Dylanists discussion
The new giant biography
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PREFACE CH dismisses other Dylan biographers as follows : Scaduto (1971) - solid, pioneering, but obviously limited. Shelton (1986) - massively disappointing, hardly advancing the story past 1966; Spitz 1988 - a meretricious pile of journalistic gossipmongering; Sounes 1992 - another volume of gossipography. All of these books focus on the 60s and have little to say about all of the rest of Dylan's career. Heylin is different - the whole of the life is given equal attention. And I say - I agree. However dodgy CH is as a writer, he knows his stuff inside out and he's not going to be trotting out the same circus ponies as the other lot do.
The first laugh I got however came quite early. CH harumphs as follows : "Of course as I am forever reminded, I have never actually met the man...it remains a surprisingly pervasive view that first hand acquaintance should take precedence over critical judgement." I can well imagine the gritted Heylin teeth as another fan at another gathering says "But Clinton, you've written SO much about Dylan, and yet you've never actually MET HIM have you?"
But this is a very interesting point - CH mentions a few unpublished "revelatory" manuscripts by one-time Dylan female companions and says reasonably is this what you would choose over my lifetime of research? CH points out how with Dylan you have to be constantly suspicious - he sold Shelton a tall tale about being a rent boy for a couple of months when he first came to New York - this was clearly lifted from the life of Rimbaud, but Shelton ate it all up uncritically. So you can't believe everything Dylan's biographers say, nor what his confidants say, nor what his other biographers say. Who can you believe? Clinton!
CHAPTER 1 : IN MY YOUNGER DAYS (1941-55)
I compared this book's first edition's first chapter with this new one - no comparison! there's a ton of new info about Dylan's Jewish maternal (Lithuanian) and paternal (Russian) families which was new to me. We see young Zimmy get switched on to country (all the Hanks) and then to rock & roll. The song of this chapter, therefore, is Tutti Frutti, and here's how Bob would have heard it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj-QQDKiN...
CHAPTER 2 : THE GOLDEN CHORD (1955-9)
Lots of great info about Bob's first dreadful rock & roll combos The Shadow Blasters and The Golden Chords - Bob didn't last long in them, they generally reformed behind his back without him! (Hint!) This is the period when he figured out what to do with Hibbing - leave it as soon as possible. He had problems with his father & spent a summer in a high-toned expensive reform school for recalcitrant middle class boys. Then he went to the University of Minnesota and heard Odetta and everything changed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqjXNtZxO...
***
3 : 1960 - BOUND FOR GLORY
When Bob went to University it took only a couple of months for Dramatic Transformation Number One to happen. He scrapped Robert Zimmerman – that kid was so 1958 – and now he’s Bob Dylan, and folk is where it’s at. And he started eating all of folk music. One might hazard a couple of things here – if you’re a solo performer you’ve solved the problem of getting fired by your band for being rubbish; and more zeitgeistically, by 1959 the wild early rock which Robert Zimmerman liked was being shut down in a mysterious series of co-ordinated attacks : Elvis in the army; Little Richard had got religion and retired; Buddy Holly was dead; as was Eddie Cochran; and in their place the army of Ken-doll teenthrobs led by Pat Boone, Tab Hunter and Fabian – there were a zillion of em, ironically many called Bobby, which Bobby Zimmerman had been known as. So chart music turned a little rancid in 1959 and 1960 and I believe this can be scientifically proved. I can scientifically prove it. A bright spark like Bob couldn’t be happy with I’m so young and you’re so old, this my darling I’ve been told, and when he heard there is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun and it's been the ruin of many a poor girl and me, oh God, I'm one he thought goodness gracious me, this is the stuff for me. Or words to that effect. Another transformation was in his voice. Gone was the raucous hollering awopbopping, in came a sweet choirboy voice, which people liked a lot. The first bootleg tape from this period is dated May 1960 and has this sweet voice on it. CH suddenly sneers out with one of his patent in-print putdowns :
The unfamiliarity of this voice even led one intellectually challenged Dylan collector to make the unfounded allegation that the tape was a fake.
Take that – and some of you reading this will know who he is referring to! (I don’t, I hasten to add.)
Continuing the tale, D got a very random gig in Denver, where he saw Jesse Fuller, and lifted the harmonica-in-the-neck-brace idea from him. Back from Denver he became obsessed with Woody Guthrie and Rambling Jack Elliott and he started talking in a broad Okie accent and stealing people’s records. Absolutely, stealing. Taking away without the owner’s consent. You know he’s beginning to sound like a nutcase now. But a very strong picture emerges of a young guy who has an obsession that he doesn’t understand the nature of yet, but he knows what fits and what doesn’t by pure instinct. The harmonica fits, the folk fits, Guthrie fits. Being a formal student doesn’t. Being formally Jewish doesn't. He plays low level folk gigs all the time and he’s getting pretty good. Then he announces towards the end of 1960 that he’s going to New York, he’s going to visit Woody. There is much hooting and derision – sure you are, Bobby.
BD : I’d learned as much as I could and used up all my options… When I arrived in Minneapolis it had seemed like a big city…when I left it was like some rural outpost.
So 1960 gives us much to think about, one thing being an issue, which I have never read any kind of discussion of - what attitudes did young American Jews have to their Jewishness? What was Bob's attitude? It wasn't that Abraham Zimmerman was a particularly religious guy, and it doesn't come across that the small Jewish community of Hibbing and the larger one in Duluth were particularly oppressive, they were just normal folks doing the usual bar mitzvah things. But after leaving Minneapolis Bob spent many years denying his background, flat-out. (We will come to his lying and self-mythologising quite soon.) Heylin concludes, tentatively, for these are presumptuous waters for Gentiles to be fishing in, that Dylan's motives were not denial of Jewishness, but rejection of his father, with whom he seems to have had problems, and a rejection of the small town background he loathed. I would be getting ahead of the story to mention that Bob eventually embraced his Jewishness, and then, seemingly, conclusively rejected it again, I will leave that dangling for now.
The song for this chapter, then, has to be this one by Woody Guthrie :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH2DJvgNl...
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well it's North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Is that not beautiful?
4 : 1961 - HARD TIMES IN NEW YORK TOWN Well, not particularly hard, since young Bob was able to charm his way into many a nurturing situation. He grafted all year, getting better and better gigs, and he got a small circle of folkies who thought he was something else, plus a large circle of folkies who thought he was a painful phony jerk. It took 8 months for Bob's first big break, which began when he got pally with Robert Shelton, who was folk music critic for the New York Times (note : by 1961 the Times thought they should have a folk music critic!). RS decided Dylan was the cat's whiskers and waited for the right moment, then reviewed Bob playing support for the Greenbriar Boys - so he gave a support act a three-column headline and gushed like a gusher. What the Greenbriar Boys thought of this has not been recorded. So that was September 29. By then Dylan had got to know John hammond Jr, who told his famous father about him, and one thing led to another, and the famous John Hammond decided he'd give it a punt and offered Dylan a contract on 26 October. And on 22 and 22 November he recorded his first album.
Bam! that's fast. The other folkies must have cried into their absinthe. What? I've been folking for years and here comes this horrible boy... and bla blah.
It's a shame, but the first album was recorded a month too soon. The performances on it are a little thin and snatched at, a little callow, it's an album that's easy to forgive and hard to like much - but on 21 December, on a trip back to Minneapolis, Bob was recorded at the home of Bonnie Beecher and what he did then was magnificent. I think you can download it here
http://heavysugarradio.blogspot.com/2009...
This set is a zillion times better than the first album. It's brilliant. I would love to stick a youtube link here to illustrate this for non-downloaders, but damn and tarnation, looks like Dylan's management have got youtube to remove almost all of Bob's stuff (Prince does the same).
So I did not want the song of the chapter to be always a Dylan source but that's what I'll have to do until I can find some useful Dylan blog somewhere... so anyway this is a song Bob lifted almost note for note - Big Joe Williams, Baby Please Don't Go. (And after Bob came Van).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikxLNaAYu...
5 : 1962-3 : SONGS OF INNOCENCE
All the next six years were massive ones. 1962 contributes a couple of big items – you can see the story slotting into place, just like you can with the Beatles (in comes Epstein, out goes Pete, in comes Ringo, then they stumble into George Martin, click, click, snap). Suze Rotolo became his first big love in 1961 and at first it was all beatnik boy and beatnik girl. She was from a posh lefty family and was a true believer & so got him into a whole new thing, which was : songs with a social conscience. Yeah, protest songs. Those. Now Bob may have got behind this idea anyway, because by now he was coming to the end of Barbara Allen and Pretty Polly, but Suze kind of insisted, cajoled, enthused – insisted. Pete Seeger & cronies set up a little folk mag called Broadside which was a very committed publication, and for 1962 and 3 Bob became its poster boy, dishing up song after song to warm the cockles of their collective heart. The first ones were terrible – The Death of Emmett Till, for example :
If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood
it must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live
There are quite a few like this – Long Ago, Far Away, I’d Hate to be you on that Dreadful day, John Brown, Ballad of Donald White – but they were getting better. Soon Bob was coming up with Let me Die in my Footsteps, Oxford Town… and a rewrite of an old spiritual called No More Auction Block which Bob turned into Blowing in the Wind. That one was a hit. Then he met up with Al Grossman, a folk impresario who had created Peter Paul & Mary the previous year and got a smash album out of them. PP&M were the folk boom’s version of The Monkees or The Spice Girls except they did play on their own records. Grossman spotted the trend and figured that if there was a group who looked like that and sounded like this, they’d be big. And they were. Favourite story (not in this book) : PP&M get their first time off in months and they’re going to Florida. Grossman issues an order to Mary Travers : no suntanning, stay in the shade. Folk singers aren’t supposed to look healthy! Your audience will disapprove! Got to keep that bleached-skin beatnik look!
Blowing in the Wind was pretty good but in October 62 came Bob’s really extraordinary A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. All of his songs until 1964 used folk tunes, he didn’t make up new tunes until, I think, Mr Tambourine Man, and he often used folk forms too – here he uses Lord Randall which is a Child ballad :
"O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsome young man?"
"I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down."
"An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son?
And wha met ye there, my handsome young man?"
"O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie down."
What Dylan did with this tune and this form is brilliant, piling on line after line, image after image, turning it into a bad acid version of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and delivering it all in a relentless controlled venomous rant. The world of 1963 could embrace a sweetened version of Blowing in the Wind, by the pallid Peter Paul & Mary, but the people who sent that song to No 2 in the Billboard Top 50 in July 63 would have run a mile from Hard Rain. That was the breakthrough. Everything followed from that one.
As Mr Dylan's management have removed all of Mr Dylan's own performances from youtube, here's a cover - this is very slightly different to the original version, but may be my all time favourite Dylan cover
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zwBHd4kl...
6: 1963 – While the establishment burns
7 : 1963 – Troubled and he don’t know why
Dylan in 1963 was a liar and a fake, and he released his second album which is great, Freewheelin’ – every track is crackling with power, they all sound very different from each other, and half of the album is comedy. Score: 10 out of 10. Odd fact I didn’t know until recently : that’s Bruce Langhorne delivering the beautiful fluid fingerpicking on Don’t Think Twice, not Bob. I always thought it sounded a little too good for Bob.
Throughout 1963 Dylan was still covering up his Jewishness, claiming he was from everywhere and nowhere, he was churning out protest stuff and he was making up barefaced lies about his early life, such as here:
Cynthia Gooding: . How long were you with the carnival?
BD: I was with the carnival off and on for about six years.
CG: What were you doing?
BD: Oh, just about everything. Uh, I was clean-up boy, I used to be on the main line, on the ferris wheel, uh, do just run rides. I used to do all kinds of stuff like that.
Bob was outing himself as a fake protest singer by 1964, saying that he just did all the With God on Our Side stuff to kick-start his career. But that was just some more jive talk. As ever, in the theatre of human endeavour, nothing is simple. By 64 and 65 Dylan was onto more dramatic reinventions and Hattie Carroll had become something of an embarrassment.
Speaking of Hattie, the real story of William Zanzinger took years to emerge from the fog of falsification in Dylan’s brilliant song. Heylin points out that she wasn’t slain by a cane, that Zanzinger was a drunken boor who was loudly berating the staff and tapping them on the shoulder - with, yes, a cane. Hattie complained about his behaviour to when she got back in the kitchen. Then she collapsed with a heart attack. She had an enlarged heart and had hypertension. Zanzinger didn’t have any connections to any high political echelons in Maryland. The song is a classic leftist stitch-up – never let the facts get in the way.
This was the first of a series of songs about real people by Dylan in which most of the facts were wrong – Joey, Hurricane and George Jackson to name but three.
So, this is the Bob Dylan dichotomy – an unmusical plagiarist with dubious morals who was also a popular music genius. A difficult case!
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...