Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life, and the right to object to intruders?

By Tony Attwood

As you may know, if you drop into this site regularly, I have been plodding my way through Heylin’s two-volume critique of Bob Dylan (previous articles from volume 2 are listed below) And although I’ve only reached page 163 I’ve also reached the stage in volume two where I am just about ready to give up.

But I’m not for one reason – Heylin keeps reminding me of brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Dylan songs I have not played in years. Not that Heylin actually mentions these songs, and certainly not because he praises them, but rather because I find his commentaries so naff, that I am forced to go back to the songs from the period he is writing about, just to see if maybe he is right, and my memory is playing tricks.

And what has brought me to this “time to give up” point today is Heylin’s assertions (around page 160 of volume two) that Dylan had, between 1971 and eearly 1973, become paranoid and could get angry.

Now as it happens I did study psychology, (although I stress not psychiatry) and I read enough in my student days and while working on my research degree, to have learned something of paranoia. And in this position, I have found the throw-away use of the concept of paranoia, (as when Heylin speaks of Dylan’s “paranoid visions” in a flippant throwaway manner), distasteful, frustrating and wrong. And indeed I fear Heylin’s commentary in relation to Dylan’s view of the world in general, is a vision that has significantly damaged some people’s view of Dylan.

And what gave me pause today, in contemplating the next part of Heylin’s book, was the notion of how I would react if I found people prowling around my house and garden, rummaging through my dustbins (trash cans, I think in America), and then writing a lot about me in the media on the basis of what they found.

Of course I don’t know how I would react, because the reviews of my books and articles, when they have happened at all, have generally been moderate and modest. A few utterly negative, a few full of praise, but mostly middle-of-the-road. But still, two things strike me here.

The sort of interference in his private life that Dylan was subjected to in the early 1970s is totally beyond all bounds of reasonableness, in my view, and I suspect it would be enough to send almost anyone over the edge into paranoia (and I am not saying that all that Heylin suggests did happen to Bob, but even if it did it, Bob was not becoming paranoid, but simply getting very fed up with the intrusions into his private life.)

Now for myself, I like to be social, and I love going out, much as I enjoy my time alone at home, writing articles such as this, writing songs that only a handful of people will ever hear, and undertaking the commercial work that I do. But I wonder, as I sit here writing, and gazing onto my garden and the fields beyond, how would I react if I suddenly looked up from the computer monitor and saw some people I didn’t know prowling around my garden, climbing the trees, taking photos, going through my dustbins and maybe trying to enter my house?

I guess I might go out and politely say to the intruder, “Can I help you?” but on the other hand, if the prowler looked as if he/she might have a tendency to violence, or perhaps looked as if she/he had consumed various behaviour-changing substances along the way, I might just call the police. But then again, given that I read last week that we are currently 20,000 police officers short in England, while the number of crimes rose by 10% last year with the number of violent offences rose by 20% last year (figures from the Crime Survey of England and Wales), maybe I would be more circumspect, lock doors and windows, turn off the lights and hide.

And all this is in a small English hamlet mentioned in the Domesday Book, and where I don’t think we’ve had a crime in the 20 years I have lived here.

So what does Bob feel about this intrusion in his private life? Heylin’s suggestion seems to be that by getting angry about people going through his trash, he is revealing his paranoia. Personally I think he’s being very restrained.

Heylin also appears highly critical of Bob’s experimentation – as for example when he gets Ginsberg and others into the studio to produce a spontaneous set of songs. OK it’s an idea, and it apparently didn’t work, but full praise (from me at least) to Dylan for trying. The problem for Bob is that such failures are noted and remembered. The problem for Heylin is that he doesn’t realise that virtually every artist in every form of art has disasters. It’s just that most artists manage to destroy them before the world gets hold of them (or in my case as one publisher pointed out far more kindly than I deserved, “I’m not sure this book is quite what the market is ready for.”)

Is Dylan being annoyed about the intrusions, Dylan being unreasonable, ungrateful, eccentric, or anything else? Or is it just an artist privately exploring where his art might take him next?

As a result of my writing of Untold Dylan (and indeed my other daily blog on issues surrounding the football (soccer) club that I support) I never see people prowling around my house, any more than I suspect you do. But how would I react if I did? Come to that how would Heylin react? Of course, I have no idea in the latter case but I guess I would call the police. (I’m not sure they’d turn up, but I would call them anyway.)

According to Heylin, in 1972 and 1973 Bob’s response to these unwanted intrusions into his private life were on occasion, neither calm nor measured, and although we may regret that, it is understandable, especially as this was the period in which Bob was finding it very hard to do his work as a songwriter.

We know that Bob wrote 15 songs in 1970, five in 1971, two in 1972 and 14 in 1973 (a full list of these songs and those of the rest of the decade are here). We’ll all have different views on each song, but out of those 36 songs maybe half a dozen are of the type many of us would consider “classic” Dylan songs.

Now in comparison, Dylan wrote 36 songs in 1962 alone, a single year in which the compositions included, among all these others, at the very least, eight brilliant songs such as

… and indeed playing “Tomorrow” (above) as I write this, still moves me deeply after all these years.

Dylan of course didn’t forget his past, and he surely must have realised that he was now struggling to write so readily, so easily and quite so wonderfully, while at the same time, he had at least one moron rummaging through whatever he chose to throw away. And yet Heylin spends his time suggesting Dylan was losing his ability to compose songs that we would remember forever. To which the most polite reply I can make is, “He was not then, and is not now, a machine.”

And if you doubt the validity of what I am saying, go out and find anyone who is involved in any of the creative arts at whatever level, and ask that person if she/he has emotional ups and downs, finds it hard to explain why some days / weeks / months it just doesn’t happen, and knows how difficult it can be to relate to those around who have no engagement in the creative arts, when the creativity simply dries up.

Of course Heylin, with his multiple books, might claim he is engaged in the creative arts, but reading volume two I reach the conclusion that he actually is just spouting opinion, which is rather different.

But there is something worse about Heylin’s writing even beyond this, for he has a habit of taking a single issue, or a single moment, and generalising out of it. For example, he quotes a situation in which a family friend, Bob Finkbine, was having a coffee with Bob and Sara, and Finkbine asks Dylan if he ever had a time when he had difficulty in writing. Sara is reported to have jumped in and said, “Try the last two years.”

Now first let us remember that these are three long-term friends having a chat in the kitchen about this, that and everything. It’s the sort of thing many people do – I have a pal who comes round to my house most Friday afternoons for a coffee and cake. We have no idea what we are going to chat about, but we usually chat for two or two and half hours and for each of us there is real pleasure in escaping our work (mine as a writer and my pal’s as a researcher and data analyst). These are relaxed conversations where all sorts might be said, and I guess each of us could recall the other, over the years, saying something that would fit any worldview that was being developed.

But so what? Is something I said on Friday afternoon to my pal in the course of a two and a half hour chat going to be seen as fully representative of my world and my worldview? Maybe it might reflect my feelings that day, that week, that month, that quarter, but probably not more than that, simply because in conversations with really good friends most of us relax and explore some inner feelings. What is said often doesn’t really mean anything.

And besides, across the period 1971 to 1973 Bob wrote 23 songs that we know about, and looking back at that list of compositions, I’d pick out 11 songs that I would and do still happily listen to

Yes of course some of these are now largely forgotten other than by people who really admire or love Dylan’s compositions. Indeed the final one in the list “Wedding Song” from Planet Waves- it was played nine times in a two month period in 1974 and then left. And maybe you haven’t gone back to it, but if you have five minutes to spare, do try it again.

That, I would argue, like the other ten songs above, is an extraordinary piece of music. And indeed although I know quoting oneself is a really naff thing to do, I am going to repeat something I have said before about this song. “Image falls onto image as thought pushes thought out of the way, but there is that unrelenting vision that he is not the Leader, he is not here to change everything, certainly not here to tell us what to do. He is just a guy.”

So why dismiss it – indeed why is Heylin dismissing the whole list of compositions? Sadly he never tells us, for as so often happens, he doesn’t justify his opinions but instead states them as facts. Which they are not.

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
7: How Bob Felt at the Time

Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life, and the right to object to intruders?

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