- 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?
- 10: How free is the artist to say what he wants?
- 11: I am not me
This is part 12 of the series “The Double Life”. And may I say, even if you don’t feel inclined to read my thoughts below, I do hope you might spare a moment to listen to the recordings included. And if you don’t have time for them, please do try the final audio within the article. Unless of course you already know it.
By Tony Attwood
“Why Dylan felt the need to write another blues lyrics and apply it to the tune he already had for ‘Call Letter Blues’ is one more for his therapist.”
That comment from Heylin on page 220 of “Far Away From Myself” by Heylin pretty much sums up my argument about the way Heylin sees creativity.
The fact is that many creative people (and here I am not just thinking of Bob Dylan, or songwriters in general, but almost all the people who can be called genuinely creative, in that they create items or works which are considered by many others to be not just unique but also of considerable merit) find their creativity comes in bursts. When it isn’t happening, it is hard, often impossible, to do something that will trigger another set of creative artistic outpouring. When it is happening, the creative person accepts it, and gets on with the creativity, until the creative burst once more fades. If it doesn’t and just stays there, then this is the absolute creative genius at work. (As opposed to the person just being a run-of-the-mill creative genius.)
And this is part of the mystery of creativity. Not only is it hard (if not most of the time, impossible) to get a non-creative person to start producing works, items, or come to that simply “things” that can be genuinely described as creative in the normal use of the word, it is also hard for the often creative person to come out of a downturn and start to create once again.
Of course, a few highly creative people appear to be creative all the time. In musical terms we might think of JS Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, my regular three examples of men who could create constantly at the highest level. In writing, Shakespeare obviously comes to mind (although for the last four years of his life, he appears to have written nothing at all, and just simply stopped). But these are the exceptions. Mostly the creativity phases itself in and out.
So if we ask why Bob wrote another set of lyrics for “Call Letter Blues” – the answer is because he was on a creative high, and thus the lyrics, and indeed the music, just kept on pouring out. Bob’s therapist wouldn’t have been able to help because what turns on and off the creative flow in highly creative people is generally considered to be something internal which even the individual experiencing the phenomena can’t really explain.
Of course, the results can be disconcerting. As one of the assistant engineers in the studio is quoted as saying “We had no idea what he was going to do, so we had to be ready for anything.”
In a later comment about the process it is said, “He was totally and completely immersed in the creation of this album,” which again is a statement about a man who is living through a period of very high creativity.
In such a period, for a person not used to working with highly creative people who succumb to the creative process when it gets into full flow, the reaction of the creative individual can seem strange, as with the notion that Bob was “only interested in first impressions.” This happens because for the creator, the artist’s work is there, it has emerged in one rush, and he/she understands it in that immediate moment of its formation. To think that others might need to listen to or look at a new artwork several times in order to appreciate it fully is alien to such a creative artist. He or she can appreciate it at once, both in its individual parts (for example individual lines of lyrics or melody or both), so why can’t everyone else?
Indeed the depth of Bob’s understanding of his own work is revealed through the comments that those working with Dylan made, and indeed which we have ourselves made on this site in passing; that Bob likes to explore some of his songs in different keys.
Now for most people, including quite a few experienced musicians, the song is still the same whether you play it in the key of E flat, E or F. Yes the melody is fractionally higher as you move through those different keys, and on some musical instruments, the accompaniment is harder to play in one key than another, but still, for most people it is the same song. For Dylan seemingly it is not.
Heylin doesn’t really explore this notion and simply seems to put it down as just another odd Dylan quirk, but changing the key really can alter the feel of a piece to someone who is completely “inside” the music.
But if there was a problem for Dylan in the creation of “Blood on the Tracks” it appears to be that he was so full of his own creative endeavour, he could not appreciate how everyone else might struggle to keep up with him. Indeed the thought occurs that had Dylan not already had his almighty reputation as a songwriter and performer, others involved in the production of the record might not have put up with his approach, and might even have dismissed some of the songs that we now consider to be absolute gems.
For if we just look at the Dylan songs composed in 1974, for most songwriters this would be seen as the absolute highlights of their careers. For Bob Dylan this set of songs came pouring forth in a very short space of time. Lily, Rosemary… Tangle, Big Girl, Shelter, If you see her, Twist of Fate, Idiot Wind, Make me lonesome, Up to me, Buckets of Rain… these are not just excellent songs, they are among the monuments of the genre. And they all were written one after the other, for an album.
It is also interesting (at least to me if no one else) that apparently when first having recorded the material for the album, Bob was interested specifically in people’s first impressions of each song – which of course was how he was judging each song because each song was coming to him as a virtually completed item, and “all he had to do” was to write the lyrics down.
Quite how each song came to him in such a way is of course part of the mystery of the creative process, but the reports of the sessions involving these songs most certainly do make it seem as if this is what happened. Bob had the idea, wrote it out, recorded it. The only reworking he wanted to do was on the recordings themselves – specifically it seems in terms of varying the accompaniment.
And it is here that we see part two of the creative experience. The songs came to Bob in a great rush, as he wrote them down. But after the rush there was a slower thought process (very common among highly creative people) as to what to do with the song. Should it be as recorded in that first burst of excitement and novelty, or should it perhaps be reworked with a simpler accompaniment….
But this is not the same as a producer then listening to the recording and manipulating it, adding a string section, taking out the percussion, and throwing in a female chorus, all after the recording session is complete. This is the composer constantly playing with his own work. Not all composers do it, and whether they do does not depend on how much of a genius the composer is, it is a matter of disposition and temperament.
And what is interesting in this regard is that having laid down the tracks at hyper-speed Bob then invited one or two musicians to listen to the tapes and add an element of the accompaniment if each felt he could.
Only after all that did he then re-record the whole album, and according to Heylin, by this stage he needed “some reassurance,” asking people if the recording was good enough, and on occasion working the same song over and over again, despite apparently already having recordings that the others involved felt were really good and worthy of inclusion on the album.
Thus we see, although Heylin doesn’t really seem to grasp it, a creative process across a number of days. The sudden burst at the start which leads to the creation of the songs, the high energy of getting each one recorded, and then the slow downturn as the creative burst is still there but begins to decline, and the uncertainty in each case as to whether the recording, or even the song, was indeed good enough.
Overall this is a really interesting set of commentaries that we get concerning the making of an album – right the way through to the fact that at the end of the sessions, Dylan is himself able to appreciate which of a range of takes of each song is actually the one that fits best within the album.
However it is also clear that the album was not conceived as an album as such, as final changes were made and at least one song had to go to keep within the absolute time limit that the technology of the day would allow.
And at this final stage, there is a further interesting point: not for the first time it took Dylan longer to decide on the running order than it did to record the song. And even then it seems Bob was not sure.
Heylin is good at describing the come down after the intensity of the writing, recording and mixing sessions, but reading his account it seems that he feels that these are issues of as much import as the creation of the songs and the recordings. True, in one very specific sense they are, because the tale of this sublime album, is a tale of the rising up of creativity in the writing of the songs, the sustenance of it through the recording, and then the decline of that extraordinary burst which led to uncertainty and the suggestion that the album needed “corrective surgery.”
It is a perfect tale of the way in which creativity works within the human mind. Quite how and why, is a totally different question. But over the recording of this album, Heylin does give us insights into Bob’s extraordinary work when his creativity is at its most potent and fulsome.
What we can take from Heylin’s account is that Bob suffered from the aftermath of an incredible creative high, which led to the creation of the songs and the first set of recordings and then their reworking into the version that we ordinary people got on the album.
The whole experience of making the album changed Bob Dylan. But then buying and listening to that album over and over again, changed many of the people who experienced the album that way. We didn’t know we hadn’t got the version of the album that the gang in the studio (except Bob) had loved, but we still had a treasure. But what Bob had done was created and lived through an experience that for most of us is impossible to imagine. If that album meant a lot to us, just think what it meant first to those who were involved in creating it, and second to the man who wrote it.