Why Bob Dylan thinks he’s a disaster with women
He wrote a love song for Elizabeth Taylor and told one of his many girlfriends ‘a whole lotta women have had my babies’. But he viewed his love life as a complete failure...
The Double Life Of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021 – Far Away From Myself Clinton Heylin Bodley Head €44 Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine Edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel
Callaway €92 Holding The Note: Writing On Music David Remnick Picador €27.50
IHis usual chat-up line was: ‘I know you know I’m making a pass, and I know you’re interested’
n A Restless Hungry Feeling, the first volume of his The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin pronounced himself astonished ‘that only five proper [ie researched] biographies of the man have been published to date’. It’s a fair point. Dylan is calculatedly unpredictable and cussedly unreliable, but for more than six decades he has been one of our most vital artists. If Disney and Dickens can be the subject of dozens of biographies, so can he.
Not that there aren’t plenty of Dylan books out there. The first biography, by Anthony Scaduto, was published half a century ago – and since then lives by Robert Shelton, Bob Spitz and Greil Marcus (not to mention Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles) have appeared. Nor has Heylin himself been lazy. By my count this is his 13th book about Dylan – and The Double Life is actually his second full biography of the man. Given that the third edition of his first life of Dylan, Behind The Shades, came out only a few years ago, what on earth has turned up to justify him starting all over again?
Dylan’s notebooks, that’s what. Back in 2016, the man Heylin excruciatingly insists on calling ‘His Bobness’ sold his archives to the George Kaiser Family Foundation in Oklahoma for several million dollars. There are 130 boxes of what Heylin would doubtless have us call ‘Dylanalia’ there, all of which he has been the first to go through.
If you want to read early drafts of Dylan’s lyrics, if you want to know about his business dealings or his recording notes, then this book should be your first port of call. Still, you can’t help but hope that a subtler and more stylish biographer goes through that Oklahoma archive to ensure it is not our only option.
Because while Heylin has read and studied everything he can on Dylan, he hasn’t digested so much as disgorged it. Anyone who thought A Restless Hungry Feeling a mite disorganised is in for a shock with the second volume, Far Away From Myself. The book is a mess from start to finish, and at 836 pages is not so much unputdownable as unpickupable. It not only kicks off midaction, it assumes you already know his life story back to front, and what every bit-part player’s function in it is.
To be fair, Heylin has turned up a couple of surprises. If it isn’t exactly news that Dylan dined with Lauren Bacall during his mid-1980s tour of Australia, it’s still eyeopening to learn that he told her he was ‘a disaster when it comes to women’. As for the revelation that the song Emotionally Yours is a paean to Elizabeth Taylor, it certainly helps explain one of Dylan’s hammiest vocals.
Dylan has always had an eye for the ladies, of course. Heylin even knows one of his chat-up lines – ‘I know that you know I’m making a pass at you, and you know that I know that you’re interested’ .
Nor does Heylin leave us in any doubt about how many conquests there have been. ‘There were times between 1978 and 1981,’ he says, ‘when [Dylan’s tour] was akin to a travelling cathouse’.
Actually, it sounds more like a travelling nursery. Twenty years ago, the journalist Howard Sounes revealed that Dylan had secretly married one of his backing singers and fathered a hitherto unreported child. Now, Heylin quotes another girlfriend being told by the man himself that ‘a whole lotta women in this world have had my babies’.
Indeed when a new girlfriend found herself pregnant and had an abortion because she didn’t want him to think she ‘was trying to trap him’, Dylan was enraged. He didn’t, he said, believe in abortion ‘unless somebody needs to have their life saved’.
Certainly Dylan seems to love children. Even though he once almost signed a note to his eldest son, Jesse, ‘Bob Dylan’ before scribbling it out and scrawling ‘Dad’, there are enough photos in Heylin’s book to suggest he is a contented family man.
There are pictures aplenty in Mixing Up The Medicine, which, its hefty price aside, is a far better introduction to all things Dylan. Based, like Heylin’s book, on the treasures in that archive, it’s a beautiful collection that also contains some of the best writing on Dylan there’s ever been.
In one brief paragraph on the motorcycle accident that ended Dylan’s mid-1960s nonstop touring, the writer Amanda Petrusich explains and analyses more than Heylin does in the interminable and confused opening pages of Far Away From Myself.
Other highlights include the Booker Prize-winning Australian novelist Peter Carey summing up Dylan’s lyrics as being ‘like Hindu gods with 20 arms. They deal a different hand each time you throw the dice’ and historian Sean Wilentz on the debts Dylan’s paintings (some of which are reproduced in the book) owe to the films of Charlie Chaplin.
But perhaps the only thing anyone need read on Bob Dylan is David Remnick’s magnificent, career-covering essay, Restless Farewell, published in The New Yorker last year, and is now available between hard covers in Holding The Note.
Remnick’s basic point is that far from being a radical rock’n’roll revolutionary, Dylan is a traditionalist steeped in what he calls the ‘bottomless source… of American song’.
Everything, from his early folk-style numbers to his recent album of Christmas songs and his trilogy of Sinatra covers, is a tribute to the past – the past that Dylan has always preferred to the present.
When journalism is this good, who needs biography?