Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited
By Clinton Heylin
Morrow, 780 pages, $32
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan
By Howard Sounes
Grove, 527 pages, $27.50
Positively 4th Street:
The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina
By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 328 pages, $25
Bob Dylan turned 60 on May 24. To mark (and market) this milestone, several new Dylan biographies have been published, adding height and heft to a teetering tower of verbiage. Of the three books discussed here, David Hajdu’s “Positively 4th Street” is best suited for the general reader. Subtitled “The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina,” the book brings Dylan into focus by examining him through the broader lens of his youthful colleagues, their relationships and their mutual cultural context. Authors Clinton Heylin and Howard Sounes focus solely on Dylan; while their writing styles are quite different, they share an exhaustive approach that may only resonate among confirmed Dylan zealots.
Born in Minnesota in 1941 and originally named Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan began his rise to fame in the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early 1960s. He arrived there with immense talent, a colorful stage name and the reinvented past of a vagabond troubadour. Dylan’s concocted image was based on a heroic American archetype, and his specific role model was Woody Guthrie.
Dylan initially focused on traditional American folk music. Such unadorned, rural Southern sounds were romanticized then as pristine populist art — despite the fact, as Hajdu notes, that their dissemination depended largely on commercial recordings from the 1920s and ’30s. Dylan pored over this archaic, rough-edged material, which was a far cry from the polished style of popular folk-revival groups such as the Kingston Trio, and learned to perform it quite convincingly. His voice was not pretty by conventional standards, but its soulful urgency demanded attention.
Dylan soon tired of being a mere interpreter and began setting his own lyrics to folk-song melodies. For a time he concentrated on polemic, topical treatises including “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”Acclaimed as classics — following renditions by established folk stars such as Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary — these songs addressed such urgent concerns as civil rights and nuclear holocaust. In addition, Dylan’s adaptations of old-time country and blues helped focus attention on many of these genres’ originators, enhancing their own late-blooming careers. Such uncompromising advocacy made Dylan a hero in folk, political and counterculture circles. By 1963 he, too, was a star, thanks in no small part to the then-better-known Baez, who talked him up and let him share the limelight at her sold-out concerts. While Baez remains active and respected today, Dylan’s ensuing work has been far more diverse and influential.
Dylan soon began to feel smothered by the role of generational spokesman. His lyrics changed from inspirational anthems to the more personal, elliptical themes typified by “Mr. Tambourine Man.” In 1965 Dylan took another radical step by playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, accompanied by a rocking band. For many in his core audience, such inevitable artistic growth represented heretical capitulation to crass, capitalist commercialism and, by extension, all the myriad other evils Dylan was somehow expected to vanquish single-handedly.
This reverberating rancor discounted such fine mid-’60s songs as “Positively 4th Street,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm” and many more electrified gems that followed. Dylan resented such possessive, rigid thinking; because of the Guthrie-esque image he’d so carefully cultivated, his folkie fans had no idea that their idol’s earliest idol was Buddy Holly, and that Dylan’s first public performances were garage-band rock back in Minnesota.
His going electric was just the first of many controversies that continue to fuel the cottage industry in Dylan biographies. When his relationship with Baez sputtered, Dylan was scorned as a calculating cad who exploited Baez’s connections to advance his career. The sincerity of Dylan’s protest songs was also questioned, and he perversely encouraged such doubts. Hajdu quotes Baez: “‘Once I asked him how he came to write ‘Masters of War.’ His reply was that he knew it would sell; I didn’t buy his answer then and I don’t now.'”
But, as Hajdu points out, Baez could also be aggressively ambitious, as could her brother-in-law, musician, songwriter and novelist Richard Farina. Farina’s song “Pack Up Your Sorrows” was popularized by Baez; his novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,” was published the day he died in a motorcycle accident in 1966. Farina was a close friend of Dylan’s and Baez’s and was married to Baez’s sister, Mimi, also an accomplished singer. The four inspired one another, but their group dynamics were also filled with personal and professional jealousy. Had Richard Farina lived, an ugly public rivalry with Dylan might well have developed.
Since confounding his followers in 1965, Dylan has composed and recorded prolifically, and explored a wide range of musical styles, collaborations and religious/spiritual paths. Not surprisingly, the quality of this work has varied widely over four decades; besides such seminal albums as “Blonde on Blonde,” “John Wesley Harding” and “Blood on the Tracks,” among others, Dylan’s oeuvre includes films, writings and artwork. Periodically dismissed as over the hill and irrelevant, Dylan has continually re-emerged with strong new music, most recently the fine album “Time Out of Mind,” in 1997. Meanwhile, his every note, lyric and utterance remain microscopically scrutinized and stridently debated — all the more so, perhaps, because Dylan grants precious few interviews and gave none for any of these books. Undaunted, all three writers assiduously tracked down quotes and anecdotes from numerous other sources.
“Positively 4th Street” gets off to a slow start because Hajdu does not offer a foreword to establish his book’s raison d’etre. For readers who grew up with the music of Dylan, Baez and the Farinas — as did this writer — the basics of the story are familiar, so Hajdu enriches our appreciation with new information. But readers who lack this frame of reference may have trouble seeing the ’60s folk-scene forest for the trees of Hajdu’s minutiae. His first few pages, on the Baez family, are especially dense.
Fortunately the pace soon picks up as Hajdu skillfully blends four converging sagas into one cohesive and increasingly compelling narrative that intensifies with the momentum of his subjects’ careers. He perceptively chronicles their interactions, the machinations of the music industry and the turbulent social-political climate.
Hajdu depicts Dylan, Baez and the Farinas as complex artists with admirable and unattractive traits, neither idolizing nor trashing them, although he does get rather snippy with some peripheral figures. For the most part, however, Hajdu creates a well-balanced and eminently readable portrait. By ending his coverage in 1966 — when Farina died and Dylan first retreated from public life after being injured in a motorcycle accident — Hajdu wisely turns less into more.
With “Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited,” Clinton Heylin updates and reprises his first Dylan biography, “Behind the Shades,” which appeared in 1991. Many keen insights and intriguing anecdotes appear within this meticulously researched book, which will fuel the discourse of Dylan talmudists for years to come. Heylin covers every discernible step of Dylan’s private and public journeys, and at times he writes with considerable flair. In describing Dylan’s early business dealings and lack of effective management, for instance, Heylin writes, “Part of the problem was that those willing to attach themselves to this comet were not necessarily the ones best equipped to ride its tail.” Heylin keeps an effectively brisk pace by presenting successive interview excerpts that eliminate the need for formulaic transitional sentences.
He also fills his prose with telling phrases from Dylan’s lyrics. These citations are apt in some cases, but annoyingly precious in others. Such lyrical references may not be obvious to the general public, and they underscore the fact that this book, like Hajdu’s, would be enhanced by an introductory summation of Dylan’s significance. Instead, Heylin seems to assume that readers share his encyclopedic knowledge — not only about Dylan but also about Dylan’s other biographers, whose work Heylin delights in debunking. This judgmental tone is applied to the music as well. Heylin dismisses Dylan’s Grammy-winning “Time Out of Mind” as “a work constructed by proxy, built on sand” and scorns Joan Baez’s singing as a “caterwaul.”
While perfectly valid in terms of criticism, such strong opinions grow tiresome. They shift the focus to the biographer’s personal aesthetic and second-guess Dylan’s artistic decisions long after the moment of creation. Although Heylin clearly admires Dylan, his subtext seems to be, “These albums would have been better if only I had produced them,” and he sounds somewhat miffed that he wasn’t consulted. This irascible persona is obtrusively evident throughout “Behind the Shades,” although, in a curious way, it’s an apt match for Dylan’s own well-documented feistiness. The book’s sheer girth may also discourage some readers. Still, Heylin is an admirably dedicated researcher and oral historian whose quick-witted writing is never dull.
Howard Sounes, by contrast, takes a more sympathetic, almost psychotherapeutic approach in “Down the Highway.” He presents Dylan as a troubled, lonesome person, fame and fortune notwithstanding. This mode has its pitfalls, especially Sounes’ continual use of Dylan’s first name, which seems oddly and overly familiar: “The fact that Bob had this in his mind for so many years offers a glimpse of his sensitive nature.” In his concise author’s note and acknowledgments, Sounes summarizes Dylan’s career for the uninitiated and then explains that, “In this book, much that was mysterious becomes clear. . . . [T]he fact that he married a second time . . . has been hidden from press and public. . . . The full story, based on documented fact and the firsthand accounts of intimate friends and family, appears here for the first time.”
While Sounes does not put a tacky, tabloid spin on such disclosures, his inclusion of this material slows the book’s pace because its influence on Dylan’s work is never clearly established. But in the world of Dylan obsessives, these revelations may well be viewed as a windfall. In general, Sounes is less astute about music than Heylin or Hajdu, but “Down the Highway” is a worthwhile assemblage of voluminous research and rich oral history.
The challenge of writing a Dylan biography may have been best expressed by Dylan himself. In 1985, Spin magazine’s Scott Cohen ask Dylan whom he would most like to interview. Dylan named several people, all dead, including Hank Williams, John Kennedy and the Apostle Paul. Then he added, “I’d like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind, who left people for ages to do nothing but speculate.”
Amen.
