The revolution begins, but no one understands. The Double Life of Bob Dylan part 17

I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current and recently concluded series, appearing on this website. Details of the earlier episodes in this series are at the end of this episode

By Tony Attwood

Heylin in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” describes the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” in considerable detail. He sees it as a process, which I am sure it was, for not only is this song over 400 words long (which is very long for a song lyric in the rock music tradition) the performance lasts over six minutes (and this was at a time where the average recorded rock track was generally only half as long).

So, seeing how the song came to its final form is of course interesting for anyone who seeks to understand Dylan’s music. We look, obviously, to see both how he has created his greatest works, how they were initially received and Bob’s response to that reception. And we need to do this because we’ve got to the point in this series where Bob was about to create a revolutionary work of utter genius which challenged all the traditions and turned the genre upside down and inside out.

But although Heylin does take us through a lot of details, and notes Dylan’s own worry with the eternal question that highly creative people face (namely “How do I know I can do it again?”) his prime focus is on the chaos of the recording sessions, with the occasional rumour about Bob’s sexual health thrown in. However to be fair he does give us a lot on the first concert that moved away from pure folk into rock.

Now maybe it is true that no one knows how Bob came up with the idea of moving into rock music – although I think the article on Wikipedia gives us more insight than Heylin does – and I suspect that Bob’s comment upon his work, which is quoted by Heylin, is correct when he says, “What I’m doing now you can’t learn by studying; you can’t copy it.” But it is true only in one sense.

Heylin lets the comment go and instead of following it up, immediately starts to write about what other bands and composers were doing at the time. What he could have done (and he has after all had numerous decades as a Dylan commentator to think of this) is ask, in hindsight, was Dylan now really engaged in revolutionary work, and if so how and why. But instead of that we are told all about what Bob got wrong, as with “Before the first session he had already made a critical misjudgement” (involving supposedly telling Mike Bloomfield to talk to the musicians in the studio.”)

Now if you talk to any creative artist, who is willing to be open and honest, he or she is quite likely to tell you that much of the time, misjudgement is at the heart of what they are doing. When it works it works because the misjudgements are set aside and the work of genius shines through. And indeed this is exactly what happened with “Like a Rolling Stone”.

What one has to remember, and indeed Heylin does touch upon this, was that Bob was indeed going out on a limb, getting together a band and having studio time, but not having got the songs worked out.

So Heylin notes that Dylan, “having again arrived at a session with only one finished song… had no game plan”. That is a real put down and suggests that Bob was hopelessly haphazard in his work. And yet he is speaking of the set of sessions that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone”.

My response would be that whatever the method of working was, in the recording sessions that led up to the creation of “Like a Rolling Stone” they must have been right for Dylan, since they resulted in a work of revolutionary creative genius. The fact is that eventually, Heylin does recognise that one excellent early version of the song “comes out of nowhere. And goes straight back there,” and the implication of this comment seems to be this is all wrong. For as one who has spent a bit of time in recording sessions, that is often how it is in the world of pop and rock. Even when a song is fully written and rehearsed the first time the tape is “rolling” there is that extra bit of pressure and there’s a slip of the tongue and something goes wrong.

And this perhaps is because the right and wrong of creative acts (as long as they are not actually hurting any living thing or causing damage to other people’s property) which surely can only be properly measured by looking at the final result.

“Like a Rolling Stone” is an utter, absolute, total, revolutionary masterpiece and work of genius. So whatever process Dylan took himself, the studio team and the musicians through to get there, it must have been right because it got a result no one else had ever imagined before. The process was necessary for the genius composer to become the genius performer who could deliver his greatest work to date – the likes of which no one had ever heard before. So what is there to criticise?

Well for Heylin there is always something, as with the assertion (page 344) that “Like a Rolling Stone” was itself “actually based on a traditional Mexican folk song ‘La Bamba’.”

OK so maybe I am not the competent musician that I like to think I am, but I am absolutely lost in seeing that there is any way that the two are related

To dance the Bamba (Para bailar La Bamba)
To dance the Bamba (Para bailar La Bamba)
It takes a little grace (Se necessita una poca de gracia)
A little grace (Una poca de gracia)
For me, for you, ay up, ay up (Para mi, para ti, ay arriba, ay arriba)
Ay, up up (Ay, arriba arriba)
I'll be for you, I'll be for you, I'll be for you 
(Por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere)

I guess someone needs to ask Heylin where he got this idea from But this reduction of one of the greatest pieces from the entire history of the pop/rock/folk/blues genre into La Bamba although (as it seems to me) it totally nosensical, it does serve a very Heylinesque purpose, in that Heylin proclaims it cleared the ground, so that by the time Dylan got to “Highway 61 Revisited” “he merely had to decide which characters to include and who to kill off.”

Now I really don’t quite get that point, but from here on Heylin appears to descend into quoting Dylan lines from hither and yon without really noting anything much except to give an indication that Dylan leaves lines in the songs blank so that they “can be readily filled in”. In short he is suggesting Dylan’s writing is all a bit haphazard and roughshod, and really, anyone could do it if they felt like it. A line here, a line here, write them all down, mix them all up, and hey presto! you have a song.

But such a discussion of Dylan’s approach to music is surely just a passing fancy, for it is very quickly over (and indeed given the trite nature of the discussion one might be rather glad of that) and instead by page 348 Heylin takes us onto the details of what Bob started to wear as his fame grew, as well as a fair amount of the argument between those who wanted Dylan to stay with the way folk and blues traditionally sounded and those who embraced Dylan’s new musical style. (And I must say as I paused to make a coffee at this point I did wonder, do the clothes actually matter?)

The fight between tradition and modernity, just like the fight between modernity and post-modernity, and indeed all other movements in the arts, is of course interesting and valuable in understanding the way art and life interact and move forward. But the fact is that Dylan was at this time at the very forefront of a movement which (to me at least) retained some of the essence of folk music, while taking rock music into a totally new dimension. After all, “Like a Rolling Stone” was unlike anything that had gone before. And thus the music and the lyrics deserve more discussion that Heylin seems able to bring to bear.

Although to be fair, Heylin is quite right of course when he says of Dylan’s creation of “Like a Rolling Stone” and his putting of a new band together to be able to perform his new compositions, that Dylan was “taking a huge risk to a potentially unforgiving audience.” Yes that is so, but Heylin lets the comment rest without considering it further. Heylin makes much of the naysayers, (“Rambling Jack Elliott thought it ‘sounded like horseshit”). But the question as to why Dylan felt like making this jump, is ignored. Which is a bit of a shame really.

Instead we get into a discussion as to whose fault it was that the sound wasn’t right, who was demanding that the volume should be reduced, who was in tears, who ran off to his car, and so on. There is an agreement that the audience booed the Butterfield, Goldberg and Dylan concert, and a long comment about whether the technicians were inept or the electronics and speakers were not up to handling what Bob and the band were doing. But not about the music and what Bob was doing.

And yet surely there is a point here. Bob Dylan had an idea, and pushed it through without testing anything out. The idea, it seems, was so important to him, it had to be tried out here and now. He didn’t want to wait for the right stage, with the right sort of equipment and indeed an audience who knew what to expect. He wanted his idea tried out NOW.

And that is interesting because it fits in so clearly with Bob’s creative approach (and that of many of genius artists) – he has an idea and he has to try it. No long re-writes, test runs, taking advice; let’s go for it. And that is, I think, central to Bob’s creativity. He has the idea he wants to go. I would say the same happened with his sudden movement between styles and approaches on different albums, and indeed his sudden change in the way his songs were created at different stages.

Allow me, if you will, to take you from the 500 or so words of “Like a Rolling Stone” to the songs of John Wesley Harding. Three verses, 118 words. And it is like that through most of the JWH album. Even “All along the watchtower” which is today often considered to be a much longer song has only 139 words. Or what I consider the utter work of genius from that album which really took on a new life in cover versions like this

The fact is Dylan changes as he goes, and never tells us why – but his music which is built around this notion of potential change, allows others to follow and rework the music in new ways.

Now the fact is (certainly up to this point, and I think, although I’ve not checked in detail, for most of the time since) most folk, pop and rock performers had their style of music, which they stuck to. They didn’t try to change the style itself, and they didn’t jump to another style. The tradition in the blues was verse, verse, verse, verse, with each verse being three lines of music, the first being repeated in the second.. The tradition of folk was verse, verse, verse etc, but without the blues format (which became known as the “12 bar” format). The blues could be played electrically, but folk was played acoustically.

Dylan with his move to electric, done without explanation and really with no expectation from those around, was a radical revolution, the likes of which music has rarely if ever seen. Certainly from my study of music history, it seems to me that much of the time styles and approaches to music evolved slowly. What Dylan did at this gig was to turn everything upside down without warning, and really without music experimentation – and as a result allowed others to take the path even further.

But back to this first electric outing. The article in Broadside, quoted by Heylin, says that by the third song “there was loud jeering and cat-calls from some parts of the audience”.

And to be fair to Heylin, he does cite the journalist who really did get to grasp the heart of the matter (if one can grasp a heart – I am not sure one can, but it seems the right phrase at the moment). Arthur Kretchmer writing in Village Voice said,

“Bob Dylan was booed for linking rhythm and blues to the paranoid nightmares of his vision… The irony of the folkorists and their parochial ire at Dylan’s musical transgression is that he is… this generation’s most awesome talent. And in eighty years you will read papers about his themes.”

That quote is carried by Heylin, and for that he must be applauded, for it surely was the most forward-looking and accurate comment made by anyone after that performance. But even so, I am not convinced Heylin fully realises even now how great a step forward this was. Before this moment pop and rock was confined to love, lost love and dance in songs that lasted two and a half minutes. Now suddenly they could be about the rest of life, about the rest of reality, and last about as long as you wanted to make them. It was the most enormous change in what music could do, and it was about as unlikely as Mozart suddenly delivering unto us a piece that sounded as if it had been written by John Cage or Beethoven asking to be remembered for the way he played the violin.

In short, and indeed in summary, Heylin seems totally to miss the point.

The series continues…

2 Comments

Tim Johnson says:

September 27, 2024 at 6:50 pm

I remember reading an interview years ago where BD said that Like a Rolling Stone started with him playing Ritchie Valens version of La Bamba on the piano. After listening to it I could hear the connection – in the rhythm and the sequence of chord changes.
Tim Johnson says:

September 27, 2024 at 7:01 pm

I recall reading an interview with BD where he said Like a Rolling Stone began with him playing Ritchie Valens version of La Bamba on the piano. Listening to it I could see the connection.

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