The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Part 14. A madman swallowed up by his own thoughts

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

Apologies, the numbering of the articles went awry last time – we are now properly organised numerically speaking.

• 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
• Part 13: Beware the amateur psychologist

Heylin’s book “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” tells us about the songs Dylan wrote and performed, and his life as a young man and then as a professional musician and highly original creative songwriter.

What marks out the book is that these different strands to his life seem to have no connection in Heylin’s portrait.  From time to time, it is suggested that Dylan behaves in a way that some of us might think of as shameful, or perhaps regrettable, or perhaps even unacceptable.  From time to time Dylan composes utter masterpieces within the genres of folk, blues and rock music.   Each is noted, and yet there is no connection made.  Dylan’s behaviour is (for the most part) highly criticised.  His songs are sometimes praised, sometimes dismissed, but mostly left unmentioned.  In short, if you want to get an insight into the songs,  or how Dylan comes to write them, this is probably not a good place to start.

It is as if Dylan could, if he had wished it, have lived a life in a nice country residence with a wife and family, while popping into his personal studio every evening to knock out a couple more world-shattering songs, the likes of which no one had ever heard before.  But he chose instead to flit around, being uncomplimentary to people, changing lovers, taking drugs.

I suppose that it is possible that this was Dylan’s life in the 60s, but if we were to look at the life story of other geniuses we would surely soon realise, this is not how it works.   And indeed not how it works, for two reasons.

One is that the rock music industry is a world of its own, in which (mostly) young men find themselves suddenly thrust into the limelight without anyone around them able and willing to guide them, in a selfless way.  Instead these are young men who have a particular musical talent, surrounded by older men anxious to exploit it as much as they can, get a financial cut one way or another, and then when the public interest fades, move on to the next “fad” (as they see it) which they can once more manipulate to their benefit.

Given that virtually all people who are born with a talent that we might call genius don’t know why or how they have have attribute, or how to handle both it and its side effects, and given that in the rock music industry, there is virtually no one around who will act selflessly to help the genius, (everyone in short wants their cut), chaos ensues.

With Bob Dylan the chaos was made worse by the fact that he was able to compose songs of genius (or at least interest) at an extraordinary speed in the early years (29 songs that we know about composed in 1965 alone, from Farewell Angelina to Visions of Johanna – see part one of the Songs in Chronological order).  Thus everyone was clambering over each other to get hold of a part of the action – and Bob was left trying to deal with it.

But at the heart of all this – the one thing that made everything else happen – was Dylan’s genius as a songwriter.   And yet the songs, in the sense of how they were written, why they were written, how they were constructed, how they evolved – do not get a mention in the book.  As we move through the “Meet the Beat” chapter and thereafter there is a lot about the drugs being taken, but yet again nothing about the creative process.

Now it might be argued that this is a book about Dylan, not about creativity.  But if it were not for that extraordinary creativity there would be no book about Dylan, because he would have been just another guy who wrote some nice songs but nothing special.

As a result of this lack of insight or serious investigation (or I suspect both) Heylin makes comments such as “You could tell the audience was puzzled but they didn’t want to be thought uncool…” (page 273).   Which raises the question, “How could you [whoever you is] tell”?

Although it is not relevant to Heylin’s writing, that is certainly not how I remember the period.  As each album came out the debate on the merits and demerits of each song between myself and my pals was intense – and we discussed “why”.  We wanted to understand what Dylan was doing, how he was doing it, and why he was doing it.  (The debate around “Ballad in Plain D” for example was intense – was it a tale that needed telling in the full, in order for it to make sense, or was it padded out to help fill the album?)

Likewise I remember seeing performances by Jimi Hendrix Experience, and by Pink Floyd (including Syd Barrett) and debating in detail with my student pals the merits of each, where they were taking music, how much of what they were doing was a contribution to a general movement and how much was unique to themselves and would thus be a blind alley in terms of future music.   We listened, we thought, we debated, and some of us wrote and performed as well.   And maybe we were the odd ones out; but to Heylin the audience just sits or stands there and soaks it all up.  Without him to explain we wouldn’t understand a thing.

Thus for Heylin it all comes down to “You could tell the audience was puzzled.”  There were of course the denunciations of what Dylan was doing which Heylin seems to revel in mentioning, but only an occasional recognition of what was actually going on, and no recognition that many of us were not denouncing, we were discussing.  Heylin tellingly says, of the critics (from whom he of course disassociates himself, although I am not at all sure that separation is justified) “what these worthy critics had yet to realize was that he was no longer ‘theirs’; that their words were increasingly mere background hum against the swelling tide of Dylanmania.”

Which for me is a telling statement.   Heylin sets himself apart from the critics (by and large people who got and retained their jobs by being able to write or speak negatively and quickly after a show) and from the everyday fans (who had to queue and pay for their tickets and who actually enjoyed the shows).  Somehow we’ve got to the state where there are three audiences: critics, fans, and Heylin, and only the latter really knows.

And put simply, I think he is wrong; many people in the audience were much, much more knowledgable than Heylin gives us credit for, and some of us knew a lot more about songs, song writing, song lyrics, literature and poetry than Heylin could even imagine.

Thus as with Heylin’s retelling of the meeting of Dylan and the Beatles, much of the time all we get is a retelling of a well-known tale.  There are no insights, musical or poetic, but we do get a lot of mention of the drugs, as well as a lot of other tittle-tattle.  We are told Richard Farina was “terribly envious of Dylan”.   Maybe, maybe not, but does it make any difference to his music?

What we also get here is a constant suggestion of Dyolan as a control freak – which again ignores the genius of Dylan.  He knows what he is creating, and he knows other people cannot create anything like this, so of course he wants to control his own output.  Those of us who have worked as authors and put our work in the hands of publishers know this too!

So Heylin drifts into discussions about what Dylan wears (blue jeans on stage, a common suit afterwards exercises Heylin considerably – he can’t seem to work that out).  And all the time I am left screaming, “This doesn’t matter; it’s the music, not what he wears, not what he does in his spare time…”

The fact is that all people who spend a lot of time in the public eye, find they have a public image to maintain.  And this can be very different from their real identity.   Heylin does hint at this, but as with most things, quickly skates over the point without actually realising it is an interesting topic.  How Bob copes with this life is a topic of passing interest (Heylin suggests Bob was brutal in his criticism of other composers, although the only example he can conjure up was when Phil Ochs, David Blue and Dylan were together playing each other their compositions, and at one point Dylan (allegedly) says “Well have you heard this?”  As evidence goes for suggesting a long-term state of mind, it’s not much.)

What Heylin does however is not just write the whole two-volume report from his own perspective of how a genius should behave, he writes it as the ultimate arbiter of what happened.   The line “this was not the case  – not now or any time soon,” crops up on page 285, but you could put it anywhere.   Everyone else’s reportage is wrong, only he, Heylin is right.   And why and how is he so right?  Well, he just is.

As Dylan himself once wrote (and Heuylin actually quotes without irony), “Do not create anything, it will only be misinterpreted”.

Joan Baez is quoted a couple of pages later as saying, “He seemed to function from the centre of his own thoughts… and like a madman he was swallowed up by them.”  And yes that is pretty much a description of the life of many a creative genius.  But it is also a pretty good description of a writer who seriously believes that he knows the subject of his biography better than the subject knows himself.    A madman swallowed up by his own thoughts… indeed.