Never Just One Thing, Part I: Dylan’s Mysterious Musical Maturation

Continuing my reviews of music books I've read in 2023, I turn to Clinton Heylin's The Double Life of Bob Dylan, the most recent granular-level Dylan work from one of the world's top authorities on the masterly yet elusive Mr. Zimmerman. I had browsed it at the library and felt that it was perhaps too detailed for my taste, since I'm oriented less to biography than to aesthetic overviews that focus on the work and bring in details from the life-in-question as needed. Yet, I gave this a go, since I wanted to encounter clues on how Dylan developed from an undistinguished teenage musician in Hibbing, Minnesota, to the most important songwriter of the second half of the 20th century. Sensing that Heylin could help here, I dug in. Here are some thoughts on the book and the thoughts that arose for me.

First of all, considering how archival Heylin is, and he does draw on much new archival detail, I think his writing style still comes across as jaunty and irreverent, which helps a lot when the book goes as far into the weeds as this one does. He isn't afraid to cast a skeptical eye on Dylan's work, which is good, since the maestro's catalog is, shall we say, spotty. I saw online that people didn't like when he threw shade on other Dylan biographers, but I just thought it means he has attitude. Which, again, helps a lot when you are documenting so many details. I did find myself skimming late in the book when he provides endless transcripts from Dylan's remarks during his plugged in tour of England in '65 or '66. But that didn't taint the overall value of the book for me. Now, to some of the thoughts that arose for me while reading on Dylan's growth and his art.

Part I. The Path

So: how did Dylan get from Hibbing to the top of the world in New York City and beyond? That will always be a mystery. But here's what I see. From the time he was an early teen, he never wanted to be anything other than a musician, a rock and roll musician to be precise. This quality of intentionality is huge. His main instrument then was the piano and his first hero was Little Richard. He and his buddies quickly started forming bands that played at the high school and other venues, like the Jewish Summer Camp he attended. What's impossible to ascertain is exactly how good they were. And that really is the question if we want to understand how Dylan ended up the master to end all masters. I would think they weren't that good, otherwise they would have made more of a splash. Some brief recordings from that time weren't impressive at all. Dylan was no prodigy. But he was driven. After high school he even went up to Fargo to try and get a gig with Bobby Vee's band. Fargo! He was willing to do what ever it took, that's for sure. He only played one or two shows with Vee, but that didn't stop him from later telling everyone in NYC that he "toured" with him.

Famously, he discovered the folk music scene when he moved to Minneapolis to attend university. Again, it's not clear how good he was. It doesn't seem that he came across as better than anyone else. I did read recently where he said that the rapid progress he made as a guitar-playing folk musician was due to making a deal with the devil. Clearly this is an homage to the legend of Robert Johnson, and stated with tongue somewhere in cheek, and yet . . . he is a Bible-believing man, so the extent to which he was driven may feel that way to him. What we do know is that he was a quick study. And this would be a defining aspect of his rise. He was able to assimilate everything he heard, sometimes even to the point of stealing, as he notoriously did later in Greenwich Village with Dave von Ronk's arrangement of House of the Rising Son. Maybe that's where the Devil comes in. During this time of his late teens and very early 20s he traveled to places like Colorado and Madison to try to advance himself. But the key is that by discovering folk music, he found something that allowed him to really, really dig into traditional song forms and to develop an identity in the process. And it made him part of a popular cultural movement. 

Later, after he became the folk world's King of Protest Music, he claimed he wrote those songs simply because people liked them and wanted to hear them and he could get them published in places like Sing Out, which basically published everything. As always he's being two things at once here. It seems entirely plausible that he went this direction because that's how he could become successful. There's no shame in that. It isn't selling out to give the people what they want, because the main idea is that you want people to listen. Being excessively purist about it helps nothing. But it is also the case with Dylan that his heart was in it too. Down the road he would come to disparage his "finger pointing songs." But in one of the most revealing sections of the book, Heylin quotes taped conversations between Dylan and his folkie friend from Minneapolis, Paul Nelson (who went on to become a prominent music critic), that make Dylan's thinking in the early 60s plain. Nelson was of the school that great songs shouldn't be overly topical. Dylan pushed back, vigorously. He was a true believer that The Times They Are A Changin'. He hit Nelson with the argument that everyone needed to choose sides, that there was a cosmic, social battle going on. This was a popular attitude at this time of the Civil Rights movement, which fought the vestiges of pure racism in the US. Yet, excessive devotion to us-versus-them is also the attitude of a crank. But in such crankishness, such crackpottery, is great power. Everyone wants to feel like they are part of something special, and, more importantly, that they are on the right side. Moral "clarity" is intoxicating.

But, look, he came by it honest. First of all, he was still a very young man, and people can go through changes quick when young. He was only 20 when he first started to emerge in NYC, and that's a time of life when everyone is vigorously "chasin' down identities," as Village folkie Paul Siebel put it in his song, Then Came the Children. Secondly, there was an inspirational tradition of politicized, left-wing music exemplified by Pete Seeger and Dylan's self-chosen musical role model, Woody Guthrie. A word about Dylan and Woody. Of all the identities he tried on, this was, as we know, the most important. Guthrie was an artist of substance, who somehow made his hillbilly affectations work for him and his songs, coming off as hip and authentic rather than foolish, a neat trick that Dylan managed to duplicate. I remember loving Don't Think Twice when young but being annoyed that he rhymed road and know'd, as if they talked like that in Minneapolis. But then I discovered that Woody uses the same rhyme in one of his greatest songs, Hard Travelin'. It can really move your development forward to model yourself after a master, and so it was for Dylan. He truly loved Woody and befriended him, regularly visiting him in the care facilities where he was being treated for Parkinson's. As it turned out, someone else had already made a career as a Woody disciple, a Bronx Jew who had renamed himself Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Elliott was unique enough so that people in the Village, Ramblin' Jack included, thought Dylan was stealing his act. But Dylan always knew he would have to find his own way. So he kept pushing.

THE "NEVER JUST ONE THING" SERIES

Part I: Dylan’s Mysterious Musical Maturation

Part II: The Nature of Dylan’s Art

Part III: Dylan's Verbosity and the Path to Poetry

Part IV: Close Reading Dylan's "Idiot Wind"

Part V: Don't Overlook Dylan's Musicality

Part VI: On Dylan's Identity Tricksterism

Part VII: What Dylan Knows and Doesn't Know

Part VIII: Dylan, Taylor Swift, and Genius Inflation

Part IX: Close Reading "Simple Twist of Fate"

Part X: The Authentic Zen of "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"