, such as go careering around with his friends.
I also get the strong impression that Dylan feels most people (especially critics) don’t understand the world as he does, in particular, his view that “things happen” and there’s nothing much we can do about it.
Heylin, however, has the clear view that most people are chancers – looking to use other people for their own benefit. He certainly casts Johnny Cash in this light, speaking of Cash’s “ulterior motive” for befriending Dylan because “he needed songs”. (One might in passing see Heylin in the same way – a chancer exploitinig the life of Bob Dylan to his own benefit).
In fact, Heylin is very strong on people’s ulterior motives (except his own). One could argue that Heylin has an ulterior motive in pointing out all the darker elements in Bob Dylan’s personality, his lack of empathy with other people, his self-centredness, and so on because it allows him to create a book about Dylan without writing very much at all about the songs Dylan creates – something that Heylin seems to find very difficult to do. And he does seem to have this dark vision of everyone’s motives except his own. Virtually no one encountered does anything genuinely to help another person. Rather, everything has an ulterior motive.
Thus when Heylin speaks of other recording artists recording Dylan’s compositions, including the ones that Dylan chose not to put on his albums, he doesn’t write, as perhaps most of us would, about “the songs that weren’t selected for the album” but rather says, “The race to record Dylan’s detritus was ramping up as the likes of Odetta and Judy Collins joined Baez and Cash in an almost unseemly rush for contemporary relevance.”
Yet I would often argue these songs were far from “detritus”. Clearly some of Dylan’s selections for the albums were idiosyncratic which could leave absolute gems unreleased by Dylan (“Caribbean Wind,” anyone?) while others were included (“Black Crow Blues” springs to mind).
To me Heylin’s vision is a pretty negative way of seeing what was going on. And to make the point I’m going to include here a Judy Collins recording, which I find deeply moving. “Dark Eyes” is a song I find troubling in many ways. Judy Collins, for me, takes it to a different plain, and I value it enormously. This recording (which of course I know came much later than the period we are covering here) suggests there is a deep artistry and understanding within Judy Collins work. It has been there from the start – I just choose this recording, to get myself away from the cynical negativity that is the very heart of Heylin’s work. I am finding there is a limit to how much of it I can take.
Of course it is not only fellow performers who get the negative approach from Heylin for he thinks little of the audience too, as he writes “You could tell the audience was puzzled, but they didn’t want to be thought uncool by anybody, so they applauded just as vigorously.”
“You could tell…” Just consider that. It suggests Heylin could tell, and you, since you are clearly a person of taste as you are reading his book, are of course going to agree. Only the silly people who were at the gig (and by then had not had the benefit of reading Heylin) were fooled. Indeed Heylin is trying here, as in other places, to get the reader to join in his (Heylin’s) superiority. This is of course the curse of much journalism; the need for the journalist to suggest that he is in the know, and so able to interpret events for the audience – but with the associated need that the readership should accept the journalist’s view.
And really this is the heart of my problem with Heylin. When it comes to the musical compositions of Dylan, (and the musical performances as well of course) Heylin really doesn’t have any idea how to write about them. So he doesn’t. Which is fair enough.
What is not fair enough, in my view is that he then fills the book with his amateur (and generally erroneous) psychology. And basically he would have done better to have studied psychology for a few years before trying to interpret people’s behaviour in the way he does.