By Tony Attwood
If you have been extraordinarily patient or perhaps you have a particular interest in creativity as a subject, or maybe you just don’t like the work of Heylin, you might be pleased to note that I have decided at least for the moment, or perhaps permanently, to stop reviewing Heylin’s mega work “The Double Life of Bob Dylan volume 2 – Far Away from Myself”.
The reason is I seem constantly to be drawn back to the same problem over and over, a problem that I perceive in the text, time and time again, which put simply is that Heylin doesn’t understand that being a mega creative person who lives or dies in terms of his work, via the strength and variety of his creativity, makes the individual very different from the most if not all people who don’t live their lives through creative activity.
Heylin does attempt to describe Dylan at work in some of his hyper-creative periods but even with that doesn’t quite seem to get the impact that this has or relate to the experience of creative activity in terms of Dylan or anyone else. To summarise my previous episode of this series, Dylan was creating what many people would consider one of his greatest albums – indeed some might say one of the greatest albums of all time in the genre of popular music – and was producing recordings that many of us would have been utterly delighted to hear on the album, but was then still continuing to re-record some of the songs, changing lyrics, adjusting the melody and so on.
This is the utter opposite of a person who is asked to cut down a tree or oversee the operation of a machine that makes mobile phones. In such circumstances there is a right and wrong way to do things. There is no right or wrong way to write a song.
But beyond that there is something else. Because your view, my view and Heylin’s view there is no absolutely right view. There might be general agreement that Bob Dylan is a master at writing songs but even within that there will be disagreements about which version of a particular song is the best. And indeed, judging by Bob’s decisions as to which songs to put on an album, and which to play in public, his view is not always the same as everyone else’s.
What would be interesting would be to use the enormous amount of information that Heylin has at his disposal to see how those decisions are made – and I felt this, particularly in reading the “Into Dealing with Slaves” chapter. I felt Heylin was probably more excited by calling a chapter just that, rather than thinking about the music and the lyrics.
But anyway, Heylin and I disagree fundamentally. His view is that it is possible to understand what Bob is up to a) with very little reference to the music and b) without considering at all the notion of creativity.
For creativity is not just about making something new – we generally don’t consider a child’s scribbles in a book to be “creative” much more than we consider most sandcastles creative, nor singing a Christmas Carol in an unusual accent to be “creative”.
For being creative is far more than being different – it is being different in a way that gives us new understandings, new feelings, new insights etc, in a positive manner. And the “positive manner” part is important – it doesn’t have to make us feel good but it has to make us interested.
“Blowing the Wind” is, to my mind, a highly creative work, because it used the basic elements of folk music (a simple melody and the four basic chords of much folk music, with a repeated line at the end to emphasise the message) in a way that was different from anything I had heard before. The message itself in the lyrics is tantalising, suggesting as it does that “the answer” is out there, but is hard to grasp.
That message – that things might be unknown and difficult to understand – was quite different from the message of most popular and folk music of the time, and yet it was put across with a gentle lilting melody which is normally associated with certainty rather than uncertainty.
Yes of course Dylan does suggest in that song that there is an answer out there, but through the phrase “The answer is blowing in the wind” he is telling us it is hard to grasp. Compare that message with the message given in the lyrics of most popular and folk songs wherein the message is one of clarity.
This however gives the composer a problem – because if the lyrics are going to be about uncertainty, how is the music to reflect that? The composer might be tempted to answer that by making the music more chaotic, more uncertain, but Dylan does the opposite.
Moving on we might also consider another song of total uncertainty – “Visions of Johanna”. From the opening line (“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks….” we have that uncertainty message. But again Dylan does not reflect this in the music, which is built around three chords once again. Yet the uncertainty of “Blowing in the Wind” where everything seems to be up for grabs and anything is available and out there if you look for it hard enough, is quite different from the uncertainty of “Visions of Johanna” where instead of the world offering all possibilities, the world is now playing tricks on us.
Put another way, with “Blowing in the Wind” everything is out there if we want to reach out and explore it. With Johanna, nothing is available because we are stranded, and unable to reach out.
This message of uncertainty is obviously not the only issue that Dylan deals with, it is one among many, and part of the fascination with his work is that he does indeed deal with so many different issues. I think Professor Timothy Hampton who described “Tangled up in Blue” as a set of sonnets gave us an insight into the structure and helps us see the way in which the lyrics keep changing their starting point, from for example “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’,” through to “And I was standin’ on the side of the road, Rain fallin’ on my shoes” all in one verse.
Yet again Bob redefined how popular music could work with concepts and ideas far more complex than was the norm in the early days of either the blues or rock ‘n’ roll, both of which are very simple in their structures and lyrics.
Now for me, given an artist who is dealing with such matters in so many varied ways, this whole notion of Bob leaving his wife to go and watch a boxing match while ignoring the issues he deals with in his compositions, just seems bonkers.
There are many artists, in all the areas of art, whose work I have greatly admired through my life, but whose personal lives I might find less than acceptable models for how one should behave. I choose to let that go, because it is the art, not the artist’s behaviour that interests me.
And maybe that is my problem. I find the issue of Bob and his neighbours, or Bob suddenly changing his mind, or Bob letting people down, irrelevant. Just as I don’t go to see him in concert to hear him discuss his private life, that doesn’t concern me when I listen to recordings of his work.
Now of course that does raise another matter. Supposing we have a genius artist, whose work offers extraordinary new insights into humanity, the human condition, human interactions etc etc, but whose personal behaviour is (to us, to me, to some people…) utterly deplorable. Supposing their political views are utterly abhorrent to me – do I reject their art, as a result?
For me that is not an abstract question since I have faced it with Salvador Dali, whose work I do admire, and which has influenced my own thinking. His politics are not something I am drawn to, but that doesn’t affect my view of his work. I don’t really know about Bob’s politics, but that doesn’t worry me. Nor am I bothered whether he believes in the messages to be found within some this work or not.
Thus I wasn’t bothered when he started writing what I might call Christian music, even though I am an atheist who believes that religions should be treated like any other institution or society in my country. But if Bob chooses to write and sing songs about Christian values that is up to him. I can still enjoy them as pieces of music.
I know about Bob Dylan and write about him, because of his music, and I can value his songs irrespective of the words, or through the words and music, as I choose to do. It makes no difference to Bob of course, nor any difference to anyone else. I see him as an extraordinarily brilliant creative force in 20th and 21st century songwriting.
Heylin goes a different way and seems to think that Bob’s actions in his personal life are valid areas for commentary alongside reviews of his artistic endeavour. I think that’s codswallop. I don’t care about the personal life of Salvador Dali, JS Bach, Beethoven, Roy Harper etc, any more than I care about the personal life of William Shakespeare or William Blake. I appreciate and enjoy their work. The fact that Shakespeare suddenly packed up, went back to Stratford and stopped writing is a point to be noted with interest, but it doesn’t change my enjoyment of his work.
So Heylin and I are on such different tracks I see no point in continuing with his massive tome. I am sure many people will have loved it, but I find the list of accolades on the back cover singularly depressing. If Andrew Motion seriously meant it when he wrote in the Spectator “Clinton Heylin is the eminence grise of Bob Dylan scholars” I can only say Andrew Motion, and I, are not only on different planets, but in different galaxies.
- 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
- 12: Blood on the Tracks, a lesson of creativity in process
- 13: Conclusion: there is no double life (this article).
The dead horse is left where it died.