The Double Life of Bob Dylan part 18: All that remains

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, as I think I have mentioned rather a large number of times, is not, and never has been a musician. And yet he comments, often pejoratively on Dylan’s music. “Tombstone Blues” he tells us “should hardly have required half of the morning and a chunk of the afternoon to record.” Now I know that it can take me all day to get a decent recording of a five minute song, and that is just with me on piano and vocals, and the benefit of a classical music education (which tends to help the focus and concentration)

So it is legitimate to ask, how does Heylin know? Well, actually he doesn’t because a couple of pages further on he illustrates “how Dylan’s vision shaped the sound picture at every turn.” The fact is that the picture we get is of an artist who knows what it should sound like when he gets that sound, but not before. He is in fact, according to Heylin, stumbling toward the sound he wants without actually being able to describe it and direct the band toward it.

If that is true, fair enough, although we only have Heylin’s word for this. And Heylin is pretty nasty about this style of working, calling the versions that don’t get the music Dylan wants, “train wrecks”. In my experience they are as often as not, the occasional misplaced chord, or fluffed rhythm. No one dies.

But in the end it really does get a bit silly. Heylin suggests that Dylan was taking a “he who is not for us is against us” attitude with his music, possibly because people around him were treating him as a mesiah. Yet a simpler explanation (and really where there is a simple explanation that works it is generally advisable to take that one rather than any other),is that which I have touched upon before. Bob didn’t know where he was taking the music – there was no clear plan. But each time he did take another step forward in the right direction, he knew he had got it right.

One only has to listen to the early albums to hear the number of times Dylan did something musically that was not only unique but also musically and literally brilliant. And in this little list that follows I’m just putting down my instant thought – you will undoubtedly have completely different but just as valid choices

On Freewheelin we might nominate Don’t think twice, on Times it could be the title track or When the Ship comes in and Boots of Spanish Leather.

On Another Side I’d nominate Chimes of Freedom and It Ain’t Me Babe. From Bringing it all back home, any and all of the four songs on side two. On Highway 61, Desolation Row (of course) and Like a Rolling Stone

On Blonde on Blonde, Visions of Johanna (of course) and Just like a woman (although I’m tempted to add One of Us Must Know).

Thus I would argue that on each and every single album Dylan introduced not only a whole collection of really interesting songs that we still remember, but also some earth shattering masterpieces. And yet Heylin spends his time criticising the way Dylan worked on the recordings.

Just consider these masterpieces, coming out one after another, and then consider Heylin’s comment that Dylan “increasingly took the view “he who is not for me is against me”. On album after album Dylan had revolutionized our concept of what pop and rock music could be. And he did that not by travelling down the same track, each time seeing if he could take it a bit further, but in fact by deliberately creating something brilliant, and then heading in a different direction.

To put this at its simplest, here was a man who on one album gave us Desolation Row, and on the next album presented the world with “Visions of Johanna.” Criticising this period of Dylan’s work, or criticising his writing methods, or how he treated his friends or anything else, is a bit like saying that “Two Gentlemen of Verona” is Shakespeare at his weakest. Yes maybe it is, but it is still several thousand lightyears above what other men were writing at the time.

And criticising Dylan’s working methods, and the way he ran the concerts is equally daft, because what he was producing on record was clearly revolutionary and brilliant. Revolutionary because no one but no one had created music like this before, and brilliant because we are all still playing the music from that time nearly sixty years later. Sixty years in which billions of songs have been written and presented for our delectation, and which come nowhere near the standards Dylan was reaching then.

And all this was achieved by a composer who, through his own admission, and as can be clearly devised from the way he worked, didn’t know how he was making it happen. Some of the songs and some of the recordings just worked brilliantly and wonderfully. But Dylan could no more turn the creative tap on and off than could most composers. (OK yes it appears that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven could, and in popular music so could Irving Berlin, but it is hard to think of many more).

But Heylin does note in text, if not in his mind, what was going on. He quotes Suze Rotolo as saying “Bob soaked up everything”, and John Steel of the Animals “Dylan had his ears open all the time.” Tom Wilson is credited as saying “Dylan was always entirely open; he listened to everything.” And when the audience turned against him, Bob didn’t back down, but carried on. And on. “Dylan was impervious to criticism” as Heylin says (page 369) and that surely is the clue. He knew that he could get it right and keep on evolving his music at the same time, and if someone said he couldn’t, or that the last album was rubbish, he’d just keep looking to the horizon (which of course never got any closer).

And to do this, as Robbie Robertson is quoted as saying, “We rehearsed in front of the audiences, rather than before we went out.” Because that was the way in which Bob could get forever closer to a destination he didn’t know, via a route he didn’t know, using a methodology he could only guess at. So if the journalists attending a show were full of incomprehension, then so what. It was a journey, this was not the final destination

And it is all very well for Heylin to use cliches such as calling “I wanna be your lover” as “his postmodernist deconstruction of a Beatlesque love song” but it might have been better simply to suggest Dylan thought there was an alternative way of writing.

So instead of seeing Dylan’s writing as a revolutionary approach that takes us into totally different territory, such that Heylin’s attempt to reduce Visions of Johanna to a “psychosexual drama” in which Brian Jones is involved, rather than what it is: a story which like life itself, doesn’t always make sense. Hence the opening line.

The series continues…

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