The series looking at volume 1 of Clinton Heylin’s epic review of Bob Dylan concluded here, and at the end of that piece, you will find an index to all the articles that were part of that series. This is part three of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”
Previously….
In my early days of trying to establish myself as a writer, I was told by a colleague who showed me far more patience than my work at that time deserved, that every paragraph should say something which if not important, was at least interesting or entertaining or frightening, or arousing or informative or tantalising, or if nothing else, at least enjoyable.
It’s a message that, in my view, has never been received by Clinton Heylin, whose prose suggests to me that the only reflecting he does once a piece is written is to say “how can I make this longer?”
Of course, I have no real knowledge about how he writes but I am endlessly caught by the thought that this is what happens: he wants to make it longer. Take for example the statement relating to 1967 when “Dylan was doing a whole lot of nothing and seemed content doing so.” (page 41). Of this time Robbie Robertson is reported as saying, “The other guys would go into town and pick up chicks and come back and party all night long.”
Quite why we then have either another 30 pages of Dylan doing nothing, or indeed why this statement about doing nothing is relevant and needs mentioning by Heylin I am not at all sure, for if it has anything to do with Dylan’s music or his mode of creating music, then it might be helpful if he could explain how. But Heylin does not explain. Instead, he meanders into pointless detail such as, “If the guitarist meant Woodstock, calling it a town in 1967 was a stretch. It was little more than a hamlet…” And given this is supposedly a volume about Dylan and his work, I find myself repeatedly wondering, does that matter? And yet this trivia is seemingly a central, in fact dominant, element in the book.
So I ask, what difference does any of this make to anything apart from pandering to the most prurient reader (who perhaps would be better advised to listen to some music)? Likewise, the “fact” (if it is such) that “Dylan drove his wife mad, leaving ‘movie’ camera equipment all over the place…” is not really vital to the situation. Dylan needed to get back to writing songs, because of the contractual arrangements reached with the two record companies fighting over his work, and he was going about it by living a fairly unstructured life, with other musicians around. That’s it. Sometimes great writing emerges from structured living, sometimes it arises from unstructured chaos. For most people it doesn’t arise at all. Ever.
[Just by way of example, and I am certainly not proclaiming my writing to be artistically significant, I have a structure to my writing day: I write my first article of the day (usually about football – [soccer]), have breakfast, bring the coffee back to my desk, read and answer the overnight emails, start work on this site, make a second coffee, speak to my work partner on the phone about what commissions, requests, threats of legal action, and interesting information has come in since yesterday, and then do some more writing and then I stop, play the piano for a bit, make myself a meal and in the evening go dancing. Not everyone’s cup of tea but it works for me, and earns me enough to get by].
That paragraph above in brackets is irrelevant to the issue of Dylan, but I include it because Heylin’s diversion into irrelevance seems to reach near hysterical levels (if such a thing is possible, and I never thought it was before reading this book), by noting that “… on February 5th 1967, two days after the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s unnecessary plane crash, he [Dylan] and Robbie Robertson flew all the way to Houston to watch Muhammad Ali fight Ernie Terrell in a private plane, in apparently atrocious weather.”
And for some reason, that seems to me to be pure Bob….
Now there is one point here, in that Mrs Bob was heavily pregnant at the time and many people (myself included) would expect that the husband might have abandoned the trip in case his wife went into labour. Indeed I recall my wife being pregnant with our first child and the football team I support playing a match 90 miles away – a match for which I had a ticket. I chose not to go because if my wife went into labour someone was going to have to drive her to the hospital quickly, and I wanted that to be me. Bob obviously had other priorities and quite possibly a resident doctor. But would they not fly because Buddy Holly had died? That seems unlikely.
So, OK, its a story, but not really that central. Besides we have a lot of other interesting insights, which are much more informative. All husbands and partners face the issue of how to arrange their lives when a child is due. But few are recording songs by the dozen, and in these circumstances, Dylan’s desire to get his songs recorded in as few takes as possible, rather than using the burgeoning techniques available in the studios, is of more specific interest here. After all many of us are fathers, but there’s only one composer of “Johanna”. And the few takes notion is interesting because that’s how it always is with Dylan, as for example in his decision to use the version of Visions of Johanna on the album in which the bass player makes a horrible error in the final verse, forgetting that it has extra lines in it. (As far as I recall Heylin didn’t even notice). Dylan obviously just didn’t want to do another take.
There is also something very odd about the way Heylin sees the world. For example, would anyone else call Buddy Holly’s plane crash “unnecessary”? Aren’t all crashes unnecessary? Would anyone else keep citing all these quirks in Dylan’s behaviour, and not draw them together into a personality profile which surely must relate at least in part, to his genius as a composer?
In this curious background approach to the world of highly regarded artists of the day that Tiny Tim (Herbert Butros Khaury who died in 1996) shines through as a really nice guy. But most other people in the story… well, they are not necessarily people you’d want to get to know unless you had to.
And maybe that is right. Maybe these musicians and hangers’ on were not nice, polite, concerned, gentle people. But then surely that is an issue in itself to be discussed. Why did Bob, and the people around him, not behave more decently to each other, if that is what happened? Why were they so self-centred? (And to be clear I am not saying they were, but rather pointing out that this is how Heylin views them, without ever asking, “why was Bob and those around him, not able to behave as we might expect decent people to behave?”
I’d then answer by saying, maybe it was because they were highly creative musicians. If so, let’s explore that a bit…
But instead we have Heylin’s vision of himself as a judge both of what is good music and what isn’t, (and what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t), as with comments such as, “At which point the tape mercifully runs out.” OK maybe it was an awful piece, but then if so, the question arises, why were the guys doing this? What did it lead to? Do all rock musicians who are searching for the songs for the next album behave in this way? (Answer, certainly not the few I worked with). Or is it just that Heylin sees himself as the ultimate arbiter of what is, and what is not, a good song, well performed? Sadly I think that’s the case.
The point is, once again the issue of creativity and purpose passes Heylin by. For Heylin refuses to see Dylan as a staggeringly creative person with an utterly extraordinary memory for music and lyrics, whose creativity and memory is the core of his being. Instead, he is constantly harping on about Dylan’s behaviour, as if one might imagine that a man with all this talent can just switch it on and off. A man, in fact, who can switch on his creative genius, create something amazing, and then be a perfect middle-class gentleman, looking after his family, doing all the right things….
And maybe that is an ideal – but in my experience at least, it doesn’t work like that. Life is not scripted and we all have behaviour patterns some of which are not so good. For some, those behaviour patterns are predictable to the point of being boring. For some (and highly creative people often seem to fall into this category) the behaviour can be erratic, self-centred, and less caring for others than we might wish. And that’s not good – but it seems to go with the territory. You can’t be an amazing creative genius but actually fit into everyday life like an accountant or lawyer or teacher or…. At least that is not how I have found life.
Meanwhile, for Dylan, projects come and go – they seem like a good idea, and then get lost. And yes that goes with the territory (it happens to writers as well as musicians) and is not an indication of a person who never finishes anything, because clearly Bob does finish things, such as albums. So he changes his mind, goes this way and that, as he searches for the next unexpected development in his career. But the notion that Heylin then puts forward that Bob “began to suspect he simply didn’t have it in him” to produce two albums a year [“product” as Heylin calls them] for the next five years., is yet another suggestion provided with no evidence or background.
Certainly what we do see, amidst what Heylin portrays as a chaotic life, is artistic integrity. Bob, it becomes clear, was certainly not going to let a record company put out something that he didn’t think was good enough or original enough or indeed novel enough – so in this period it seems he was “writing ten new songs a week, rehearsing them in his living room….”
That is an amazing output, although again Heylin cannot stop himself from denigrating the work of his subject, describing one piece as “a song of self-analysis, designed to save money on a therapist.” So what? That doesn’t mean it is going to fail as a piece of entertainment.
What in fact was happening, as Heylin does finally recognise (page 49) was that “a new Dylan [was] emerging”, through what was clearly a time-consuming, difficult and perhaps sometimes painful process. And yes, that is how original creative artistry often seems to go. The artist doesn’t know how to make it happen, and so casts around via a multiplicity of ideas, wondering what it was that made everything work so perfectly in the past.
And herein lies the problem. “Visions of Johanna” was a stunning masterpiece. But it can’t be created again – what is wanted is whatever it was that was happening in the composer’s mind that allowed Visions to come into existence, but which this time will lead to the creation of something different. But the artist doesn’t know if that is possible, and even if it is, how it can be made to happen. Imagine, you invent the hammer. It’s a brilliant idea, and everyone loves it. Then your boss says, “OK what’s the next invention…”
What Bob seemed to find, just as many totally creative people do, was if he tries less and enjoys himself more, then the gates to creative nirvana might just open. As Blake says in the Proverbs of Heaven and Hell “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, and it seems from Heylin’s description Bob tried some of that approach (although as far as I have read, Heylin doesn’t use that quote). So Bob appears (at least in the way Heylin writes it) to be improvising both in his lifestyle and in every basic musical idea he can find, in order to seek a way, if not to the palace of wisdom, then at least to the next album.
Part of this exploratory process then involved creating characters like “Tiny Montgomery” and this is indeed where the story gets interesting…. except Heylin then diverts into a rather tedious debate as to whether Bob used a typewriter or not. Which debate leads to the bizarre comment, that “so scant was Dylan’s regard for the lyrics, he was now producing like ticker tape….” Yes lyrics were then abandoned, as Heylin notes, but he seems to be utterly oblivious to the fact that for most artists, no matter what their field, no matter how great or poor they are creatively, probably around 90% of the output is rejected in order to keep the 10% the audience gets to read or hear.
I truly can’t see any real evidence that Dylan had scant regard for his lyrics at any time, as Heylin suggests. I suspect he was going through a process which is equivalent to the visual artist making sketches which are then jettisoned, or a playwright having a couple of actor friends take on character roles and improvise conversations, to help the author get the feel of his creations. Or indeed a songwriter improvising at the piano…
Improvisation worked at this time because now Dylan was getting back into the swing of things. For as Heylin says, Dylan “cut eleven original songs, one after the other, in no more than two takes….” The creative genius was back as becomes apparent as one realises that these songs included “You ain’t going nowhere”, “I shall be released,” “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Million Dollar Bash” – all in September 1967. Also in the list is “I’m not there” which Heylin dismisses as “semi-coherent”, a throwaway phrase that leaves me so fuming that even now I have to stop writing to recover.
Still at least he has the decency to quote Bob’s comment, a decade later: “At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe, and we were singing these homespun ballads.” And yes, there we have the clue to where this is going.
Finished off and rehearsed, this could turn out to be a fantastic song – but even without that, unfinished it is one of those songs that from the first time I heard it, has forever been part of my view of the world out there.
Yes she's gone like the rainbow The shining yesterday But now she's warm beside me and I'd like her here to stay She's an unforsaken beauty And don't trust anyone And I wish I was beside her But I'm not there, I'm gone
And then around this time, Bob had the idea of a song that begins, “Help me in my weakness…” Maybe there is no connection, but maybe one experiment clears the way for something amazing….
The series continues.
Where, exactly, is that bass line mistake?
The bass player forgets that the verse has 14 lines rather than nine. So the penultimate verse has
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
final verse has
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
So the three line section (starting with “See the primitive”) expands into a seven line section, in which the line “On the back of the fish truck that loads” seems like an extra line thrown in. With that line missing the final verse is simply an extension of the section, but that extra line makes it somehat lopsided. None of the other verses have that exatra line giving three lines that rhyme instead of two. The bass guitarist seems to forget there is that extra line and moves on to the accompaniment for “the harmonicas play” before correcting himself. It is very slight and hardly noticeable but it makes me think that Bob maybe slipped in that extra line at the last moment, changing things on the spur as it were, just because he can.