A review of the Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin.
This article concludes the series of reviews of this book. Links to the earlier articles in this series can be found at the end of this piece.
By Tony Attwood
I’m at the end of my rambling review of what I feel is a rambling book: I didn’t think the series was going to be this long – maybe three of four episodes at most, but as I got into it I found myself more and more astounded not just by what Heylin says, but by the issues he utterly ignores, without seemingly even once to realise that he is ignoring the issues.
At the head of the list of obvious issues is the impact that being a creative genius has on a person, and the work he creates. “Creative genius”, means one can come up with new ideas and new things that appear to be starting from or taking us to a new point. But there is more to it than that, for creative geniuses do not usually seem to be able to turn their genius on and off upon demand. Sometimes it is there, sometimes not. Sometimes they are prolific, sometimes confused, sometimes angry.
Think of how many songwriters have written a few glorious pieces, but then written others that somehow are ok, but not earth-shattering. I mean Pete Townshend is recorded as writing around 140 songs, but how many can I immediately recall? And I was a fan of the Who and of some of his subsequent work. People of my age (ie old) remember “Pinball Wizard” and maybe “Who are You”, and “I can see for Miles”, but does everyone recall Pete writing, “All Lovers are Deranged”…. In case you don’t know that here it is… I don’t think Pete recorded it, but I’m sure he wrote it.
All lovers are deranged: but I’d also add so are creative geniuses. The point of the song above is that deep, intense love, changes us. Anyone who has suddenly fallen in love knows how utterly all-consuming it can be, how it takes over life.
So now transfer that and multiply by several hundred thousand, and you’ve got your creative genius. Genius creative people mostly can’t turn their genius on and off – it (their genius) turns itself on and off for reasons that are rarely understood. OK not Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, but most… including even Shakespeare who having written Henry VIII stopped it all, went home to Stratford and wrote nothing more.
And from all this and many other examples, we might learn that by and large it seems, when the creative ability goes, the genius doesn’t know how to bring it back.
If you want examples from Bob, think of 1971, 1972 and 1976 (in case you don’t hold the chronology in mind there are details in our series on Bob in the 70s). An average of three songs year. And this compared with 36 songs in 1966 alone. What made Bob operate at just 8% of a capacity that he had just a few years before?
Now compare and contrast the creative genius songwriter with your plumber. The plumber doesn’t lose his plumbing skills in the bad times. He might make mistakes because of something awful happening in his life, but he doesn’t lose the ability to plumb.
So my point is that creative people are different, and to understand them we need to understand that difference. Indeed this is why I created the Year by Year file – I wanted to be able to understand the ebb and flow of Bob’s creative genius across time. And when I started reading the “Double Life of Bob Dylan”, I thought I might get some insights or even some revelations.
Thus “What enabled Bob suddenly to write the masterpiece that was and is Visions of Johanna?” is an interesting question which perhaps can be answered via details of what Bob was up to at the time, what else he had written and so on. But then again what enabled Bob suddenly to take a very ordinary song like “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” and turn it into what I consider to be an utter musical masterpiece? I don’t know. This is 2014
And OK maybe for you that is part of the Tour that should be consigned to the bin rather than raved over, but I have tried to make the case for this re-written version of the song to be of very serious interest. But if you want to explore this further just consider what the song sounded like on year earlier.. This is from 2013.
However Heylin gives us nothing much about the creation of the music. Yes we are told that Bob was surprised at how he was booed in England when he did his half acoustic, half electric shows in the 1960s, and his comment in 2012 which Heylin cites, is helpful in understanding Bob’s reaction: “Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah and for what? For playing an electric guitar.” (page 425, quoting Bob in 2012).
Heylin is interested in proving how misled and misleading the critics were on the first electric tour, noting with the benefit of hindsight for example, how the English music press didn’t even send their own correspondents to the tour but simply lifted negative comments from the local press (none of whom had either a music or popular culture correspondent). And OK that’s an interesting reminder, but surely most of us by now know just what short-cuts the media will always take when they can. When you are told you have 400 words to write your article, complex situations get transferred into something simplistic. The music was no longer the theme – everyone wrote about the audience.
But that’s how the newspaper industry, and these days the on-line industry, works. Fortunately, I run Untold Dylan, and although my co-writers might occasionally drop me a note saying, “Tony, do you think you might have a look at your article on xxxx and maybe….” generally everyone’s work is published in full and without any change because that’s the idea. We value opinions. There’s no space limit.
Heylin does give us some conversations Dylan had, verbatim, which is good, but then immediately puts his own meaning into them. So Bob did talk at length to an Irish woman – I suspect a reporter, but it is not clear – and Heylin reduces her to IG (standing for “Irish girl”). Dylan is playing out his usual sort of banter with reporters, reducing complexities to simplicities, and coming up with answers to questions that could equally be lines from as yet unwritten song (“What you don’t know is that love is cold” is a perfect example).
And from this Heylin concludes that Dylan was “feeling desperately homesick”. And my point is that maybe yes, maybe no, maybe he was just overwhelmingly bemused by the reception his sessions with the band got, and anyway, so what?
Thus for me, by the time we get to the discussion about what Bob knows about Wales, I’m wondering what the point of it all is. The reminder that these journalists were interviewing Dylan without knowing his work is worthwhile, but the theme is not developed and Heylin goes on and on quoting them. Yet Heylin constantly seems surprised a) by the journalists’ ignorance (honestly, it was ever thus) and b) the fact that Dylan was getting very fed up by having to do interviews with people who, through not knowing anything about him, asked dumb questions. [An equivalent I gave recently when trying to explain this still seems to me to work. Question: “Tony what do you write about?” Answer: “Bob Dylan’s music”. Question: “Oh is he still with us?”
However now we are looking back, and if ever there is a way of looking back in print rather than music, it is via Heylin’s two volume work. And what we find is that Dylan is not particularly interested in the literary world – which I think we can take from the songs. Dylan was forging a new path for rock music, and got pretty fed up being interviewed by people who knew nothing of his music, nor the music which influenced him.
Yet Bob was and is, phenomenally knowledgeable about songs, and has an incredible memory for lyrics… and with those two facets to his life, he explored music in the 1960s (and has continued to do so). I suspect that to Bob, an intellectual debate about the meaning of his songs, is as irrelevant as a debate about the relationship between “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Lord Randall”.
"Oh where ha'e ye been, Lord Randall my son? O where ha'e ye been, my handsome young man?"
What is wonderful is the fact that Dylan knew the song and nurtured it to take its place in 20th century music, while so many have in fact lost touch with the musical heritage of their country.
But this means nothing to the media, for on the tour of the UK, the media did what they often did – they created the story the editors wanted, not a report of what actually happened. Thus there are nonsense tales of fans “storming out” because they “paid to see a folk singer” (while in fact everyone knew how the shows were shaped, from day one).
So what was happening on the tour? Bob was following his genius, as most artists of genius do. The audience, the publisher, the art gallery owner, the journalist can all give their opinions, but the genius creates what is created. Such art is rarely if ever created to order, and ultimately it is up to us, the people who look and listen, to decide what we think of what is presented.
Looking back over this period I am left with the image (which Heylin does indeed pick up on) of Dylan singing “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” for that was never more true
Dylan got used to the nonsense, and in contemplating his next venue (Paris) and the reception he might get there, said of the journalists, “Stupid questions deserve stupid answers.” It is good that Heylin quotes that, but a bit sad that he feels obliged to go into detail of how Bob was treated at each concert before reaching Dylan’s conclusion on page 445. Do we need the details of the nonsense at each show? What do we learn from that?
However over time Bob got the hang of the British media. He bought a glove puppet and took it into press conferences, answering reasonable questions seriously, but for ludicrous questions putting the puppet to his ear and then giving a silly answer to a silly question.
We do get a bit of a feel for the tour from the book, but as always we get Heylin’s view that it is he who really knows what is going on, not Bob, not the band, not the fans, not the journalists. We need (Heylin tells us) the Heylin understanding – whereas in fact what happened on the tour was mindboggling obvious. The media found a story (Dylan was playing electric and the fans didn’t like it), and then replicated it on every stage of the tour. Heylin says on page 448 Dylan “was misreading the situation.” But if that was the case, so was Clinton Heylin, who in writing the book seems not to have the slightest bit of understanding of how the English media worked at that time.
Dylan’s complaint at one concert was that he couldn’t hear the band properly (which can happen and can be very frustrating). Heylin suggests that Dylan was now “burning himself up” while the local press suggested he was taking drugs. And the music, and Dylan’s ability to perform when he can’t hear the band properly, well, no, we don’t talk about the music, because well, all Heylin wants to talk about is the audience. Lyrics, music… what lyrics, what music?
Instead Heylin mentions in quite a bit of depth ddetails of how the rooms in the hotels used had to be checked after the band left to remove all evidence of pills. OK maybe that is of interest. But really, not to mention the music, the songs, the arrangements…. not even once?????
And that pretty much sums up volume one. A man recognised as one of the great geniuses of the era, a man who later went on to get the Nobel Prize, a man who took rock music in an utterly new direction, a man who wrote some of the greatest popular songs ever composed, a man who entertained millions in his concerts, and whose career outlasted everyone else in the post-war popular music business, is portrayed at the end of the book ranting about where the speakers were placed. You can conclude that was Dylan off the rails, or you might perhaps conclude with me that Heylin did not have the slightest idea why the placement of the speakers was so important. Not even after over 400 pages.
Yes maybe the drug taking was part of this life. Maybe the audience booing some of the electric performances was encouraged by the media. But surely there is more to this tour than audience reaction. Surely there is more to understand than can be learned by studying a couple of letters that Dylan wrote and never sent (page 457).
It really is as if the tittle-tattle and tiny details are everything, while 100 plus compositions are just incidental. It is as if “Ballad for a Friend”, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, “Dont think Twice”, “Masters of War”, “Boots of Spanish Leather”, “God on our side”, “When the Ship Comes In”, “One too many mornings,” “Mr Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden” and “It’s all right ma” have never been written. Yes, they are mentioned, but only in passing. The big news is the booing, the drug taking and Bob getting annoyed. If you want to read about such things, this is the book for you. But if you are interested in Dylan’s lyrics, and/or his music, no, it’s best to take your pals to a bar and buy the first round.
- 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
- Part 14. A madman swallowed up by his own thoughts
- Part 15: What exactly is going on here
- Part 16: The irrelevance of normality to the artist
- Part 17: The revolution begins, but no one understands.
- Part 18: All that remains
- Part 19: All around the world