The Double Life of Bob Dylan part 19: All around the world

A review of the Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin.

Links to the earlier articles in this series can be found at the end of this piece.

By Tony Attwood

Judging by what Heylin says, and what we know from our own experiences of watching Dylan perform live, Dylan did not want to “over-rehearse,” as he saw it.  He sought a more basic, perhaps one could say “a more raw” sound.  And because the audience and journalists were not used to this, and because music journalists are mostly people who are themselves not very good musicians (if musicians at all), and beyond that, because Bob chose not to explain himself on tour, the tour got a lot of criticism.

And indeed Heylin makes it clear throughout that Dylan wanted the recordings he put on LPs to be as representative of the music in the concerts as possible.  So no long rehearsals, no over-dubbing, but instead six takes at most and then simply choose the best.

Now this was obviously a very different approach from what the music industry, entranced by the growing capabilities of the technology it was able to conjure up, was doing.  The general view at the time was, if the technology is there, let’s use it.

But it wasn’t just the re-creation of music through technology that annoyed Bob; he also hated it if something he said in a recorded interview was twisted and turned into something else.

Heylin gets this to a degree but then (page 375) forgets all that as he starts trying to work out who “Louise” and “Little Boy Lost” actually are in “Visions”, launching into ludicrous sidelines such as, “This certainly could be Brian Jones” without once contemplating the fact that Dylan could be writing a work of fiction.  Indeed, why do any of the songs have to be about real events, real people, or anything else?

Do these people like Heylin pick up a novel and then start saying, “Oh that is Mr Smithson who lived next door to Dylan in 1989”?  No of course not.

But although it would be an easy thing to do, I can’t pump all the blame on Heylin at this point.   I’ve mentioned far too many times my own ventures into amateur songwriting with performances in folk clubs, and I know how often people will say of a song, “who is that about?” or “is that supposed to be me?”   The answer is no one and no.  Quite why people accept that novelists and short story writers can write about non-existent people, but think songwriters can’t have an original idea, is beyond me, but my occasional chats with other songwriters, and my own painful experiences show that this is the case.

Dylan however has this problem in greater depth, saying of a Playboy interview that was tapped, “… then they just took it right off the tape and any time they felt like changing it, or thought I should say something else, they’d just put it in.”   In response, Heylin decries Dylan for being “surprisingly unguarded”.   And yes anyone who gets within 100 miles of a journalist learns this, but still the point is that a) journalists should not behave like this, and b) the first few times it happens to one, it can be rather unnerving.

Add this to Heylin’s own weird desire to take characters from Dylan’s songs and find who they are based on (“Little boy lost … certainly could be Brian Jones…”) and we have a rather spooky view of Dylan’s creative process.  Indeed, why not take Dylan’s own explanation, and the commentary of many other songwriters, and indeed writers of fiction – the characters we have are the characters we make up.

Yes, some novels can be about real people – my own historical novel, “Making the Arsenal” includes a real-life character (now long deceased but very famous at the time the novel is set in) and I’ve evolved my central character’s personality from contemporary reports.  But most of the characters are invented: it’s a novel.   So why can’t Dylan write songs with invented characters in them?  Why do they have to be about anyone in particular?  Louise is only a real person because journalists want her to be one.

But now Heylin of course goes further, because that is what he does, suggesting that instead of Dylan being frustrated about the commentaries he gets about his song lyrics “he was revelling in it” (page 376).  Really?  How does he know?

The reaction of the audiences to Dylan, with the booing and so forth, upset The Hawks, and it is strange that reporters have just reported this without thinking about the implications.

Audiences however have power – they can cheer, they can boo, they can walk out, they can refuse to attend.   And certainly, as the tour went on everyone must have known they were going to get a rock band in the second half.  So they came ready to boo.   This is not unique.

Exploring this notion, I found myself thinking of the London football (soccer) club that has a ground near to where I was brought up as a child, and which was supported by my father, and my grandfather, my mother, my aunt… and then myself throughout my life.  Indeed although my ancestors have sadly passed on, but I still go and watch the team in every home game.

And it is a fact that if Arsenal (my club) are not always playing as well as some in the crowd expect and demand, the players can be booed (not by me I hasten to add), and although it is rare these days, in the past I have seen fights break out between those who think we should be supporting the team no matter what, and those who feel they have the right to express their anger at the players’ poor performance as they perceive it.

It’s the same with Dylan.  Some could appreciate what he was doing with his experiments, some couldn’t.  There was, shall we say, a certain level of disharmony within the audience.  But Heyln suggests with absolutely no evidence, that Dylan was revelling in the negative reaction, and just kept carrying on with his new rock songs.

The media of course love a story that falls in their laps and which they have to do no research on whatsoever, and so the story made the headlines.

But we know from a discussion between Ginsberg and Dylan, Dylan believed in the songs.  However, with the media, it is always the same.  When a story is there without them having to do any research, they take it.

Certainly from conversations that Heylin reports, Dylan was bemused by the level of antagonism he was getting in the early days of his move over to performing with the rock band.  However, as the schedule that Heylin reports shows, he didn’t have time to contemplate what was going on, let alone change the sequence of songs, or indeed consider what the band was doing.  And of course, for those who did listen to the lyrics there were always endless fantasy tales about who each song was actually about.

Part of the problem with Heylin, and indeed for Heylin, is that he cannot grasp the utterly simple notion that a songwriter, like a novelist, like a poet, like a playwright, does not have to experience the emotions and activities that are portrayed in their work, in order to write about it.  To put it simply, I didn’t have to travel in a spaceship to write my two science fiction novels.  So why does Heylin seem to think that lines that Dylan writes directly relate to his life?  (And to be clear, I am not saying that my work is remotely the equivalent of Dylan’s but rather, that rather, is how many writers write fiction.).

But no, Heylin can’t make the jump.   For him “One of Us Must Know” must be about an actual relationship.  Because?  Well, because it must be.  This view  really does represent a total lack of understanding of creativity, songwriting, and artistic process.  And indeed music.

The fact is that when a commentator is negative about Dylan, Heylin gives the critic space and quotes him word for word. When Dylan records “Visions of Johanna” in one complete take, Heylin doesn’t even notice the error made by the bass guitar – which is interesting because Bob must have heard it, but chose that version to be released.   It says a lot about his desire to get a complete “live” performance.  Heylin does note that Visions had a couple of false starts, but nothing more, confirming, if we needed confirmation, that he’s not got a musical ear.

In short with his double album, Bob found a new way of making the recordings.  “Visions” was recorded in just three takes apparently.  No overdubbing – because Dylan never did that – just a straight recording.

Reading Heylin, it seems to me that he simply doesn’t understand what it is like to be in a recording studio, for a group of musicians who are normally on stage doing their own thing, and covering up when things go wrong, secure in the knowledge that the audience probably won’t notice.

But it is also true that Heylin’s vision and understanding of the world, and the cultures around the world, is incredibly limited.   He calls Australia, “an English-speaking enclave still stuck in the 50s” – and that seems to satisfy him.  But he does get the concept of the concerts in that Dylan “changed personalities from one half of the concert to the next   He came out a different guy…”

Now if we combine that observation, with the fact that the writers of the newspaper commentaries knew nothing about music or performance, we can see the problem emerging; a problem that was going to continue for years to come.  Self-appointed critics without musical knowledge seeking to control the agenda and telling us what to think.

Dylan on the other hand knew where he was going, and although “even in cosmopolitan Sydney the booing and catcalling was vicious…” there was hope, because even Heylin admits “it [the booing] was organised.”

But it could be thought from this that Dylan was just doing his own thing without any care for anything else.  Yet that doesn’t seem or feel right.   Meeting with others at the house of a local notable academic Dylan is reported as being keen to find out what everyone thought.

Yet according to Heylin (page 408) Dylan was facing an “uncomprehending Antipodean media”.

Overall, reading about Dylan in Australia gives one the feeling of a staggeringly creative man who has no one to guide him, but a lot of people trying to exploit him and more than anything a complete lack of understanding as to what he is doing as an artist.  He was in fact, creating his new approaches to music live in front of audiences, whereas later he would do it in the recording studio.  But he is constantly surrounded by the media who clearly have no understanding of music or lyrics, and no understanding of the forms of creativity that Dylan is using.

And above all, there is no one out there who can help him along.  The journalists are asking pathetically stupid questions  (take a look at the interview on page 415/6 if you want an example).

So what we have is (in my view) a creative genius who does not know how he creates what he does (it sort of just happens) being asked inane questions by journalists who seemingly have hardly heard any of his music, and certainly have not heard the music upon which Dylan is developing his own genre.  And the trouble is that when Dylan does meet some journalists who seem to have an idea about what is going on (see Scandinavia, page 417) he’s not very good at handling them.

In fact, it is only in Europe that he manages to get a conversation with journalists who actually seem to have enough musical knowledge, poetic knowledge, and knowledge of contemporary society, to understand what is going on.

Dylan mocks the journalists because they clearly have not done their homework – and (although Heylin doesn’t say this) it is rather like some guys who managed to pass GCSE Art (an exam that can be taken aged 16 in schools in England and Wales) then demanding to know, “What are you going to protest about on this trip?”   To which Dylan quite reasonably replies, “You name it and I’ll protest about it.”

The series continues…

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 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

The series continues…

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