The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Bob Dylan? Sorry, he’s still not here
Overlong, vengeful and obsessive, Clinton Heylin’s study is a bizarre monument to a totemic musician
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB DYLAN, VOLUME 2: 1966-2021: FAR AWAY FROM MYSELF by Clinton Heylin
848pp, Bodley Head, T £30 (0844 871 1514), RRP£35, ebook £14.99
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“People think they know me from my songs,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “You’d have to be a madman to try to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs.”
Clinton Heylin is just that sort of madman. The 63-year-old British music journalist has written a dozen previous books on Bob Dylan, including the authoritative 1991 biography Behind the Shades. Dylan apparently decried Heylin’s well-researched approach as “too personal, too probing”, a remark Heylin proudly describes as “the greatest compliment this biographer [has] ever received”.
The Double Life is Heylin’s most ambitious attempt to compress his extensive knowledge between covers. Its first volume, A Restless, Hungry Feeling, was published last year, covering the years 1941-1966. It benefited from a narrative focus on Dylan’s early life and welldocumented creative emergence in 1960s New York, as the young tyro concocted seven world-changing albums before a notorious (and possibly mythical) motorcycle accident in Woodstock.
The second volume is almost twice as long, clocking in at 758 pages (not counting addenda) and engaging with 55 years of creative highs and lows, and personal twists and turns. It covers a period in which Dylan releases 33 studio albums and more than 20 collections of “official bootleg” archive material, publishes three books, collaborates on several films, paints, sculpts and performs thousands of live shows on what fans still call “The Never Ending Tour” (though Dylan claims it ended back in 1991).
Far Away from Myself starts breathlessly, tossing us back into 1966 with a bewildering number of unintroduced characters and unexplained references. An intimate familiarity with obscure corners of Dylan’s career is taken for granted. If you don’t know what Heylin means by “the famous ‘Ain’t no head of lettuce’ version” of a particular outtake of You Ain’t Going Nowhere, a curiosity from The Basement Tapes, you’ll struggle.
Worse, Heylin is often pursuing arguments with some perceived version of events, constantly challenging the veracity of stories told by Dylan’s closest collaborators, friends and lovers. Heylin even treats Dylan himself as an unreliable source, dismissing his acclaimed 2004 memoir Chronicles as “a liar’s autobiography”.
Nor does Heylin ever pass up an opportunity to insult another writer. I’m described as “suddenly cloth-eared” – why “suddenly” I have no idea, given that it’s my sole appearance – but I’m in good company, with leading critics labelled “irredeemably dumb”, “stupid”, “credulous”, “wretched”, “fools” writing “arrant nonsense” with “quivering quills”. Many great musicians are treated with similar contempt, with Heylin routinely dismissing the talents of Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell and especially the “bluster and bombast” of Bruce Springsteen.
Not that Dylan himself is given an easy ride. His rampant womanising, heavy drinking, moral double standards and habitual obfuscations are laid bare. His artistic judgment is constantly called into question, as Heylin pores through notebooks and rehearsal tapes to reconfigure or reassemble songs, proposing “Heylin-approved” improvements. (Ironically, he writes in sentences so convoluted you wonder whether Heylin himself has ever accepted editorial advice.)
There is something particularly onerous about this obsession with searching for clues to Dylan’s personal life in songs of extravagant language and mystical scope. Heylin devotes pages to theorising about which real-life woman might have been the inspiration for a trio of early 1980s rejects: Caribbean Wind, Angelina and The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar. “This is pure speculation, of a kind that Dylan very much dislikes,” admits Heylin, then adds: “Which is, frankly, tough luck.”
The faults of this overloaded, eccentric tome are so manifold that it’s easy to overlook its virtues. So let me be fair to Heylin: I devoured it with considerable pleasure. It’s crammed with interesting stories, casts light on unexpected corners of Dylan’s creativity, and mines fascinating snippets of lost work.
Still, any notions of The Double Life being a definitive biography evaporate in its manic energy, unravelling threads, spurious theories, undefined characters, vague contexts and multiple dead-ends. A difficulty with any authoritative account of Dylan’s life is that Dylan positively revels in notions of self-fictionalisation. Biographers are reduced to scraping for clues in all the wrong places, like notorious 1970s Dylanologist AJ Weberman digging through his hero’s rubbish.
Heylin is the most dedicated and forensic of Dylanologists, and this books shows it – yet he’s ultimately defeated by the sheer abundance and genius of the great man’s work. There are so many versions of Dylan on display that, in the end, you put down the book, exhausted – and return to the music itself.
Heylin constantly insults his fellow critics. At one point he calls me ‘cloth-eared’