I wrote that one myself, I said to her.
Did you? she replied. It was quite good, actually.
We talked briefly, and it became clear that she believed what I'd said. So there's a woman in Belfast who thinks I wrote the single of the 60s. It's starting to be all over now, baby blue.
Wouldn’t be easy to measure the influence of Dylan in, and on, my life. At St Colman's College in Newry, while the bogmen played gaelic football, a small, self-appointed hip group ('Anglos', as the priests derisively called us) was holed up in the school library, with Stephen Donnelly's cheap Eko guitar, trying to work out Hard Rain, Oxford Town and so on.
By that stage he'd 'gone electric', of course, and was producing breathtaking, revolutionary fare like Subterranean Homesick Blues. No-one nowadays can comprehend the extent of that seismic shift in pop music from moon and June and spoon to cool, smart, hipster jive ... You could tap your foot and actually listen to some very interesting words ...
But, even more than that, he had opened the door on Woody Guthrie, and from Woody was a path to Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), and back of and beyond that were Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Blake, Gary Davis, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller ... the men who were truly 'come with the dust, and gone with the wind', and from whose sacred canon of blues and ragtime tunes I still play simplified selections, crudely imperfect, on the streets today.
And there was more. How should we live? In those days Bob had the answers: don't follow leaders; nothing is revealed. Sure there’s nothing else to say after that. Unfortunately it turned out that he didn't follow this sound advice himself. He is terminally attracted to 'witchy women' - zen, spiritual, astrological, mystic types that most of us lads would rather be buried alive than spend five minutes with. The crap he has come out with in his later career trying to attune himself, and us, to these fruitcake goddesses and their head-up-the-arse cosmologies.
Plus, there is his dumber than dumb 'saved' period when he behaved and talked and sang like a hectoring, bigoted, moronic bully. Which he was. I can't even bear to think of the shite he produced then. But get on any of the fan groups on Facebook, call him out for that, and be buried in abuse from true believers.
So how come I celebrate his Nobel Laureateship? It's like this. There are two parts to Dylan's career. Part one goes up to, and includes, 1967's John Wesley Harding album, i.e. the years when he was an artist in the true sense (if it has any) of that word. What he accomplished then is easily worthy of the Nobel.
Part two, however, is what followed, as he turned into just a singer-songwriter, though one who still showed occasional flashes of genius. When I recently 'contributed' this insight to a Facebook group called Dylanology, you can imagine what happened, and soon the admin gave me the bum's rush. Mind you, I'd already made a few (obvious) jokes suggesting that the early Bob was just copying Donovan, and I had, naturally, incurred a mountain range of humourless wrath from dreary acolytes. So I was riding for a fall there anyway.
Do we need another book on Dylan? Well, in 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. Clinton Heylin was given access to this collection, and found so much that's 'new' he felt it necessary to begin all over again.
Heylin is the big cheese, head honcho, numero uno, top dog of Dylanologists, having disgorged a freight train of Dylan books as long as Desolation Row. Supremely dismissive of most other writers on Bob, he always goes that extra hundred miles to illustrate how uninformed, unresearched, and unreliable they are. He is never happier than when skewering them for their inaccuracy, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and plain old stupidity. Nevertheless, he might well be justified, especially since he's all over this stuff.
And, incidentally, you know you're dealing with a heavyweight when, in the author blurb, he notes that he has two history degrees.
Anyway, this new two volume life is not your usual let's-start-with-the-great-great-grandparents rigmarole. Heylin assumes you are broadly familiar with a lot of the background story, and recalls only specific incidents he thinks instrumental in forming our young hero (like his good friend Larry Kegan's tragic accident).
Much of the book is like this, presumably so that Heylin can fit in plenty of stuff from the archive. If you're looking a blow-by-blow, strictly chronological life story, look elsewhere. Sometimes the detail can be oppressive. The quotes from, and analysis of, archive extracts is, frankly, boring. A lot of Dylan's scribblings are simply rubbish, though Heylin might argue that he's trying to construct and illuminate Dylan's creative path to some of the masterpieces. This may be of interest to the 'self-ordained professors ... too serious to fool', but to the rest of us, even a dedicated fan of the early Dylan like me, it's tedious. There's a large chunk, too, devoted to the amphetamine-fuelled load of 'stream-of-consciousness' codswallop that is Tarantula, Dylan's 'novel'. You wouldn't miss anything if you skimmed all this stuff.
Heylin is good at getting to the heart of the Dylan story - he skillfully traces the ascent (though it's more of a decline in many ways) from pushy folk singer gadding and sponging and chancing his way around Greenwich Village (but with some good friends), to the summit of being Bob Dylan (with new, improved and intimidating entourage of shark-men and devastatingly cool but cruel hipster sycophants ... all high on whatever). He understands that, even if there ever was one, there is no real Bob Dylan. Dylan has lied, and acted, and pretended, and switched on and off and into and out of so many personas by now, that everything is broken.
There's a revealing chapter on the shooting of D A Pennebaker's documentary of Dylan's short (solo) tour of England in 1965. Even though he had much say in the finished product, I've never reckoned Dylan comes out of it very well; he's like a sneering, mocking fathead at times. Nevertheless, that's actually saintly, compared to his behaviour in the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor. And as for his treatment of Joan Baez ... well, we can all agree with him that her hideous, shrill voice was piercing enough to shatter a beer bottle, but it's tragic watching her tolerate his sarcasm and disdain. Love betrays.
And what is it about us, if we’re good at one thing, we imagine ourselves brilliant at everything ... ? Same with Dylan. Suddenly he's a poet, playwright, film director. Yet when Heylin gives us glimpses from the archive of Bob’s best such efforts, well, they are so trivial, misconceived, misinformed and embarrassing that you can only agree with Pennebaker’s assessment: I don’t know what he was smoking, but he was pretty far up in the air most of the time ... !
The famous press conferences of the 1966 world tour, in which he would ruthlessly taunt and scorn journalists, some of whom hadn’t even heard his records, are still funny, and Heylin quotes extensively from them. Stupid questions, Dylan said, deserved stupid answers. The imbecilic quizzing about the ‘meaning’, if he himself even knew, of his material causes him at one point to announce, I do know what my songs are about: some of them are about three minutes, some five, and some about twelve. Most of this banter is comfortable for Dylan, but it’s worth noting that if a smart cookie, an intellectual who might catch him out, turns up, he backs off. As a result he had – and still has – an anti-intellectual streak 10 miles wide, shown off in all its idiotic splendour most especially in his saved period.
That tour is, of course, notorious for the, shall we say, ‘mixed’ reception the fans gave to their ‘gone electric’, would-be pop star. Incredibly, many fans were prepared to lay out good money just to walk out ostentatiously after the acoustic first half, or stay to boo and catcall during the electric set. Play some real Dylan songs! shouts one purist. Hey man, says Dylan to lead guitarist Robbie Robertson, there’s a guy up there wants the Saviour ... The Saviour’s in the dressing room, he tells the heckler, and he can’t come out tonight. The more they boo, the more confrontational and mocking Dylan becomes, turning up the volume. At the Manchester Free Trade Hall someone calls out, Judas!
You're a liar, Dylan drawls back, and, turning to the band shouts, Play fucking loud ... ! and they crash into a supremely vicious Like A Rolling Stone. You have to marvel that he made it through such a druggy, surreal, hostile, wired tour at all. Dogged defiance and all manner of substances probably shaded it for him. Also, at some level he must have known what they were playing was magnificent. At the time, though, it was all just inevitable and mundane: So, where are we being booed tonight? Robertson would sometimes ask wearily.
Some reviews are already accusing Heylin of patronising our man, and writing Dylan's story as if he knew it better than Dylan himself. And there is some truth in this, he is Misstra Know-It-All, but I don't blame him: the very last person you would ask if you wanted to know the true story of Bob Dylan is ... er ... Bob Dylan. Remember the character name he chose when being cast in the film Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid ... ? Alias ... Says it all really.
Notwithstanding all this, the book is no hatchet job. Far from it. Certainly Heylin knows a cruel and stingy poser, liar, thief, ruthless and uncaring womaniser, plagiarist, braggart, and terrible guitar player when he sees one. And he studiously debunks the mythologising bullshit that people, especially Dylan himself, crank out. So, not one for the hero-worshippers.
Nothing, however, is allowed to detract from the fact that during the years vol. 1 covers, Dylan was a genius who completely rearranged how we think about popular music and the subject matter of songs. In a blistering 15 months, one impatient, unorganised, precocious brat fired off Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde, an unprecedented and creative musical coup d'etat that hasn't been equaled yet, and possibly won't be ever.
So, for the most part, Heylin's assessments of Bob and his music are balanced and fair. Or perhaps by that I mean they often chime with mine, anyway. One star deducted, though, for pronouncing Visions Of Johanna the man's 'greatest' song.* And there are a few too many ‘perhaps’s and 'probably's and 'possibly's, where he deduces, with no evidence beyond his 'expertise', that Dylan did this, or played that, or wrote something whenever.
It doesn't bother me that Dylan was already an awful, drugged-up, patronising and obnoxious bollix back then; if we have to invent these types we have to carry the can. I remain someone who will yield to no-one in my admiration for his pre-1968 glory. Thanks to him I discovered music 'where it isn't simple ... [but] in that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player'.
And, when I'm busking, people occasionally stop and enquire about my guitar style ... my guitar 'style' is unstylish, clumsy and clunky, but Mr Dylan made it all possible because back then he went ahead even though he couldn't really play guitar, and I can't really play guitar either. And, as he said to top blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield who had just turned up for the Highway 61 recording sessions, I don’t want you to play any of that B B King shit ...
Add to all that the countless number of times I've been able to laugh heartily when told by yet another deluded Leonard Cohen fan that sad-sack Lenny should actually have won the Nobel ... well, you can see I have much for which to thank Bob.
My only real gripe is why on earth Heylin chose to end vol.1 just before John Wesley Harding. That lonesome, austere and spartan gem is perhaps Mr Dylan's greatest achievement, and had Heylin chronicled its creation, I wouldn't have to bother with vol. 2 at all ...
Never mind though. I take comfort in the fact that no matter how indifferent his output after 1967, Dylan’s legacy and influence are assured, in one respect at least. During another busking session two teenage girls asked me, straight up, who Bob Dylan was. He’s the new Ed Sheeran, I replied.
[*Everyone knows that Positively 4th Street is his magnum opus.]
Clinton Heylin, 20121, The Double Life Of Bob Dylan. Bodley Head. ISBN 9781847925886
Some reviews are already accusing Heylin of patronising our man, and writing Dylan's story as if he knew it better than Dylan himself. And there is some truth in this, he is Misstra Know-It-All, but I don't blame him: the very last person you would ask if you wanted to know the true story of Bob Dylan is ... er ... Bob Dylan. Remember the character name he chose when being cast in the film Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid ... ? Alias ... Says it all really.
Notwithstanding all this, the book is no hatchet job. Far from it. Certainly Heylin knows a cruel and stingy poser, liar, thief, ruthless and uncaring womaniser, plagiarist, braggart, and terrible guitar player when he sees one. And he studiously debunks the mythologising bullshit that people, especially Dylan himself, crank out. So, not one for the hero-worshippers.
Nothing, however, is allowed to detract from the fact that during the years vol. 1 covers, Dylan was a genius who completely rearranged how we think about popular music and the subject matter of songs. In a blistering 15 months, one impatient, unorganised, precocious brat fired off Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde, an unprecedented and creative musical coup d'etat that hasn't been equaled yet, and possibly won't be ever.
So, for the most part, Heylin's assessments of Bob and his music are balanced and fair. Or perhaps by that I mean they often chime with mine, anyway. One star deducted, though, for pronouncing Visions Of Johanna the man's 'greatest' song.* And there are a few too many ‘perhaps’s and 'probably's and 'possibly's, where he deduces, with no evidence beyond his 'expertise', that Dylan did this, or played that, or wrote something whenever.
It doesn't bother me that Dylan was already an awful, drugged-up, patronising and obnoxious bollix back then; if we have to invent these types we have to carry the can. I remain someone who will yield to no-one in my admiration for his pre-1968 glory. Thanks to him I discovered music 'where it isn't simple ... [but] in that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player'.
And, when I'm busking, people occasionally stop and enquire about my guitar style ... my guitar 'style' is unstylish, clumsy and clunky, but Mr Dylan made it all possible because back then he went ahead even though he couldn't really play guitar, and I can't really play guitar either. And, as he said to top blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield who had just turned up for the Highway 61 recording sessions, I don’t want you to play any of that B B King shit ...
Add to all that the countless number of times I've been able to laugh heartily when told by yet another deluded Leonard Cohen fan that sad-sack Lenny should actually have won the Nobel ... well, you can see I have much for which to thank Bob.
My only real gripe is why on earth Heylin chose to end vol.1 just before John Wesley Harding. That lonesome, austere and spartan gem is perhaps Mr Dylan's greatest achievement, and had Heylin chronicled its creation, I wouldn't have to bother with vol. 2 at all ...
Never mind though. I take comfort in the fact that no matter how indifferent his output after 1967, Dylan’s legacy and influence are assured, in one respect at least. During another busking session two teenage girls asked me, straight up, who Bob Dylan was. He’s the new Ed Sheeran, I replied.
[*Everyone knows that Positively 4th Street is his magnum opus.]
Clinton Heylin, 20121, The Double Life Of Bob Dylan. Bodley Head. ISBN 9781847925886
➽Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast ... when he can get a pitch.
This is quality stuff - the knowledge of the subject and the beauty of the writing. Michael, it is an honour to have a piece of such brilliance grace this blog. Hopefully, you will return.
ReplyDeleteUnknown - if your comment is for publication please sign off on it
ReplyDeleteChristopher Owens - I thought as I was formatting this that I'd love to have your take on this book and review
ReplyDeleteAM,
DeleteHeylin is a good writer and has written some very enjoyable books on punk, but I would have to give this a miss as I cannot stand Dylan.
was never smitten by him myself although I love Lay Lady Lay and Hurricane. Beano and the loyalists liked
Deletehim quite a lot in the cages.
Unknown - thank you for you comment. If it is for publication please sign off on it.
ReplyDeleteAlthough not a follower of the articles on TPQ, now and then some of my friends who visit the site regularly will draw my attention to an article. As one of the former political prisoners AM mentions who listened to Dylan quite a lot in the compounds, I read with interest Robert's assessment of the new Heylin book. And whilst I agree with some of the comments about it being a knowledgeable piece, I have to disagree with its broader content. By his own admission, Robert has been significantly influenced by the music of Dylan from an early age and gives recognition to the ground-breaking contribution Dylan made, up to John Wesley Harding. However, to be totally dismissive of everthything thereafter causes this reader to be less objective than I should otherwise be about Robert's piece. As a musician himself, I find it hard to believe that Robert would categorise Idiot Wind, Tangled up in blue, Hurricane, When he Returns, Jokerman, Blind Willie McTell, Brownsville Girl, Girl from the Red River Shore, to name only a few, as crap. In addition, whilst Dylan is no Hendrix, again as a musician, surely Robert would concede that as an accompaniment, Dylan's playing on, for example the albums, Good as I've been to you and World gone wrong, is at least competent? Moreover, to accuse Dylan of plagiarism ignores his nod to the predecesors and peers he persistently pays tribute to. Whislt only tentatively linked to the review of the book, Robert makes some valid points about the contributors to the social media platform 'Dylanology' who will give no mileage to anything critical of Dylan. In this respect, therein, I believe, lies the sub plot to Robert's piece and the fact that he has been barred from contributing himself. His redress is facilitated by AM and TPQ, but unfortunately I doubt too many visitors to Dylanology will read it. However, instead of an objective review, Robert has submitted, in my opinion, at times, a subjective binary diatribe with no credit at all to Dylan post 67. That said, I will listen out for you in town Robert when next I'm in. In fact, where is your pitch and I'll stop and say hello. Maybe you'll do Like a Rolling Stone? If so, put your dummy back in when you're finished mate.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Mitchell
William - thanks for your lengthy comment.
DeleteThe piece was written by a Michael not a Robert.
Nor has Michael being barred from answering. He has chosen not to. Commenting in response to what others think about their own piece is the prerogative of the writer.
Both the piece and your comment I found enjoyable. Whether Dylanologists are reading the piece it is impossible to tell but it is taking more than the average amount of page views for a book review.
William - it doesn't detract from a thought out comment.
DeleteA few years back Beano Niblock shared his take on what Dylan meant for him and other loyalist prisoners.
ReplyDeleteApologies Anthony for getting Michael's name wrong. Maybe too early in the morning for me.
DeleteBob Dylan doesn’t like you
ReplyDeleteThe Unlikely, Lifesaving Queerness of Bob Dylan
ReplyDelete