How to ignore important details: Heylin far away from reality (updated)

 

By Tony Attwood

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 five of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music

This article was updated on 11 November 2024 (after I published a draft version, rather than the finished version – apologies for that!)

There is a quote from Sara Dylan at the start of Section 3.4 of Heylin’s book in which she complains about the “crazies” (as Heylin calls them) coming up to the family home.  She complains in part that “we get a Christ every six months coming up to our house… We even got John The Baptist last year.”

In a way, that sounds rather amusing., although for myself, that feeling only lasted about one second as I quickly recalled some of the people who turn up at my house (in a small village in Northamptonshire, England, with beautiful countryside views).  Indeed for one religious sect, I had to point out what my profession was and then threaten to write an article about their harassment of me when they kept on turning up, even after I had told their various representatives and their head office that I absolutely did not want to see them, and found them a menace to society.

But I am sure that was as nothing to what the Dylans got, and probably still get, and it must be really distressing – especially when some of these unwelcome guests actually enter the house without one knowing.

Heylin records a few such matters, but … and this is one of the key things that really does frustrate me about his mega-biography of Dylan… he doesn’t take any of this into account in his subsequent review of either Dylan’s behaviour or his work.

Certainly, the religious fanatics (as I perceived them) repeatedly turning up at my home frustrated me – and it was only happening two or three times a year.  What must it have been like for the Dylans and their children?

But Heylin takes no note of this as he goes on to describe Dylan’s behaviour which he suggests generally is unfeeling toward others, and in his estimation it seems, decidedly odd.

Now I complained earlier that among other things, Heylin takes no note of the effect of being a genius generally has on one.  The artistic genius, I noted, often doesn’t know where his/her genius comes from, and what turns it on and off, and so doesn’t know how to proceed when the perceived quality of work declines.   There are, after all, many mentors around who can help people through all sorts of crises, but I doubt there are many, if any, who really know how to help a creative genius when the buzz goes away.

This problem of uncertainty must have been even more exaggerated for Bob Dylan when having struggled (as Heylin describes it) to find his direction, he produced albums such as “John Westley Harding” and “Nashville Skyline” which not only went in different directions (particularly when compared with those that preceded JWH) but which were each a commercial success.

What was happening here is, I think, an incredibly interesting issue.  For it raises the point, is there some abstract way in which we can measure the musical effectiveness, brilliance, beauty or anything else of music, or are we just to consider that those that sell the most are the best?

Such questions sadly are far beyond Heylin’s ability to consider, and instead we get sentences such as “Absurd as it sounds “losing his audience’ had a certain perverse appeal to the befuddled amnesiac”.    And later, “Could career suicide really have been at the back of his mind?  If so, he was going about it the right way.”

These could be interesting topics to debate it’s true, except that when Henylin gets near such issues he cites one unnamed person who “stormed out of the room” on hearing “Blue Moon”.  What’s the point of adding this to the text?  We are not told.

So we get the feeling via Heylin that Bob Dylan was withdrawing into himself.  And we get reports about how Dylan treated some journalists’ questions if he thought they were too silly to answer.  There are also bits of amateur psychology, and in the end, Heylin concludes that in most things “Dylan was incapable of making a definitive decision.”    I truly doubt that, but of course I can’t prove my point.  But it does seem to take us back to the key issue: where does creativity come from?

But once again because we have no background information on Dylan’s creative ability, how it works, why sometimes it doesn’t work, and what he did in order to try and get his creative juices flowing again, these situations described by Heylin look like the tantrums of a spoiled child.

And yet I would argue, if one studies the work of most highly creative people, they go through such phases and can find these times incredibly difficult to handle.  After all, how would you feel if, having become the supreme musical megastar of all time, you then discover that you didn’t really know what to do next or how to do it?   While at the same time having record company executives pointing out that there were contractual obligations to fulfil.    And all the while having Heylin writing stuff about how you’d lost it (whatever “it” was)?

So this is really my main complaint about Heylin’s work.    Heylin makes no attempt to understand the music either in a structural way or from an aesthetic point of view.  He makes no concession to Dylan’s background or the way his image has been treated by the media and the record companies.  And likewise he shows no understanding of the pressure that Bob Dylan must have been under all the time to produce more music of the quality that we had all admired in earlier years.  In short, Heylin ignores all the important issues and instead gives us tittle-tattle.

It is true that he does quote some of those who came into contact with Dylan at this time, and one issue that was a problem (“He’s the center of attraction, and he hates it”) but there’s no attempt to dig further into this.  It is as if we have to accept that this is all Bob’s fault for simply not settling down and writing another “Visions” and another “Desolation Row”.

Of course one can take the view that one shouldn’t go into the music business if one can’t cope with stardom – but how could one tell in advance?  And come to that, how can one know what it will be like when the creative tap is turned off, but the media and fans are all still knocking at your door?

Heylin in fact goes down his own route – he takes one issue (for example buying a house) and then having sketched that out, he generalises to suggest that he (Heylin) has a complete understanding of Bob’s mental health issues at this time.  And to be clear, using the phrase “mental health issues” is not meant to imply Bob was mentally unsound, rather that he was suffering from a very high level of stress, and did not seem to have anyone at hand who was able to help him.

This is quite clear from a response Dylan is said to have made to a comment by Paul Simon.  Simon said words to the effect that Dylan had of late lost his cutting edge as a composer.  In fact Bob need not have made any ripost, but the fact that he apparently chose to say something perhaps reveals something of Bob’s fragile state at that moment.

And what disturbs me about Heylin’s book at this point is that Heylin is constantly there in the background suggesting that all he is doing is recording the events, whereas in fact he is being highly selective about what he reports, and the comments he makes.   Thus he leaves aside the issue of whether he, Heylin, has the necessary background and understanding to write in depth about the mental health pressures that can arise when a highly acclaimed creative artist feels unsure about his work, and what he might produce next.

The fact is that Bob had a recording contract that he had to adhere to; a contract which like all contemporary music contracts took no notice of the artist’s ability to be as successfully creative today as he was yesterday.  Apparently, Dylan wanted some privacy, and of course one can say, “Well you can’t have both anonymity and all the earnings from those songs.”  But the contract says nothing of such matters.  It just assumes that Bob can go on creating musical recordings that the audience will love – and that these recordings will be something unique to modern times.

Yet Bob was quite likely simply going through a period when he wanted to be obscure.  That might be the cause of what Heylin calls his “insidious nostalgia”.

Yet is that a reasonable description?  Most of us get nostalgic at some time, and often do so without a completely realistic view of the past.  Indeed it seems that Bob was uncertain about how realistic his thoughts were and how good his music and performances could be, as witnessed by his surprise appearance at a concert by The Band.  It was not just his amazement that he could still instantly wow the audience, but also his delight at then being back home away from it all afterwards.

What comes across to me is that Bob didn’t, during this time, seem to have a set of friends that stayed constant – friends who would be there and would always treat him as a pal – people who would understand and make time for being called when the friend was in need of support, no matter what time or day it was.  Or if he did, Bob found it hard to stay constant with these friends – which is not unknown in circumstances of the type described here.

Now of course that might be right –  but (and this is another huge problem with Heylin’s work) it is constantly unclear where Heylin is getting his insights from, and there can be little doubt that if Bob did have a few very close friends and confidants at this time, they would be extremely unlikely to talk to someone like Heylin who presents himself as the great unquestionable authority on all things Dylan.

Which really does bring us to the major problem with this book.  Heylin appears to be working as a private detective trailing through the detritus of Bob’s life long after the event.  Would those who really knew Bob actually talk to someone like Heylin?  I have my doubts.

Now add this notion to the fact that Heylin is constantly critical about Bob and his lifestyle, and indeed quite a lot of the time (when he bothers to mention them at all) Bob’s compositions and performances, and what we have is a book of negative tittle-tattle mostly supplied by outsiders mixed with a set of suppositions from an author who seems to have no musical ability or knowledge, and particularly importantly in this part of the book, no knowledge of creativity and how creativity affects the creative person.

It is almost as if the book needs a co-writer, who does know at last a little bit about those two rather vital subjects.