Heylin keeps stalking Bob Dylan
Part Two of massive bio is, well, massive.
The Double Life Of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin Vol. 2 1966-2021 Far Away From Myself
By John Nogowski
Clinton Heylin’s 13th (or 15th, one entry had three editions) book on Bob Dylan is 836 pages long, including the index. The Old Testament, King James version, is 1,184 pages.
Since Heylin’s latest book leaves off in 2021 and Dylan, at last report, is still alive and on tour, puzzling his audiences as to what song he’s playing until he gets to its title, there’s still a chance Heylin might yet catch up. Like the Old Testament, “The Double Life Of Bob Dylan” is overwrought (in spots), judgmental, mystifying and at times, seems to go on forever.
At the same time, there is so much IN there, if you’re a Dylan fan, you can’t help but pore through it, nodding here and there, shaking your head sometimes, wincing at some of the sentences (“he had a couple more jump blues his live set needed like JFK needed a hole in the head.”) But somehow you find yourself reading on and on and on.
We certainly learn that along with recording and touring extensively, Bob is or has been quite the pelvic missionary. There may well also have been some double-dealing with the recent flurry of “authentic” signed lyric sheets – just like those “signed/stamped” copies of “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” There may also have been some funny business with Dylan’s paintings, too. Who knows?
Since the Dylan archive in Tulsa offers the actual complete recording sessions for many of Dylan’s albums, it figures that Heylin would be the kind of guy to go and listen to take after take of song after song that in some cases won’t make it on the record. In some cases, he wonders why this was left off and that was left off and lets us know all about it. This is not exactly breaking news, particularly, since Dylan fans are well aware of what gets left off records. That, in part, is responsible for the creation of The Bootleg Series.
But what we, as fans, don’t generally know are the specifics and qualities of all the songs recorded for a particular album and the choices that Bob Dylan faced when it was all done. Heylin gets ankle deep into this kind of thing here. On the one hand, it’s neat that somebody KNOWS that, I guess. On the other hand, isn’t it almost TOO MUCH information? Whose album is it, anyway?
In a way, it would be like you, right now, looking over MY shoulder as I write this paragraph, you suggesting more semicolons or fewer adjectives or whatever. It’s one thing to peek through the window into the recording session. It’s another to act as pseudo-producer, isn’t it?
Sure, Clinton Heylin has probably listened to more Bob Dylan than anybody this side of Bob Dylan himself, but does that mean he’s qualified to tell us what HE thinks should have been on the album or what verse Bob should have used, is he? Isn’t that solely Bob’s decision? And shouldn’t it be?
Back in the day before bootlegs (and YouTube) you might read something by Greil Marcus where he had gotten to listen to some surreptitiously obtained tape that you knew, as a reader, you never would. And it’d piss you off (at least it did me) that he was going on and on all about something we’d never get to hear.
Now, apparently, there IS access for some people to listen to entire tapes of these Dylan recording sessions. Like EVERYTHING. Recently, whole series of takes of some legendary Dylan cuts are appearing on YouTube. It’s darn sure that “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” on Take One sounds absolutely nothing like Take 15 or whatever it was, the tune we know and love. Yeah, I guess it’s neat to trace the progress. At the same time, aren’t we losing some of the mystery around creating something magical?
Whether intentionally or not, whether it was learned behavior he found necessary to keep the creative process alive for himself, Dylan has always had lots of shifts and diversions and changes in direction and carving each one up to try and solve something, ah, I don’t know what purpose that serves.
If, for example, when Heylin listens to the official recording of, say, “Neighborhood Bully” and then writes to tell us Take 4 was way better and Bob was a moron for not choosing that one, what does it all mean?
The late Paul Williams, who might have been the most enthusiastic Bob Dylan listener and writer ever, used to write these pieces “You Have To Hear This Tape.” And while I admired his enthusiasm and occasional insights about Uncle Bob, almost none of us were ever going to hear that tape he was talking about. So what was the point? Did we miss ANOTHER great Dylan concert? I’m sure that wasn’t his intent; he seemed about the kindest man alive. But where do you draw the line? Or can you, with Bob Dylan?
To me, and I’m probably alone in thinking this way, the fact that Dylan’s notebooks and scribbled half-ass lyrics sheets and other paraphernalia is on display at the Dylan Center in Tulsa is counterproductive. Sure, I suppose it’s better that we have the stuff instead of tossing it into a dumpster somewhere but there was a reason Dylan chose not to use that verse or that take, an artistic decision – whether right or wrong. Maybe I’m being old-farty by suggesting we are not respecting that by rummaging through all the leftovers and, as Heylin does again and again, make a big deal out of it, truly questioning Dylan’s decision-making.
We’ve all done that. When we heard “Series Of Dreams” or “Blind Willie McTell” or a bunch of other songs, we thought what the hell is wrong with him. But ultimately, it’s his call, isn’t it?
A thoughtful friend of mine suggested, “Well, if Dylan turned over all those manuscripts and notebooks, they’re fair game, aren’t they?” Which is true enough. Like lots of Dylan fans around the world, we love hearing the little tidbits, the stories of Bob in the studio or on the road or the on-stage patter, whatever. There’s a new book out now, chock full of stories about what it was like to play alongside Dylan. And sure, some of them are interesting – if not particularly surprising - to those who’ve followed him for a while.
And if I sound like an old coot, so be it. But I wonder if Heylin obsessively fussing with all these unheard items, items that he heard and we didn’t (and won’t) ultimately takes away what IS offered on record or occasionally, in concert. Would we appreciate “Hamlet” more if we had all sorts of deleted scenes and stage direction instead of the brilliance of the play itself?
There’s more to quibble with. Since the story Dylan shared with us in his acclaimed “Chronicles, Vol. 1” in no way resembles the way Heylin would tell The Bob Dylan story – THE REAL BOB DYLAN STORY, in other words, he shreds the book. As others have suggested Bob “borrowed/heisted/lifted/stole” sentences and used lines from random poets (Henry Timrod) or even from novels that appear in his songs on “Love and Theft” in particular, when it comes to “Chronicles, Vol.1,” Heylin really takes the plunge.
Back in November of 2003, Heylin opens discussion on this topic by quoting Dylan as telling someone “Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” But later, Bob tells interviewer Edna Gundersen he completed single sections in one sitting, “because if I stopped, I didn’t want to have to go back and read it.”
Whereupon Heylin, whose own prose most critics agree could certainly use some pruning, goes ahead and calls the kettle black. “Perish the thought a first-time author might need to sometimes rewrite sections,” Heylin sneers. Then he drops a real bomb.
“Instead,” Heylin suggests, “he look a leaf from the magpie,” in other words, swiping lines from elsewhere. Heylin fires out what he calls “unDylanesque phrases” from pages 63, 96, 112, 167 which he says are “verbatim lifts from Jack London’s prose.”
Which may well be the case. So? If Dylan did write that way – you’d wonder why his editors didn’t catch it in the first place. You’d also wonder why someone who, in the recording studio at least, is more intractable than just about anybody in the history of recording (there’s account after account of this kind of behavior on the other pages of the book) would resort to cribbing someone else’s sentences to flesh out his own thoughts. Could you write that way? Why would you?
Unless this is Bob’s somewhat perverse sense of humor, pulling yet another in a continuing series of fast ones on all of us, perhaps especially those who chased down the rabbit holes of where he found those sentences. There are some poor souls out there who have NOTHING better to do, evidently. Instead of spending hours reading two hours of Robert Louis Stevenson to find two sentences that may or may not be in “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” maybe try and listen to what is recorded and write about what some of these songs offer, rather than their ingredients. Or read some Chekhov. Or Hemingway. Or Twain. Bottom line was, did the book work? You bet your ass it did. Does it matter HOW he pulled it off?
Now it’s true, sometimes writers do those sorts of things. Remember James Joyce talking about his intent for his just-about-unreadable “Finnegan’s Wake,” – which he actually included in the book – “and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.”
Yeah, Joyce might have been one of the greatest writers of all time but did he give two and three-quarters of a shit about writing something his readers would understand? Hell, no. This was all about him. Look what I can get away with. And he did.
Now, we don’t know that Bob has ever read “Finnegan’s Wake” but from what we know of him and his sense of tomfoolery (Re: The Complete Basement Tapes being Exhibit A,) and his general overall “whatthefuck” attitude, it’s a sure bet he would have approved of what Joyce did. Maybe he did something similar. We’ll never know, will we?
On the one hand, here is Bob Dylan, getting these rave reviews for “Chronicles, Vol. 1” and telling author Jonathan Lethem “…with the book I wrote, I thought: The people who are writing reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell they’re talking about. It spoils you. They know how to write a book, they know more about it than me. The reviews of this book, some of ‘em almost made me cry – in a good way. I’d never felt that from a music critic, ever.”
To some of us, at least, Dylan lays out his story straighter than he ever has (and of course, some of it is made up, he’s writing about 50 years ago) and it was touching. And he, at least to Lethem, admits he was touched, too.
Or maybe he’s sitting on his bus somewhere in between gigs, silently laughing to himself that he pulled another fast one on the world. Maybe he did.
Continuing on through the book, there are all sorts of little items that will make you laugh or nod or wince. You can’t say Heylin didn’t dig. We discover Bob was a fan of former band member Willie Smith’s Hawaiian shirts (taking them without permission!), that Band member Richard Manuel unsuccessfully reached out to him while Dylan was in Japan just before Manuel hung himself in a cheap Florida motel (almost implying Bob might have saved him had he been able to take the call) and that Bob’s wry sense of humor had him pulling the chain of his friend George Harrison on a song for his “Under The Red Sky” album, dutifully recording Harrison’s guitar solo, even though it was way out of tune, then Dylan telling him it was perfect. There’s more, much more.
There is no question that, like Star Trek, Heylin goes places no other biographer has before – or at least it seems that way. Some of that is, of course, he’s written so many damn books on the guy. Shouldn’t it be against the rules to write 13 (or more) books about one guy, unless he was Jesus Christ or something?
Some of it is Heylin is just inexhaustible on the topic of Bob Dylan, even after all those books, all those pages, all those opinions you’d think the guy would run out of something to say. Nope.
Unlike, say, Greil Marcus who has said, flat-out, he is NOT writing another book on Bob Dylan after his fine “Folk Music,” Heylin seems poised to sit back down at the computer and let it rip. This book leaves off in 2021 so we know there’s at least three more Dylan years and tours for Heylin to critique, hoping for more.
As Bob says at the end of the closing song on “Under The Red Sky” in one verse that Heylin DIDN’T second-guess, “May the Lord have mercy on us all.”
Amen
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third edition of a book I’ve been doing on the career of Bob Dylan for McFarland and Co. since 2005. It’s available on Amazon and covers everything he’s done up through 2022, including “Rough And Rowdy Ways.”
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