The Double Life Of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin 

Vol. 2 1966-2021 Far Away From Myself 

By John Nogowski 
Published April 24, 2024. 

Clinton Heylin’s 13th (or 15th, one entry had
three editions) book on Bob Dylan is 836 pages long,
including the index. The Old Testament, King James
version, is 1,184 pages.

Since Heylin’s latest book leaves off in 2021
and Dylan, at last report, is still alive and on tour,
puzzling his audiences as to what song he’s
playing until he gets to its title, there’s still
a chance Heylin might yet catch up. Like the Old
Testament, “The Double Life Of Bob Dylan”
is overwrought (in spots), judgmental, mystifying and
at times, seems to go on forever.

At the same time, there is so much IN there, if
you’re a Dylan fan, you can’t help but pore
through it, nodding here and there, shaking your head
sometimes, wincing at some of the sentences (“he
had a couple more jump blues his live set needed like
JFK needed a hole in the head.”) But somehow you
find yourself reading on and on and on.

We certainly learn that along with recording and
touring extensively, Bob is or has been quite the
pelvic missionary. There may well also have been some
double-dealing with the recent flurry of
“authentic” signed lyric sheets –
just like those “signed/stamped” copies of
“The Philosophy of Modern Song.” There may
also have been some funny business with Dylan’s
paintings, too. Who knows?

Since the Dylan archive in Tulsa offers the actual
complete recording sessions for many of Dylan’s
albums, it figures that Heylin would be the kind of guy
to go and listen to take after take of song after song
that in some cases won’t make it on the record.
In some cases, he wonders why this was left off and
that was left off and lets us know all about it. This
is not exactly breaking news, particularly, since Dylan
fans are well aware of what gets left off records.
That, in part, is responsible for the creation of The
Bootleg Series.

But what we, as fans, don’t generally know are
the specifics and qualities of all the songs recorded
for a particular album and the choices that Bob Dylan
faced when it was all done. Heylin gets ankle deep into
this kind of thing here. On the one hand, it’s
neat that somebody KNOWS that, I guess. On the other
hand, isn’t it almost TOO MUCH information? Whose
album is it, anyway?

In a way, it would be like you, right now, looking
over MY shoulder as I write this paragraph, you
suggesting more semicolons or fewer adjectives or
whatever. It’s one thing to peek through the
window into the recording session. It’s another
to act as pseudo-producer, isn’t it?

Sure, Clinton Heylin has probably listened to more
Bob Dylan than anybody this side of Bob Dylan himself,
but does that mean he’s qualified to tell us what
HE thinks should have been on the album or what verse
Bob should have used, is he? Isn’t that solely
Bob’s decision? And shouldn’t it be?

Back in the day before bootlegs (and YouTube) you
might read something by Greil Marcus where he had
gotten to listen to some surreptitiously obtained tape
that you knew, as a reader, you never would. And
it’d piss you off (at least it did me) that he
was going on and on all about something we’d
never get to hear.

Now, apparently, there IS access for some people to
listen to entire tapes of these Dylan recording
sessions. Like EVERYTHING. Recently, whole series of
takes of some legendary Dylan cuts are appearing on
YouTube. It’s darn sure that “Stuck Inside
Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” on Take
One sounds absolutely nothing like Take 15 or whatever
it was, the tune we know and love. Yeah, I guess
it’s neat to trace the progress. At the same
time, aren’t we losing some of the mystery around
creating something magical?

Whether intentionally or not, whether it was learned
behavior he found necessary to keep the creative
process alive for himself, Dylan has always had lots of
shifts and diversions and changes in direction and
carving each one up to try and solve something, ah, I
don’t know what purpose that serves.

If, for example, when Heylin listens to the official
recording of, say, “Neighborhood Bully” and
then writes to tell us Take 4 was way better and Bob
was a moron for not choosing that one, what does it all
mean?

The late Paul Williams, who might have been the most
enthusiastic Bob Dylan listener and writer ever, used
to write these pieces “You Have To Hear This
Tape.” And while I admired his enthusiasm and
occasional insights about Uncle Bob, almost none of us
were ever going to hear that tape he was talking about.
So what was the point? Did we miss ANOTHER great Dylan
concert? I’m sure that wasn’t his intent;
he seemed about the kindest man alive. But where do you
draw the line? Or can you, with Bob Dylan?

To me, and I’m probably alone in thinking this
way, the fact that Dylan’s notebooks and
scribbled half-ass lyrics sheets and other
paraphernalia is on display at the Dylan Center in
Tulsa is counterproductive. Sure, I suppose it’s
better that we have the stuff instead of tossing it
into a dumpster somewhere but there was a reason Dylan
chose not to use that verse or that take, an artistic
decision – whether right or wrong. Maybe
I’m being old-farty by suggesting we are not
respecting that by rummaging through all the leftovers
and, as Heylin does again and again, make a big deal
out of it, truly questioning Dylan’s
decision-making.

We’ve all done that. When we heard “Series Of Dreams” 
or “Blind Willie McTell” or a bunch of other songs, 
we thought what the hell is wrong with him. But ultimately,
it’s his call, isn’t it?

A thoughtful friend of mine suggested, “Well,
if Dylan turned over all those manuscripts and
notebooks, they’re fair game, aren’t
they?” Which is true enough. Like lots of Dylan
fans around the world, we love hearing the little
tidbits, the stories of Bob in the studio or on the
road or the on-stage patter, whatever. There’s a
new book out now, chock full of stories about what it
was like to play alongside Dylan. And sure, some of
them are interesting – if not particularly
surprising - to those who’ve followed him for a
while.

And if I sound like an old coot, so be it. But I
wonder if Heylin obsessively fussing with all these
unheard items, items that he heard and we didn’t
(and won’t)  ultimately takes away what IS
offered on record or occasionally, in concert. Would we
appreciate “Hamlet” more if we had all sorts of 
deleted scenes and stage direction instead of
the brilliance of the play itself?

There’s more to quibble with. Since the story
Dylan shared with us in his acclaimed
“Chronicles, Vol. 1” in no way resembles
the way Heylin would tell The Bob Dylan story –
THE REAL BOB DYLAN STORY, in other words, he shreds the
book. As others have suggested Bob
“borrowed/heisted/lifted/stole” sentences
and used lines from random poets (Henry Timrod) or even
from novels that appear in his songs on “Love and
Theft” in particular, when it comes to
“Chronicles, Vol.1,” Heylin really takes
the plunge.

Back in November of 2003, Heylin opens discussion on
this topic by quoting Dylan as telling someone
“Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” 
But later, Bob tells interviewer Edna Gundersen 
he completed single sections in one sitting,
“because if I stopped, I didn’t want to have to 
go back and read it.”

Whereupon Heylin, whose own prose most critics agree
could certainly use some pruning, goes ahead and calls
the kettle black. “Perish the thought a
first-time author might need to sometimes rewrite
sections,” Heylin sneers. Then he drops a real
bomb.

“Instead,” Heylin suggests, “he look a leaf 
from the magpie,” in other words, swiping lines 
from elsewhere. Heylin fires out what he calls 
“unDylanesque phrases” from pages 63,
96, 112, 167 which he says are “verbatim lifts
from Jack London’s prose.”

Which may well be the case. So? If Dylan did write
that way – you’d wonder why his editors
didn’t catch it in the first place. You’d
also wonder why someone who, in the recording studio at
least, is more intractable than just about anybody in
the history of recording (there’s account after
account of this kind of behavior on the other pages of
the book) would resort to cribbing someone else’s
sentences to flesh out his own thoughts. Could you
write that way? Why would you?

Unless this is Bob’s somewhat perverse sense
of humor, pulling yet another in a continuing series of
fast ones on all of us, perhaps especially those who
chased down the rabbit holes of where he found those
sentences. There are some poor souls out there who have
NOTHING better to do, evidently. Instead of spending
hours reading two hours of Robert Louis Stevenson to
find two sentences that may or may not be in
“Chronicles, Vol. 1,” maybe try and listen
to what is recorded and write about what some of these
songs offer, rather than their ingredients. Or read
some Chekhov. Or Hemingway. Or Twain. Bottom line was,
did the book work? You bet your ass it did. Does it
matter HOW he pulled it off?

Now it’s true, sometimes writers do those
sorts of things. Remember James Joyce talking about his
intent for his just-about-unreadable “Finnegan’s Wake,” 
– which he actually included in the book – “and look
at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched
and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a
whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it
sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for
ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that
ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.”

Yeah, Joyce might have been one of the greatest
writers of all time but did he give two and
three-quarters of a shit about writing something his
readers would understand? Hell, no. This was all about
him. Look what I can get away with. And he did.

Now, we don’t know that Bob has ever read
“Finnegan’s Wake” but from what we know of him 
and his sense of tomfoolery (Re: The
Complete Basement Tapes being Exhibit A,) and his
general overall “whatthefuck” attitude,
it’s a sure bet he would have approved of what
Joyce did. Maybe he did something similar. We’ll
never know, will we?

On the one hand, here is Bob Dylan, getting these
rave reviews for “Chronicles, Vol. 1” and
telling author Jonathan Lethem “…with the
book I wrote, I thought: The people who are writing
reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell
they’re talking about. It spoils you. They know
how to write a book, they know more about it than me.
The reviews of this book, some of ‘em almost made
me cry – in a good way. I’d never felt that
from a music critic, ever.”

To some of us, at least, Dylan lays out his story
straighter than he ever has (and of course, some of it
is made up, he’s writing about 50 years ago) and
it was touching. And he, at least to Lethem, admits he
was touched, too.

Or maybe he’s sitting on his bus somewhere in
between gigs, silently laughing to himself that he
pulled another fast one on the world. Maybe he did.

Continuing on through the book, there are all sorts
of little items that will make you laugh or nod or
wince. You can’t say Heylin didn’t dig. We
discover Bob was a fan of former band member Willie
Smith’s Hawaiian shirts (taking them without
permission!), that Band member Richard Manuel
unsuccessfully reached out to him while Dylan was in
Japan just before Manuel hung himself in a cheap
Florida motel (almost implying Bob might have saved him
had he been able to take the call) and that Bob’s
wry sense of humor had him pulling the chain of his
friend George Harrison on a song for his “Under
The Red Sky” album, dutifully recording
Harrison’s guitar solo, even though it was way
out of tune, then Dylan telling him it was perfect.
There’s more, much more.

There is no question that, like Star Trek, Heylin
goes places no other biographer has before – or
at least it seems that way. Some of that is, of course,
he’s written so many damn books on the guy.
Shouldn’t it be against the rules to write 13 (or
more) books about one guy, unless he was Jesus Christ
or something?

Some of it is Heylin is just inexhaustible on the
topic of Bob Dylan, even after all those books, all
those pages, all those opinions you’d think the
guy would run out of something to say. Nope.

Unlike, say, Greil Marcus who has said, flat-out, he
is NOT writing another book on Bob Dylan after his fine
“Folk Music,” Heylin seems poised to sit
back down at the computer and let it rip. This book
leaves off in 2021 so we know there’s at least
three more Dylan years and tours for Heylin to
critique, hoping for more.

As Bob says at the end of the closing song on
“Under The Red Sky” in one verse that
Heylin DIDN’T second-guess, “May the Lord
have mercy on us all.”

Amen.

John Nogowski is the author of "Bob Dylan: A
Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography:
1961-2022, (3rd edition)" available on 
amazon.com - .co.uk - .de