Bob Dylan and the turbulent ride from hicksville to top of the world

BIOGRAPHY
The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol I: 1941-1966, A Restless Hungry Feeling
Clinton Heylin
Bodley Head, $65

Fired up by James Dean and Little Richard, an escapee from a dead-end mining town invents a radical new narrative for his life, essentially by inventing a new language. First, he devours as much of the old one as he can and then, one jingle jangle morning, he explodes like a musical kaleidoscope.

The world, enraptured and aghast, demands that he explain himself but he’s flying too fast to look back. They call him all kinds of things, from charlatan to prophet. He mocks and dodges and lies. He lies a lot. But the magical, musical word spew just won’t quit until â€" pow! He vanishes in a motorcycle accident.

On his Australian tour in 1966, Bob Dylan gave a press conference in Melbourne.Credit:

Act I alone of Bob Dylan’s legend is enough to ensure immortality. But the Dylanologists demand more; always more. In a book touted as “the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of [the] artist”, Clinton Heylin declares his intentions with trademark aplomb as “akin to when some Renaissance masterpiece is restored to its truer self â€" recognisably the same figure but sharper in detail, the colours more illuminated”.

In other words, the author of the benchmark Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades has produced the book equivalent of the 2021 collectors’ remix of a classic album. You’d need to know the original material backwards to spot the new details, but if you haven’t heard it before, it’s probably the best version to get.

The unearthed master sources are indeed a find: Heylin had exclusive access to Dylan’s vast personal archives, bought for $US15 million-$US20 million ($20 million-$27 million) by a historic foundation in Tulsa in 2016.

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The best insights come from the cutting-room floor: outtakes and between-takes dialogue in the studio and on the road in Europe, courtesy of D.A. Pennebaker’s verité film Don’t Look Back and its compromised successor, Eat the Document; and reclaimed press conference and interview tapes with Dylan and many others.

So it is that Robert Zimmerman’s carefully guarded human frailty is laid more bare than ever, whether it be his jealous ambition, his romantic opportunism or his stubborn opacity, both to fellow musicians in the hot throes of the recording studio and the multitudes of “Mr Joneses” in constant, maddening clamour at his doors and windows.

“It does tricks with your head,” is one concise, plain-speaking truth bestowed on a Canadian journalist in the eye of the folk-electrical storm, viciously spiked with cannabis, LSD, red wine, methamphetamine, Nembutal and every other coping mechanism under the mid-’60s sun.

This Bob Dylan is, in short, a beleaguered young man in his early twenties, nurturing a gift he doesn’t understand well enough to trust, let alone deconstruct under the aggressive scrutiny of a world that would literally tear him limb from limb because he is popular.

Given all of this, he is clearly also a very remarkable one. For such a young man to turn his back on the folk establishment he once coveted, and who now wants to crown him king, must truly have been no small thing. “Politics is bullshit,” Heylin quotes him as telling Phil Ochs as early as ’64. “Just look at the world you’re writing about and you’ll see that you’re wasting your time. The world is … just absurd.”

Heylin is cocksure enough about his peerless powers of research and extrapolation to openly taunt and denigrate other biographers â€" even Dylan himself, whose acclaimed Chronicles Volume I he casts (borrowing from Peter Cook) as “a thin tissue of lies”. With recurring chortles of “methinks not” and “sometimes people just remember things wrong”, Heylin ridicules many a “minor writer” and “so-called” journalist by name.

Which might all seem a little smug if he weren’t simultaneously such a breezy and authoritative storyteller. His hair-splitting about places and dates and hence exactly who might have influenced or stolen what is necessarily academic, but his sometimes almost begrudging adoration of his subject is never less than infectious. And, well, you don’t last long writing Bob Dylan bootleg liner notes without being 100 per cent correct close enough to all of the time.

When that Triumph motorcycle tries to end our hero’s journey on July 29, 1966, we’ve had quite the ride ourselves. Still, there’s no story on Earth like the one Mr Dylan keeps on writing himself, the one about the world that’s just absurd, intentionally regardless of what anyone anywhere else said or says, now, then or ever. Even Clinton Heylin.

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Michael Dwyer is an arts and music writer

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