The irrelevance of normality to the artist: the “Double Life of Bob Dylan” part 16

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

A review of the Clinton Heylin book by Tony Attwood. Links to previous episodes are at the end.

In my review of “The Double Life” I am now two-thirds of the way through volume one and it is interesting that at this point Heylin suddenly says “the media didn’t know what to make of him [ie Dylan].!” And that of course is true. Journalists writing immediate reviews of shows, interviews and albums often have a very limited amount of time to get their words into print while the story is still “hot”, and so rely on past experiences, prejudices, and what everyone else is saying.

So here I would agree with Heylin, but then when a few pages later he adds that “Dylan was simply looking to wrestle free of the stereotypical straightjacket that lazy tabloid journalists thought they could wrap him in,” I fall off my chair. Not because the statement isn’t true, but because the “stereotypical straightjacket” of “normal” or “decent” or “reasonable” behaviour is what Heylin labours throughout the entire volume.

Dylan does not stick to the normal way of doing things in most aspects of his life, at least as far as we can tell. But then that is typical of the genius. And to labour the point once more, if one writes pieces of music, which quickly become artistic monuments in depicting a way of seeing the world, and which millions upon millions of people retain throughout their lives as part of their way of understanding what is going on around them, of course what lazy journalists (or come to that journalists rushed off their feet by lazy editors) write is irrelevant.

The social norms for someone who has written, “Times they are a Changing” or “Gates of Eden” or “Desolation Row” are irrelevant because of the attitudes and views those songs offer. Indeed they are doubly irrelevant when the genius artist finds (as Dylan has done on occasion) that new songs are not emerging from his brain in the way old songs have done. Remembering always, that it is most likely that Dylan has no idea how those songs emerged when they did.

But then, to make matters worse, Heylin, who spends much of this book not believing Dylan’s statements about anything, has the nerve to say at one point in offering an explanation of how he worked, “Not for the first time, he wouldn’t be believed.” (Page 320). And yet much of this book is packed with Heylin not believing what Dylan says.

What makes this more ludicrous than offensive however, is that in noting Dylan saying that “Times they are a changin'” is “not a folk song” Heylin finds it necessary to chime in with the statement “Nor was it,” as if somehow the truth or falseness of a Dylan statement needs Heylin to tell us if it is true or false!

The fact is we are talking about music – one of a number of art forms over which many of us will have our own feelings. That is the point of music – and indeed of most art that survives for more than a few months. We can always give explanations as to why a certain song is especially important, and those reasons may relate to memories of first hearing the song, an appreciation of the lyrics, an appreciation of the music, or just an indefinable something. Indeed if you have ever bothered yourself with some of my ramblings on this site you might well have stumbled across me raving over one of the many versions of a song most commentators never even get around to mentioning.

To me that is one of the supreme high points of Dylan’s work. The fact that it clearly wasn’t for Dylan himself, nor for anyone else I have come across, doesn’t matter. It is for me.

Thus the point is we all respond in different ways and so it is not surprising a composer with such a prodigious output produces works that different people appreciate at different levels and in different ways. And this gives the critic a problem because through modern media the multiplicity of views can be seen and recognised. But all Heylin can say in relation to this is, “Increasingly, the ever-widening chasm which separated Dylan form normality was artificially induced.” Quite how he knows, or come to that how he can measure the “chasm” we are not told. Personally I don’t see it being any different from the chasm I perceive between any artist and his/her audience.

But then when I listen to Tell Ol Bill Take 9 for the thousandth time, I don’t really care. It speaks me, as it always has. It relates to my life, my world, my emotions both musically and lyrically – and of course I know it means next to nothing to most people, including most Dylan fans. So I am more or less on my own with this one – but that doesn’t matter; it talks to me. Yet this is what Heyliin cannot grasp because he seeks to be the almighty reference point of Dylan for everyone else. Of course everyone who takes notice of the evaluation of classical romantic music puts Bach, Mozart and Beethoven at the absolute pinnacle but they do it by considering the music – not the tittle tattle of those composers’ daily lives. For with music a billion opinions are out there, and each as valid as the other. Part of the reason for this is that music, like all the arts, is an highly emotional event, and we each experience different emotions and respond to emotions in different ways. Another part is the music is abstract, which gives each of us something different to appreciate.

Of course, seemingly to gain attention, sometimes Heylin is just gratuitous in his insults, seeming to think that a page that doesn’t either insult Dylan, a song written by Dylan or a group of Dylan fans, isn’t a page that should be in the book. Ironically however Heylin notes a list of Dylan’s loves and hates written for the “hormonal readership” (as Heylin disparagingly calls them) of a magazine, and includes as a like “originality in anybody.” And maybe this is the cause of the entire problem with this book, for just knocking an artist because of his behaviour simply because one does not have the inclination or maybe ability to write about the music itself, is not only trivial but ultimately pointless. I can still enjoy the music of Chuck Berry, while being horrified at his attitude to women. Indeed if to be a great artist one had to fit the current moral code, we’d hardly have any great artists at all.

And that is of extra interest because Heylin has already expressed his dislike of Dylan’s behaviour on numerous occasions. So what we have is Heylin’s own view of how people should behave as a measuring stick against how Dylan behaves, behind which is the notion that it should be possible for Dylan to be the sort of man that Heylin seems to imagine himself to be, and yet still be able to write works of genius. And yes maybe some genius artists are like this, but my casual reading of the lives of genius artists suggests not – generally it seems because the art for a genius becomes more important than anybody else.

For myself, in my private life, I like to think I do go out of my way to help my friends when they are in need. My songwriting, my writing of articles for this website, and another site that I also happen to run, my nights out dancing, my book writing, these are all important to me, but never so important that my friends don’t come first. But then I am not a driven genius writer – far from it. So would I stop writing “Things have changed,” knowing that if I didn’t complete it now I would never recapture its brilliance, in order to comfort a friend on the phone who had just found her/his husband/wife was having an affair? I would like to think I could but if it were that great a piece, I’m not sure I could.

There is a telling phrase in an interview that Heylin quotes in which an interviewer seemingly lacking in knowledge in terms of what Dylan does says, “I’m trying to find out what you think you’re doing.” To which Dylan replies, “I just do it.” It’s a perfect answer from a creative genius – and one that Heylin totally fails to understand.

Unfortunately, I’m not well read enough to know how Salvador Dali coped with journalists but I like to imagine he was as impatient and frustrated with them as Bob Dylan is. For the fact is that Dylan’s understanding of his own work could well be the same as Dali’s understanding of what he did, as when Dylan answered a journalist’s question, “What do you mean when you say you don’t write about anything?” Dylan replies “I write inside out and sometimes the dimensions cross. I can’t write about the tress, I must write of the tree.”

That quote and indeed a lot more from that interview is in Heylin’s book and it contains some fascinating thoughts (page 328) but Heylin’s single response is that it “shows a Dylan trying to live outside the law and still be honest,” which is about as trite a response as one can imagine.

Indeed Heylin does recognise that Bob, along with virtually every artist whose work we can study and who has left a record of his emotional response to what he does, is wrapped up in his own doubt when he says “How do I know I can do it again?” And yet then Heylin immediately meanders off into a scene in which Sara and Joan Baez come face to face for the first time. There is no attempt whatsoever to investigate further Dylan’s artistic responses as he moves through his life. Instead, we jump straight back to domestic issues. And yes I know they can be influential of course, but even so, the artist’s drive to meet the demand for more and more of his work, while keeping the standard and originality as high as before, surely is a bigger issue.

However “The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 1” was apparently (according to the book’s cover) described as “gripping… hugely impressive.” So maybe I have just got this all wrong, and that of course is for you to decide.

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