Picking over Dylan
‘‘Dylanologist’’ Clinton Heylin leaves no (rolling) stone unturned as he forensically charts the life of the legend. Will Hodgkinson reports.
Every musician of note gets honoured with a biography or two. Nobody but Bob Dylan, however, has their own equivalent to the Dylanologist, that cross between fan, archivist and assassin who is on a holy mission to trawl through every bootleg recording, to scrutinise every lyric, until they have pulled back the curtain on the most unknowable man in music history.
Dylan’s appeal lies not only in the richness of his songs, but also in the fantasy world he creates, something the Dylanologist wants to expose and destroy. From the scuzzy lows of the notorious writer and ‘‘garbologist’’ AJ Weberman, who would go through Dylan’s rubbish bins, to the learned highs of countless scholarly treatises, the goal is the same: to capture an elusive butterfly, pin it down, and poke at it until the secret of its beauty is revealed.
The New York Times called Clinton Heylin ‘‘the only Dylanologist worth reading’’, and it has a point. The Double Life of Bob Dylan is Heylin’s 13th book on Dylan – it stops before his motorcycle crash in 1966 so there are more to come – and it is a 528-page attempt to go further than any Dylanologist has gone before. Granted exclusive access to Dylan’s personal archive, Heylin has taken an archaeological approach to digging up the facts beneath the legend.
Peppered with fact-checking footnotes to point out where others have got it wrong (or where Dylan has lied), the book really comes alive at the beginning and the end, when Heylin goes beyond the endless details to capture his subject’s situation with sympathy. He focuses on the significance of a childhood incident when a friend from Minnesota called Larry Kegan dived into the ocean off a wall while on holiday in Miami and broke his neck, leaving him paralysed.
Heylin quotes a speech Dylan gave during a 1980 concert, where he recalled being trapped on rocks on the Carmel coastline and having to jump into the sea before telling the audience: ‘‘I was lucky, but this friend of mine did the same thing down in Florida ... He’s sitting in a wheelchair now.’’ Although he cannot resist suggesting that Dylan’s story is probably made-up, Heylin concludes: ‘‘The subtext is undeniable: It could have been me.’’
Heylin uncovers the friendship between Dylan (still Robert Zimmerman at the time) and Kegan, who although younger was something of a hero to him, a rebellious teenager who went joyriding in his parents’ car at 13 and looked like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Dylan visited Kegan in hospital regularly, trying to cheer him up by singing songs and recalling the good times at the summer camp where they met, but as Dylan’s mother, Beattie, said in 1968: ‘‘That [accident] must have had something to do with Bobby’s career ... That was a real tragedy in Bobby’s life.’’
It is far more revealing on what makes Dylan tick, on why he became so isolated and unknowable, than the countless exposes of tall tales elsewhere.
Not that Heylin’s obsessiveness doesn’t unearth some fascinating revelations. He traces the genesis of Like a Rolling Stone to May 21, 1965, when Dylan held a party at the Savoy hotel in London. Afterwards Dylan spent a week in bed, allegedly with food poisoning, holed up with his future wife Sara Lownds and avoiding old girlfriends Nico and Joan Baez. Also at the party was a British rocker called Vince Taylor, who played a concert in Paris a few days later where he announced from the stage: ‘‘I’m the new Jesus, the son of God.’’ Taylor had lost his mind after taking LSD at the Savoy party. Heylin believes the wine was laced with it.
The suggestion is that Dylan didn’t have food poisoning at all. He was recovering from a bad trip. From the experience came what Heylin describes as his ‘‘raw, existential howl’’, a 20-page ‘‘piece of vomit’’ about ‘‘my steady hatred’’ (Dylan’s words) from which Like a Rolling Stone was fashioned. Only one of those pages survived and made it to the Tulsa archive. It doesn’t contain any lyrics that made the final cut, but the song’s ‘‘Miss Lonely’’ does seem to be the subject: ‘‘You stand among the vulchers/ you know that tho/ i know ... youre too beautiful for words/ you cannot be imprisoned.’’ Given that Rolling Stone magazine named Like a Rolling Stone the greatest song of all time, this is historic material.
Equally gripping are the final chapters on the 1965-66 period when Dylan abandoned folk and protest music and went electric, again because you feel that Heylin understands what he was going through. Out of his head on drugs, subject to the enormous pressure of sudden, constant attention, even the legendarily cynical Dylan was unprepared for the outraged response to his seemingly minor crime of plugging in a guitar.
It began at Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. Heylin dispels the famous myth that unreconstructed folkie Pete Seeger went to his car to get an axe to chop the electric cables (he actually went to his car to have a little cry), but he evokes the tension between the old and new guard nonetheless. And the May 1966 tour of Britain and Ireland sounds like a nightmare. From a student called Keith Butler becoming the most famous heckler in history after shouting ‘‘Judas!’’ at Manchester Free Trade Hall, to a girl in Glasgow punching him in the face as he came off stage, Dylan was at war with his audience every night. As he later said of the period: ‘‘The fact that I made it through what I did is pretty miraculous.’’
These are the high points of a forensic analysis of Dylan’s early life that, for depth of research alone, is hugely impressive. Unfortunately, it can also be hugely annoying. The tone jumps from lofty to faux hip: people are forever penning this and opining that, while Dylan is described as a ‘‘young tyke’’ twice in the space of two pages.
Heylin has got to the bald truth, not by speaking to Dylan (who cannot be trusted), but by scraping through his relics. And everything he has found is put on display rather than buried into the story. It is the opposite approach to Dylan, who hid the truth to let the magic shine.
‘‘I’d like to think my access to the vast archive ... has produced a cohesive portrait akin to when some Renaissance masterpiece is restored to its truer self,’’ Heylin says in the introduction. It took me a while to realise that the Renaissance masterpiece he meant was his own Behind the Shades, which he also proclaims to be the most ‘‘factually reliable of all Dylan biographies’’.
I can’t share Heylin’s astoundingly high regard for his own work, but if you do want to strip away the mystery and get a logbook on Dylan’s inescapable reality in time for his 80th birthday in May, this is the one for you.
The Man In Me: The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol 1: 1941-1975 by Clinton Heylin (Bodley Head, $75)