How Bob Felt at the Time (The Double Life of Dylan part 7)

An index to the current series running on this site, and many of the past series is given on the home page: I don’t know what it means either, but it sounds good.

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.”  Again an index to previous episodes is at the end.

By Tony Attwood

Part 7: How Bob Felt at the Time

“While Dylan’s own contemporary work made almost no impression, his influence on contemporaries had never been greater.”

That statement relating to 1971/2 is made on page 142 of the second volume of Heylin’s magnum opus, the Double Life of Bob Dylan, and to me it is one of the most important comments the author makes.   For apart from being informative it raises all sorts of interesting questions about how Bob felt at the time.

Imagine, if you can (and it is hard, I know) that you have been one of the most idolised and lionised songwriters the world has ever known, and then you find you can’t do it any more.   You simply can’t write songs that satisfy your own criteria or reach the standards  your past work achieved.   What on earth do you do?  Do you release it anyway, or just pass the time, watching (as it were) the river flow?

It is of course not an issue that most of us get anywhere near facing, most obviously because we never get to the point of having worldwide fame for being a creative genius. Or indeed thinking that our own artistic endeavours are of particular merit. Besides, to have had all the fame and adulation that the average rock star gets, and then fade away is one thing.   But to have been hailed as the greatest songwriter of them all, and then find you can’t write songs that satisfy you, yourself, any more…. What then?

What Bob seems to have done, quite reasonably it seems to me, is to find a club which had live performers he liked, and where people wouldn’t make a fuss about Bob turning up, to watch and listen.  And it was in this hinterland, far removed from the mega-crowds at concerts, that “When I paint my masterpiece” emerged.

Of this time, Jochen, on this site, has described the situation far more lucidly than Heylin could ever manage, saying,”1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

“Then, in January ’71, a tape of Leon Russell floats by, inspiring a brief but long-legged revival: the songs Dylan recorded with Russell in March ’71 are on the setlist 50 years later, throughout the Rough & Rowdy Ways World Tour 2021-2024, night after night, some 200 times.”

Thus it was a composition that led, apparently, to a return to the ability to write songs there and then in the studio – a remarkable ability indeed, and one upon which many who witnessed it, looked on in total amazement.  Just as many of us are amazed by the music even before we learn that it took just ten minutes to write the piece.

Of course “When I paint” is a piece that sees Bob telling it as it is – the song does begin, after all, with the line, “What’s the matter with me I don’t have much to say”.  It is a song about the creative urge having gone, leaving behind it no trace.

And then, having created such a wonderful song, someone (presumably in the record company) decided to release it as a single.  It didn’t make the charts, but maybe it did remind a lot of people that Bob was still around.

At the same time there was another problem, apart from that of how (if at all) Bob might re-enter the music marketplace in a pre-eminent position.  And that problem was the way in which those who had known Bob personally in the past, through having performed or recorded with him, were now adding to their declining incomes by reminiscing about Bob and his move away from the sort of music that had made him famous in the first place.   It must have seemed to Bob that the chance to step back and reconsider himself, was being totally undermined by those who had known him in the past and were ready to accept a few bucks from a passing journalist to put forward their view on how sad was that Bob was no longer, well, to put it bluntly, “Bob.”

As Heylin notes, suggestions were even made to the effect that Bob had an obligation to both his public and the bands who had taken Bob’s songs and presented them to a wider audience.

And yet such a notion is surely nonsense because it ignores (as Heylin ignores) the two totally separate levels of reality in which successful songwriting occurs.

First there is the ability to write and complete a song which the songwriter is very happy with.  A song which makes the composer think, “Wow, I did that.”  If you are not a person working in a creative field you might find this hard to understand, but it is there for many artists, no matter what their field of work.  The visual artist, the actor, the singer, the author… each has feelings about his or her own work, and these feelings are utterly independent of what the world of critics, fans and friends say.

Then second there are the comments of others.  For a world-famous composer such as Bob Dylan there are of course millions of such comments, and he will undoubtedly only bother with a few, usually from people he respects.  But even here if a negative comment is made about one of his compositions that he really holds in high regard, it will be his feeling of the song that survives, not that of the friend-turned-critic.

Thus an artist of any kind often operates in some kind of “otherworld” when creating, and only when pausing or when the work is completed, (if at all,) does he/she consider what has been created.  And at that moment the artist can then reject all that has been written / painted / created / recorded in relation to the song, or accept it.  It is his/her decision, and it may not reflect the view that the public has.

My own feeling (and I’ve not done serious research to validate this beyond it being a feeling) is that in the “down” and “recovery” periods that most creative people go through, artists are more critical of their own work than they need to be, comparing their current efforts with the very best they have created in the past.   And this is related to the fact that as far as I can tell (from I admit knowing just a few creative people, and from trying to analyse my own modest book, article and to a lesser degree song writing) when one returns to creative work after a period away, one can be much, much more self-critical than before.  It is as if one can imagine one’s past work to have been at a much higher level than it actually was, and thus be attempting to reach a level one was never at before.

At the same time there is the issue of confidence – something we read about when at the very last minute, Dylan almost backs away from doing the concert for Bangladesh, seemingly losing his nerve about being on stage.   As we know of course, George Harrison calmed Bob down, and all went well.

Alongside all this, Heylin tells us, complex contractual negotiations were going on in relation to Bob’s future work.   And this really is something we need to pause and consider.  For here we have issues relating to huge amounts of future income (issues written of course in legal terminology which is often obscure to the non-legal mind), issues relating to appearing on stage in front of thousands on site and millions more who will see the video, and issues relating to being able to write new songs that are (in the minds of critics and fans and onself) as good as the old ones.

What does come over however is the fact that Bob was at this stage in his life – this period when in our lists of new compositions little seems to emerge – taking back control of his life AND of his art.  Control of what his recording contract said, control over when he played and what he played, and control over which songs that he had written were to be released.   And since what he wrote was utterly dependent on his emotional state, and since his emotional state influenced what he felt should be in the contract, what he played and when he played, pretty much everything went around in circles.

Heylin, who is much more a reporter than a creative writer, doesn’t really get this in my view, and the amount in his volumes about Dylan as a creative writer (let alone as a creative genius) is vanishingly small.   Which is a shame, because the reason we want to read these books is because of Dylan, the creative genius.

In short, I do get the feeling that Heylin doesn’t really understand the essence of creativity, even though creativity is the very heart and soul of the man who he spends so many pages writing about.  Bob however was utterly, totally aware that his creative levels had dropped, and like most creative people to whom that happens, he didn’t have any idea what to do about it.

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
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning