The Double Life Of Bob Dylan
Volume 1 - 1941-1966, A Restless, Hungry Feeling
Clinton Heylin - The Bodley Head
What can we expect from a major star's personal private files, his archive in fact? I was drooling at the thought of what Bob Dylan's archive might contain. Indeed, it took me by surprise that he even had one as I had never thought of him as a hoarder. Someone meticulous like Paul Simon, yes definitely, but Dylan with his restless, hungry feeling seemed too impatient for that.
Let me give you an example. In 2006 a unique biography of the poet, Allen Ginsberg, was published, unique in the sense that the author Bill Morgan had waded through Ginsberg's colossal archives and had written a book that was mind-bogglingly frank and explicit. It was not pleasant reading and it took me several years to wade through its 700 pages, but it completely changed my thinking about him. I still acknowledge that Ginsberg was a sensitive, brilliant poet but he was totally insensitive to those around him in his pursuit to bed anyone he fancied. He had hundreds of gay relationships but he preferred the company of straight men and if that meant bringing their female partners along for the ride, then so be it. Ginsberg was hungry for young teenage boys and definitely not asking for birth certificates. In his journals, he relived his bedroom encounters in lurid prose, and if someone antagonistic towards him had handed a journal to the police or the press, his career could have been over. Not without irony, the biography is called 'I Celebrate Myself'.
I was therefore intrigued to hear that an oil billionaire, George Kaiser, had purchased Bob Dylan's archives for the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. When I read the conditions for inspecting the archive, I thought that only Greil Marcus would meet the criteria. This is unlike, say, the extensive archives for the Mersey poets (Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough) in Liverpool which are open to all: there are a few files that are sealed for 50 years but not many.
It was with some pride that I noticed that the first person to publish a book around Dylan's archive was a Brit, Clinton Heylin, one of the UK's leading rock journalists with a specialist knowledge on Bob Dylan. He has spent over two months in the archive but it seems that there is less material for the early years and his first volume stops at age 25. Also, there are many sealed files which he is not able to access. Shame - when I got the book, the first things I wanted to look up were Bob Dylan's tax returns, but there's nothing like that here.
Heylin has made a major mistake in his first section called 'That All Important Intro…2-3.4' as he is settling old scores and dissing one Dylan biographer after another. With all the potential publicity around Dylan a major rock star becoming 80 in May, there will be a huge market for Dylan biographies and thousands of people will read one for the first time so why bang on about other Dylan biographers whom they won't know? If Heylin wants to rant, then fair enough, do it at the end, by which time the reader should have realised that Heylin can't be beaten anyway if he has done his job right. Far better to put the details of the Tulsa archive at the front as this is the daddy of all USPs.
Heylin's comments seem so unnecessary. Howard Sounes, for example, is described as a semi-literate, professional dirt-digger. Acting on a hunch, Sounes discovered that Dylan had married a background singer, Carolyn Dennis, in 1986. Is Heylin saying that he himself wouldn't have used this information because it would be dirt-digging, and what did his criticism imply about how he was going to view this archive?
I should declare an interest as I am one of the unfortunate biographers to be ridiculed, but I'm in good company and I don't feel that I wrote 'pseudo-history', which presumably is treating tall tales as the truth, a Trumpian view of the world. For that matter, Heylin dismisses much of what Dylan himself wrote in his celebrated memoir, 'Chronicles, Volume 1' (2004).
Indeed, this made me wonder how official this book was. I thought it might have had Dylan's imprimatur, but I somewhat doubt it as Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, is half-heartedly thanked for "managing the unmanageable".
Dylan's early years were so explosive that they should be viewed chronologically so that we can gauge the changes in his personality. However, Heylin's story begins at the Riverside Church in Harlem in 1961, then going back to his early teenage years, then returning to New York until he finally gets born in Minnesota in 1941 - and that's on page 153.
Because of this confusion, Howard Sounes' biography is a far better bet for the new Dylan reader or the classic Robert Shelton study of his early years but nevertheless, those of us who have read several Dylan books will find much to enjoy here.
I loved Dylan's comment about Rick Nelson's 'flatless intonation'. Isn't that perfect? Rick Nelson is the one rock and roller where you can make out every word. As Bob himself slurred away, was he paying Rick a compliment or was it merely an observation? Heylin quotes the 1960s journalist Penny Valentine who comments that the structure of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' is a combination of Chuck Berry's 'Too Much Monkey Business' and Rick Nelson's 'Waitin' in School'. We learn that Dylan wanted Nelson's guitarist James Burton for his first tour with a rock band, but Burton was tied to television work with 'Shindig'.
Heylin seems surprised that Dylan sought out a Bobby Vee concert during Vee's hit-making years, but why not? Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull once told me that he wished he could write a simple, straightforward love song. Going right back to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, it's been love songs that make the world go round. Dylan knew that, just as Lennon and McCartney did, and if he wanted to, he could write simple masterpieces like 'If Not For You, 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight' and 'Make You Feel My Love'. You couldn't ask Captain Beefheart to do that.
I loved seeing the first draft of Bob Dylan's first recording contract, reading that Bob wrote 'Blowin' In the Wind' on notepaper from the hotel where Jimmie Rodgers died, and learning that Dave Van Ronk referred to Bob Dylan's 'dead fish handshake'. Heylin referred to an illegal publication as a 'bookleg'.
Mistakes? Well, bits and pieces. Elston Gunnn should be spelt with three n's: Liam Clancy can't 'recently recall' anything as he died in 2009; hundreds of people are killed in 'Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues' so it can hardly be Dylan's 'funniest song' (I'd put my vote on 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now') and surely his first producer, the legendary John Hammond wasn't as inept as he is portrayed. It is intriguing that Hammond by that time reported to Mitch Miller at Columbia, who was a Grade A alpha male and a middle of the road king, so I'd like to know how they got on.
It's hard to review the first volume of an autobiography as you don't know how things are going to be resolved in the second, and the overall title isn't yet fully explained. Clinton Heylin's book gets a thumbs up certainly, but not a double thumbs up.
Spencer Leigh
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Fatea Showcase Sessions
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