The Double Life of Bob Dylan gets tangled up in view
Bob Dylan remains deeply relevant — an artist for all time — but his biographer is stuck in the past.
Bob Dylan has never been one for nostalgia. In an early draft for his memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, he writes, “I never wanted for a second to be a sixties artist, but an artist for all time”. This year, as the Nobel laureate is celebrating his 80th birthday, he remains focused on the present. Just last year he released the masterful Rough and Rowdy Ways, and if it weren’t for the pandemic he probably would be on the road playing concerts right now. But of course the narrative of Dylan’s rise to fame still holds tremendous appeal: how he “burst on the scene, already a legend”, transforming songwriting and popular music in his wake. Dylan purposefully omitted this part of his life from Chronicles, and with no volume two in sight we still have to rely on others to tell his story. Enter Clinton Heylin, who has gained a reputation as one of the most important Dylan scholars of the past three decades. He’s also a contested figure among Dylan fans, who either appreciate his diligent research or dislike his arrogant tone — often both. Heylin has written eight previous books about Dylan and his work; his most notable contribution is perhaps the biography Behind the Shades, published in 1991 and revised in 2001 and 2011. Ten years later, the self-proclaimed “smartass know-it-all” decided against yet another revision when he was faced with a wealth of new material from the Bob Dylan Archive, acquired in 2016 by billionaire George Kaiser and now housed in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So Heylin decided to start from scratch, working with primary sources such as manuscripts and session tapes rather than the increasingly unreliable memory of witnesses. The result is The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1: A Restless Hungry Feeling: 1941-1966, which announces itself as the “definitive [Dylan] biography”.
The reality is more complicated. Across the course of 500-plus pages, the book traces the story of the boy from small-town Minnesota; his turn from teenage rock ’n’ roller to guitar-toting folkie, from the ambitious and eager Greenwich Village golden boy to the hip paranoid rock star we recognise from the cover of Blonde on Blonde. Heylin tells this story with the authority but also the impatience of one who has told it before. As a result, he sometimes loses sight of the larger narrative, which may pose a problem for readers new to Dylan. (We’re a few pages into Dylan’s 1962 trip to London before there is any explanation of why he is there in the first place — he had been cast as a folk singer in a televised BBC play.)
While it’s clear that a lot of research went into this project, these pages don’t reveal anything substantially new or significant about Dylan the man or the artist; certainly nothing as explosive as the title, The Double Life of Bob Dylan, would suggest. (What’s the book equivalent of clickbait?) Instead, Heylin focuses on early lyric drafts, on deleted scenes from the films made during Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966, and determines the exact moment of studio chatter between takes when Dylan loses patience with his producer. For nerds such as yours truly this stuff is interesting, but one cannot help but feel as if Heylin assembled this new tome from information better suited to the footnotes The book’s narrative is still strongly shaped by its author’s voice and his inevitable bias. Some of Heylin’s opinions are baffling but ultimately inconsequential, such as the easily disproved assertion that Dylan wasn’t a good enough guitar player to play on the recording of Don’t Think Twice (It’s All Right). Others are a lot more troubling, such as his take on the real-life case that inspired Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll: Heylin insists on defending the convicted Zantzinger, downplaying his (substantial) part in Carroll’s death, and berates Dylan for taking some poetic licence, all the while blind to the role that systemic inequality played in Carroll’s life as a black woman, as well as in her death.
In general, it feels as if Heylin’s world view is stuck in the same decades he is writing about, with casual homophobia and especially sexism appearing throughout the book. Women are “girls” or “gals”, predominantly defined by their attractiveness (folk legend Karen Dalton is introduced only as “a buxom [girl] singer with lung power to spare”). A special kind of ire is reserved for Joan Baez, the “caterwauler from Carmel”, whose humiliation at the hands of Dylan (real and/or projected) the author seems to relish.
Dylan aspired to be “an artist for all time”, and there is plenty of evidence for his continued relevance to our present moment. Last year, it wasn’t just classic songs of his such as Only a Pawn in Their Game that rang hauntingly true during the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests but new songs such as I Contain Multitudes and Murder Most Foul also offered timely reflections on the significance of identity, both personal and national, which is constantly in flux, constantly in a state of becoming (something Dylan knows a thing or two about).
Heylin’s Restless Hungry Feeling is a reminder that it’s not only important to occasionally re-examine the facts of the story we’re telling but that it’s crucial to re-evaluate the way we’re telling it as well.
Laura Tenschert is the creator of the Definitely Dylan podcast, presenting a modern take on the work of Bob Dylan.
The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1
A Restless Hungry Feeling 1941-1966
528pp, $48 (HB)
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