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
- 9: Where do you go when the creative spark stops?
By Tony Attwood
Does it matter that Salvador Dali supported the Francoist regime? Does it make his works less important and insightful artistically? What about Goya? What is the relationship between an artist and his/her political views? If the artist has political views you don’t agree with does that make him less of an artist in your view?
Maybe not, but it can cause some to doubt the ability of the critic to fully grasped what the artist was up to, when critic and artist hold utterly opposing political views.
This writing a sentence which opens “Fittingly George Jackson was gunned down whilst trying to orchestrate a jail breakout,” before adding, “Fittingly Jackson was gunned down….” gives us a clear view of Heylin’s political agenda. And indeed many will agree with him about the nature of George Jackson. But that raises the issue, what are we to make of Dylan’s song “George Jackson”.
Is a song to be held in low regard because one does not agree with the message in the lyrics? If so then the whole of Dylan’s work is to be viewed from a political point of view., and only to be valued when his lyrics agree with the listeners’ political standpoint?
Of course it can be said that in this case, Dylan was wrong; Jackson was “little more than a crook,” as Heylin quotes, clearly suggesting that he agrees. But there really is a question here that does not appear to be recognised by Heylin, and that is, is Dylan’s creative art form subservient to the message? In other words if we don’t agree with the political message, does that mean the creative art is of lesser, or indeed, even of no value?
Personally I’m very unhappy about this. I think that for people interested in art, the art form and the political or religious or any other message within the art, is only one part of the story. I for example love the work of Salvador Dali, but his politics were about as far from mine as I can imagine.
Heylin clearly believes that the facts of who Jackson was, overwhelm any attempt to value the artistic creation of the song. More, he feels that within his books on Dylan, his own personal political view should become part of the story, as expressed in the line “Fittingly, Jackson was gunned down.” One only needs a passing interest in the law and justice for all, no matter who or what they have done, to be concerned about the gunning down of a person being a “fitting punishment”.
Now of course we all have opinions, and we can see that this section (as indeed elsewhere in the books) Heylin is constantly viewing Dylan through his own political lens. But this raises another point: Heylin doesn’t come out and confess this. Rather he takes it that his own personal views of justice etc are universal. He thus presents himself as the speaker for the whole of western society. The one who knows. The one who can tell us.
Yet we may ask, “Do we criticise Bram Stroker for developing the character of Dracula?” Do we take it personally? I don’t think so.
Heylin says, “Dylan has a long history of seeing criminals as victims,” yet Heylin persistently mixes the views expressed in songs with the view of the composer. Writers, like actors, do not always write about they believe in. Or does Heylin believe that a man who plays the part of Dracula, The Joker, or Voldemort really is that character? (So bizarre has this book become by sections 3.7 and 3.8 that I begin to wonder.)
My point here is that irrespective of Dylan’s view of the people he writes songs about, there is an issue here, and a viewpoint, that leads the author to conflate the message and the art. (He notes for example the “John Lennon turgid pro-IRA, pro-black power polemics for his latest platter…” and seems highly delighted that it was not a commercial success. But is Heylin’s convolution of the lyrics and the overall musical effect valid? Because Heylin feels a set of songs is turgid, does that make them turgid, or is it that Heylin just doesn’t agree with the politics? I was thinking he was saying, “What I say is right.” Now I start to feel he is also saying “My political view is right, and there is no other.”
For is the fact that some art is “commercially catastrophic” a measure of its artistic success? Repeatedly in the book Heylin conflates the two issues – if there is something he doesn’t like or agree with and he can point to it being a commercial failure, he certainly does, endlessly suggesting that by choosing themes and approaches outside of Heylin’s self-selected norms the artist will fail and will deserve the failure, for failing to represent the norms of Heylin, (which are in fact, he suggests, the norms of society.) And yet repeatedly in the creative world, artists have stepped beyond the norms of society, only to find society much later, catches up with them.
Indeed one could also point out the many love songs (of which Heylin seems to approve) are exceptionally trite, but Heylin never uses this put-down for love songs, he only does it for political songs with which he does not agree. He also seems to feel that he is the appointed one, who is allowed to comment upon Dylan’s work and give the official verdict (which is probably why the press like his work so much: they hate uncertainty but thrive on certainty, and if it comes from one source, so much the better). Thus someone who examines Dylan from his own point of view can be called by Heylin, a “self-styled Dylanologist”. But if so, then what else is Heylin?
Dylan, I feel, has always written what he wants, and that is part of the strength of his music. But Heylin sees Dylan as someone with severe problems (of the type which again by implication Heylin suggests he himself does not suffer from). Thus when some improvised poetry of Ginsberg was found to be being recorded, and Dylan reportedly said, “Turn that damn thing off,” (meaning the tape machine), Heylin calls this part of Dylan’s “paranoid visions.” But actually it could just as easily have been Dylan knowing that the resultant recording would have found its way into the wider world and be offered as an insight into Dylan’s creativity, when it fact it could be just a rough sketch.
But talk to any songwriter or performing musician, and the chances are that they will say, the last thing they want circulating are the early improvised run-throughs or written drafts, because they will be offered up as finished works of art, and not the early explorations they actually are. I can most certainly say as a writer that early drafts of my work are absolutely not intended for any sort of publication, and certainly other writers I’ve discussed this with privately feel exactly the same.
In short, the early musings of creative people which lead ultimately to the completed artwork are often things that are not to be exposed to a wider audience, both because they are not finished, because the artist is not satisfied and because the audience at large is generally ignorant of just how many drafts a work of art might go through. Yes sometimes the artist might agree to sketches being released, (as presumably Dylan has on occasion) but that is a matter for the artist.
This culture of demanding access to everything is clearly linked to rummaging through the rubbish jettisoned from the house. There might be nothing of significance there, but there will certainly be something of which some significance can be imagined. But it is the personal throw-aways of the individual, and surely we still have some willingness to preserve the rights to personal privacy among the living.
There is also the point that most of us can get upset or depressed or angry or any of the other emotions of which the human mind is capable of generating. Because of my insignificance in the world no one reports on my artistic outbursts, which fortunately have reduced over the years, but Heylin reports every Dylan moment as if the musician is unstable, rather than a man under a level of pressure and observation that almost anyone would find intolerable.
Mixed in with this is Heylin’s view that Bob was somehow unreasonable in feeling that he needed to be in a certain place with certain people around or not around, to be able to create good music. This is very similar to most of the artists I’ve come across, whatever their art. However, most artists have the fortune not to be mega-famous and not to be pursued by Heylin or someone like him; thus they could eventually settle down and work without distraction. Such a situation leads inevitably to disagreements with critics and the public about one’s work, which of course are hard to resolve since there is no arbiter who can decide what is good and what not. The artist might have one view, the agent another, the commercial interests another, the audience yet another. And quite often Heylin, another.
In this regard, Heylin presents a totally false view of the artistic world in which it is possible to make definitive opinions of whether the art is good or not. That is not the case. Sometimes there is a coming together of opinion over certain artwork such as in Dylan’s case, “Blowing in the Wind” and “Idiot Wind” and perhaps “Visions of Johanna” but other times no such consensus can be found. Besides which, the artist has to exist in the real world which in Dylan’s case includes bootleggers dustbin raiders and critics.
Of course most of us never have something that we have done at work described as “Merely awful” as Rolling Stone did on one occasion of a Dylan composition, but for most of us, our work is just our work, not our heart and soul. And here I can sympathise with Dylan, although of course working on an infinitely smaller scale than Dylan. For many years I worked as a copywriter – meaning I wrote the text for advertisements – and had numerous occasions where insults were handed back to me by our client, once my work was established. Fortunately, I was generally able to show that many of my advertisements were significant successes, but it can still be very frustrating to have someone who really doesn’t know anything about the creative work one is engaged in, dismissed. Because I wrote for different clients all the time I was able to see the results of my work in different arenas, and thus show that the denigration was not appropriate. But when Bob was infinitely braver than I, venturing as he did into new artistic fields, that outright rejection of a work of art by someone who had never written or sung a song in his life, must have hurt.
As for the fact that Bob seems to be mistrustful of many people around him, consider this sentence from Heylin (page 1777). “Columbia had miscalculated his royalties for the period 1967 through 1972 to the tune of more than $300,000.” CBS settled the debt and paid Dylan in full.
So yes you may think, “how good is that to get $300,000 extra in the bank.” But if you were still working for recording companies, you might start distrusting the whole industry. For perhaps even worse, (given that Bob wasn’t actually short of cash) was the fact that after he left the label, Columbia released the “Dylan” album claiming that most of the songs on the album were Dylan compositions, which they were not.
In short every part of Dylan’s professional life was engulfed in battles, and Heylin notes these. But at the same time, while Heylin rarely notes the effect all this might have had on Dylan, Heylin insists on finding meaning in every line that Dylan writes – meanings which he then associates with Dylan personally. The equivalent would be someone reading HG Wells “War of the Worlds” and then stating with certainty that Wells believed that Mars was inhabited and that it would in the near future launch an all-out assault on Earth.
But no, he didn’t; it was fiction. So why does Heylin not accept that song lyrics can be, and indeed mostly are, fictional? If Dylan writes, “I hate myself for loving you” that does not mean he does have the emotion. He might, but we don’t know. What we do know is that he’s writing a piece of music for us to enjoy.
Worse, Heylin suggests is that his own understanding of Dylan is paramount; his view is definitive. He clearly is no musician himself, but he can criticise musicians for destroying an “otherwise exemplary rendition”, but of course he can’t really explain himself. When a friend of Dylan says, “I think it’s one of the best songs you’ve ever written,” Heylin’s response is “which it wasn’t by a long chalk”. And how do we know that Heylin is right? We don’t. He demands to be seen as the ultimate insider. He simply demands we accept. And indeed we can say that all the articles in this series are about what happens when we deny that acceptance and instead read Heylin’s work critically.
Beyond everything else, Heylin does not understand the creative artistic process (rather than the process of the critic), in which the artist of whatever type he/she is, keeps on playing around with the work even when others think it is done. Even with “Dirge”(above) which Heylin admits is brilliant, he has to say “He had unwittingly tapped into his bloodiest track in years”. Unwittingly? I’m not sure, and Heylini offers no proof.
Yes this is Heylin, so even when praising a song, he has to suggest that the success of that work happened “unwittingly”. It was ever thus.