By Tony Attwood
This article is part of a series of articles started out as a review of Clinton Heylin’s tome “The Double Life of Bob Dylan.” It’s a massive piece of writing that I find uninformative and uninspiring, but it does have the virtue (for me, if no one else) of raising some issues which I’ve not really thought through before. Most particularly, as I get into volume two which covers 1966 to 2021, I note with something verying from dismay to utter horror, the lack of any insight at all on the issue of Bob’s phenomenal creativity.
That is to say, Heylin doesn’t consider how a massively creative individual such as Bob Dylan copes with, and eventually comes out of, a situation in which he suddenly finds the creative spark which was simply there, every day, is no longer present. And worse, how does he deal with the fact that there seems to be no way to get that creative spark back, no matter what he does? (Although to be fair I am not sure there is much written on Dylan and creativity although there is an interesting short piece on Dylan on Creativity available on line.
As I’ve noted in previous articles (listed at the end of this piece) I find Heylin’s volumes more a reflection of Heylin, his knowledge (and in parts his lack of knowledge – or at least understanding) of the way a creative artist creates, than a useful study of Dylan’s work. And the more I read volume 2, the more it makes me realise just how few people have tackled the issues of creativity, life, events and Dylan, as a whole. And it is the thought that a fundamental issue in relation to Dylan’s work is missing from Heylin’s account that leads me to keep reading what I find to be a rather turgid volume 2, (and then write my view of where Heylin has got it so wrong!)
So in a real sense I am very grateful to Heylin for he has, in writing what I think are two pretty awful volumes, highlighted the key issue that is missing from so much discussion on Dylan: the issue of creativity. Hence I am continuing with this series, while at the same time contemplating writing a series here specifically on Bob Dylan’s creativity. Perhaps more of that later.
A list of the previous rambling articles in this series is printed at the end of this piece.
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The third verse of Dylan’s “One too many mornings” composed in 1963 contains the “restless hungry feeling” line, and it is worth considering that verse…
It’s a restless hungry feeling That don’t mean no one no good When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’ You can say it just as good. You’re right from your side I’m right from mine We’re both just one too many mornings An’ a thousand miles behind
… it is interesting for it has within that verse a denial of the value of the ordinary and the everyday. For the restless hungry feeling doesn’t offer help to anyone, especially when all that is being said by me can be said just as well by everyone else. In such a world each person is right, and no one really is in touch with any reality other than her/his own.
Put another way, it is only when one uses art (in any of its many particular forms) either to express something important that has not been said before, or to offer a new insight into something that is well known or often expressed before, that art has any purpose.
At least that is what these lines of Bob say to me. It is not that the restless hungry feeling that civilisation or society or politics or whatever has gone wrong that is unhelpful. What is unhelpful is that we can all of us end up saying the same thing. That situation means all of us are just going round and round in circles, never exploring new possibilities and options. Everything, including life itself, drifts into becoming a cliché.
In a very real way this can be seen as a criticism of Bob’s own writing by Bob himself in 1973/4. A feeling that the writing is irrelevant if it is doing nothing more than repeatedly saying the same thing in a slightly different way. And according to Heylin this was the feeling that Bob very much had, to the extent that (in the words of Jerry Garcia to Rolling Stone) “he wants to get out of the music world.”
Now I have expressed my view a few times here that creative people are different from those who work in non-creative fields because the creative world lacks clear instruction manuals. You can learn how to be a physicist or a house decorator, and your work can be measured against established yardsticks. But being a creative artist is quite different – it is hard to establish how creativity can be taught or learned, and it is equally hard to establish rules by which creative endeavours can be measured. (Indeed when researching the subject at Nottingham University I recall several of us ending up with the view that the only way one could help students to be more creative in their work was to tell them to be more creative.)
As we can see from the recordings and all that has been written, Bob, in the early 1970s was very conscious of his creativity. If he had been an accountant or a bricklayer he could have been shown where he was making mistakes and could have been shown how to overcome the mistakes. Had he failed to learn how to stop making mistakes he would have lost his job, and that would be that.
But there are no re-training courses for creative artists, who have lost their creative spark simply because none of us quite knows where creativity comes from or why many highly creative artists can suddenly lose it. (We might think perhaps of the notoriously difficulties face by many talented musicians in terms of their second album: they threw all their creative ideas into the first album, and then, there’s not much more forthcoming).
As a result of this simple fact of life Bob was lost in the early 1970s, and as I’ve pointed out previously his creativity level dropped. He couldn’t write much that he was satisfied with, he didn’t know how to recapture his earlier productivity, and he had no one to turn to, Iin order to find the answer.
Thus as Heylin points out, Bob felt the need during this low period in his creativity, to “get away”. Now that is not an unusual feeling among highly creative people who find that their ability to create in a way that satisfies them, has gone walkabouts. Some simply stop, some travel, some take to drink, some just go through the old routine hoping the old spark will be rekindled, some have marriage breakdowns, but very few highly creative people actually talk much about this – for the simple reason they don’t understand why the spark has gone, or indeed what the “spark” was in the first place.
To get this in perspective, take 1962 – the year in which Dylan wrote at least 36 songs including “Don’t think twice” and “Hard Rain”. I am utterly certain that he, like other massively talented artists, didn’t have a plan as to what he was writing or how he was writing – it just happened. And then take 1968, when it all stopped. True the creativity picked up again, but then in 1971 it left him once moren – and because there was no one out there who could tell Bob how to get his creative spark going again, it stayed stopped.
In fact it wasn’t until 1973, that compositions like “Wedding Song”, “Dirge”, “Heaven’s Door” etc appeared (and I should add, I am talking about songs in regards to their originality of style and approach, not a case of whether one likes them or not). And with these songs, we can see a return of originality and exploration. In short, creativity.
And it seems that for Dylan, just like every other creative artist who hits a brick wall, he really had to wait for things to get moving again. Now I know in my own very modest way as a writer of a fair number of books, I’ve had that too. Not that I was in any way famous, but it’s how I earned my living, and so the occasional drop in the ability to find new things to write about in a way that people would find interesting just stopped, was if nothing else, financially painful. It was also enormously frustrating, and I suspect I took out my discontent on those I loved most, which was pretty appalling.
Yet I needed to keep writing because I had to pay the mortgage and the school fees. Bob however could afford to stop, but still, the sense that he used to be able to create brilliant new songs at the drop of a hat, seems to have gnawed at him. Yet Heylin, seeming to miss the point completely, quotes Jerry Garcia as explaining the situation by saying, “He’s in a house now with five kids in it. He has not time to write, no solitude.” And maybe that was true, but mostly I think whether one is one of the greatest creative artists of all time, or a jobbing writer (as I have always seen myself) when “writer’s block” hits, it hits. And you just have to wait, and meanwhile, try something new.
So Bob explored making a film. And (because this is what happens during periods of writer’s block), he started to re-evaluate and in effect downgrade his previous work. Heylin quotes Bob as saying of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, “Everybody loved it. It was shit. That was the end for me.”
Indeed with seemingly much merriment, Heylin goes to some lengths to tell us how Bob turned to writing the soundtrack for a movie, and how it was derided by the critics (page 175/6 of “Far Away from Myself” if you want the gory details).
But at the same time as this prolonged period of songwriter’s block there was an ongoing contractual battle happening between record companies, the discovery that past royalties had been seriously underpaid, the release of the rather poor retrospective “Dylan” album…. in short every part of Dylan’s professional life was a battleground.
Of course Siegfried Sassoon wrote poems of war, of the war he was very much a hero within, but it was not his war, it is was his nation’s war. Dylan was fighting a war over publishing contracts, unwanted record releases, intrusion into his private life… and all the time wanting to find a new way to be creative once more. Songs are started but abandoned.
And all of this comes back to one central issue. Successful creativity is something that in almost every artist, comes and goes. And to give the most famous example, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest around 1610, and then seems suddenly to have stopped. He left London, went back to Stratford, wrote virtually nothing more and passed away on 23 April 1616. It happens.
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
- 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life