The series looking at volume 1 of Clinton Heylin’s epic review of Bob Dylan concluded here, and at the end of that article you will find an index to all the articles that were part of that series.
by Tony Attwood
It is quite extraordinary that having spent the entire first volume of his two volume epic on Dylan, that Clinton Heylin opens volume two “Far Away from Myself” with a review of how drugs can change a person. He brings into the discussion Syd Barrett, a truly wonderful composer and performer who I had the honour to watch perform several times, and who indeed was then lost to all of us.
Dylan’s movement onward however causes Heylin to get a bit tangled up not in “blue” but in issues such as the aftermath of his infamous motorcycle accident, and his movement on from the use of drugs. He also finds a need to link writer’s block (something that everyone who works in the arts can get I think, be they very minor commentators or those capable of producing major works of genius).
Heylin speaks of the “fog descending” indeed not just once but twice, and I think he does hit the spot at the moment that he says Dylan was “creatively shot” (page 4). But, and this really does follow on from my complaint about the first volume of Heylin’s magnum opus, he doesn’t venture into any sort of discussion about what creativity is and how it relates to the work of Dylan.
Part of Heylin’s problem is, I think, his desire to take a Dylan line (For example, “I’m trying to get as far away from myself as I can”) and feel that this line has to have a deeper meaning than what it appears to mean when we first come across it. And maybe it does; but maybe not. The writer in any genre who knows he/she can produce a book or poem or article or filmscript to order, but wants this latest piece to be truly different, knows exactly what this feels like. Except that when faced with Dylan’s statement Heylin can’t reist noting that Dylan “now interweaved a mosaic of intercultural references with imaginary lives, convincing would-be Dylan scholars to become Sherloocks, as they followed the trail of clues without ever asking themselves, Is this man still doing pretty good stuff”.
OK so that is a review of reviewers and what they write, and yes sometimes that can be a rather helpful point to make – except when the person writing the review of reviewers is himself the arch-reviewer, the man who claims to be (or if he doesn’t claim to be, allows his publisher to claim him to be) the ultimate reviewer, interrogator, interpreter of ultimately authority on Dylan.
Which means we are now going around in circles. “Would-be Dylan scholars” I suppose does not include Heylin, because in Heylin’s own eyes, he is the ultimate Dylan scholar par excellence. Or if not, is he just the ultimate critique of all Dylan scholars, the man who takes in all that is written on Dylan, digests it, and then tells us what we should ignore and what we should believe? Looking back I think, probably yes.
For me, and of course this is simply my interpretation of Heylin’s interpretation of Dylan, Dylan’s life, his words and (in my case but virtually never, ever, Heylin’s) his music, suggests that Dylan had perhaps created “the persona of an amnesiac from the bits he remembered when he had been a genuine amnesiac.” And quite honestly I find that neither illuminating nor entertaining.
In fact, the opening of this second volume all seems to be about suggesting that Dylan quite often knew he was stringing the world along, except (according to Heylin) he wasn’t when he proclaimed he was “sick of love”. And how does Heylin know that he wasn’t telling fibs at this point? Well, he forgets to tell us.
All of this, served up by way of introduction to the second part of his magnum opus, lays out the details clearly: Bob Dylan doesn’t, and hasn’t ever, really known what he himself, and by extension, his writing, is about, nor what his “message” (if there is one) actually means.
Of course, in the aftermath of the motorbike accident different people were spinning different tales about the crash and its impact Maybe the accident was trivial but Bob used it to get some time and space. But … so what? The fact is we know that Bob survived (if there was anything to survive) and went on to produce some more music in the decades thereafter, that many of us like quite a lot, and which many consider truly ground-breaking.
What is particularly fascinating in what is for me, if not for other readers, an incredibly disjointed opening to volume two, is the final quote from the introductorory page and a bit of part three in which Dylan is quoted as saying to Anthony Scaduto, in early 1971, “People shouldn’t look to me for answers. I don’t know what’s going down on the campuses, what’s in their heads. I have no contact with them, and I’m sorry they think I can give them answers. Because I can’t.”
It’s a fair enough statement from Bob, and it really doesn’t need any further explanaition; it is how he sees himself and the world.
The chapter itself is titled, “There must be some way out of here” – the opening of course of the song Dylan has performed on stage far more than any other (2281 times as of mid-October 2024, the last performance being the day before I write this). And we are told that it was Richard Farina’s death in a motorcycle accident that made him (Bob) think of the line – or something like it. But even here Heylin disagrees – and then takes us into more and more detail of how despite being told to give up the drugs, Bob was still smoking dope.
So let’s stop at this point and ask simply why this smoking dope issue is relevant (leaving aside the issue of whether it is true or not).
Is the point that smoking dope shows what sort of man Bob Dylan was, is, or became as a result of his fame etc etc, or is the point that Bob Dylan is one of the most remarkable composers and performers of pop/rock music the world has ever known, who on occasion smokes dope, just as I (most certailnly not a composer of any note) had a rather enjoyable couple of glasses of Merlot during the course of the evening (an evening within which, I hasten to add, I most certainly was not driving).
My argument is that ok, it might be of interest to some people to know about Dylan’s alleged drug taking – and fine they can go and read this. But Heylin’s massive two volume pièce de resistance is, at least at the start of volume two, a diatribe about Bob Dylan and drugs. Page after page after page of it in fact.
The period covered by the opening of this book is June 1966 to May 1967. I don’t immediately have to hand details of which songs were written in which month, but I can say with some certainty that during the entire period from the start of 1966 to the end of 1967 Dylan wrote 43 songs which were recorded one way or another, and kept. That makes this one of the most incredibly prolific periods of songwriting in Bob’s life.
Except that… if you were to see a list of these songs (which you can do here if you wish – just scroll down the page a while) and you will notice something strange happens. For although we start out with a set of songs you will undoubtedly know (Sad Eyed Lady, for example, One of us must know, etc etc), by the latter part of 1966 and through 1967 Dylan was writing and/or performing songs that only the most knowledgeable of Dylan students will be able to recall instantly.
What is also rather fascinating is the fact that the last five of the songs in the second of those two years are all about the concept of “moving on”. It is as if Bob had gone through his escape period and now was ready to take on the world afresh. Which of course he did.
Heylin does go into enormous detail as to what Dylan got up to and how his life changed around this time, and eventually gets around to considering the lyrics he wrote in what we have come to know as the post-accident period, but he doesn’t seem to be able to get to grips with it at all. Certainly there’s hardly a mention of the music, and actually not too much about the words either.
But above all I guess I just come at the whole thing from a different point of view. Heylin wants to tell us about Bob’s mental state and it is good to know that Bob was just enjoying himself (page 30) but really there should be something here here that is more than “A bunch of Basement Noise” at this point in Bob’s life.
In my view Bob was clearly rebuilding himself through music, and the existence of recordings of the music that was performed at that time is a remarkable document – especially when we consider what came next.
In the article on this site in which we list all the songs from the Basement Tapes I made an attempt to note in just a few words for each track, considering what each song was about. Which leads to the simplest of observations that songs about “moving on” appear rarely at first, but dominate at the end of the period tells us something.
Just that one simple thought seems to me to be more interesting than a debate about whether Robbie Robinson was exaggerating when he said that Bob would play songs the band had never heard. Indeed Heylin’s phraseology here is particularly interesting, for he writes, “Though it is hard to believe that the Hawks would not already know ‘You Win Again’….”
And maybe that’s it. The story continues to be what Heylin believes without any real reference back to reality. “A Bunch of Basement Noise” it might be to him (to use the title of his chapter on the period) but not to all of us. And surely, even if you don’t particularly like the music, as a guide to how Dylan was clearing his mind and getting ready to produce an album as different from his previous work as anyone could possibly imagine, the Basement Tapes are surely a valuable reference work. Although actually it is far more than that, if only Heylin could hear it.