Come writers and critics, who won’t apologise with their pens

My mini Bob Dylan shrine at the Oxfam bookshop in Truro, Cornwall.

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess
Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind

Despite there already being hundreds of books about Bob Dylan, the eve of his 80th birthday (on May 24th) heralds a whole bookshelf of new tomes; actually only some new, many revised, updated and expanded.

Michael Gray’s Outtakes on Bob Dylan; Paul Morley’s You Lose Yourself You Reappear, Bob Dylan and The Voice of a Lifetime; The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham; Robert Shelton, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home; Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes; John Bauldie’s The Chameleon Poet: Bob Dylan’s Search For Self; Determined to Stand – The Reinvention of Bob Dylan by Chris Gregory and Clinton Heylin’s A Restless, Hungry Feeling: The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1: 1941-1966 are just the ones featured on expectingrain.com. It’s hard to believe these are all being published within a month of each other, and all about one man, but such is the endless allure and mystery that is Bob Dylan.

Clinton Heylin (who, along with fellow Dylanologists John Baudie and Michael Grey, was born in the north of England) has published some dozen books on Dylan and is the first writer to be allowed access to the not-yet-open Dylan archive at the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has been called ‘perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan’ by Rolling Stone and by the New York Times as ‘the only the Dylanologist worth reading’. He should repurpose the old Dylan marketing phrase ‘No one sings Dylan like Dylan’ to ‘No one writes Dylan like Heylin’.

I’m not actually Heylin’s biggest fan; I’ve read a bunch of his books, which verge on the obsessive, and find him intentionally perverse – he seems to go out of his way to criticise songs and albums loved by other critics (and fans), such as Oh Mercy and ‘Love and Theft’, and fawns over obscure, overlooked or just plain bad material, such as Knocked Out Loaded. Other criticisms of the writer include him not crediting his sources – unless it’s himself.

Mainly, though, he goes out of his way to criticise other Dylan critics. I’d noticed it whilst reading his books; in fact I’ve previously mentioned on these pages his attack on Dylan researcher Olof Björner. I also read an article in which he trashes Alexis Petridis’s review of Rough and Rowdy Ways in the Guardian, which had the headline ‘A testament to his eternal greatness’ (Heylin had quipped something along the lines of: with a headline like that, there’s no need to read the article). He’s even taken Dylan himself to task several times by, for instance, questioning the writing methods of Bob’s own autobiography, Chronicles. Heylin Knows Dylan Better Than Dylan!

Anyway, Heylin’s notorious bitchiness has recently gone mainstream, with two articles in the Guardian last week highlighting Dylan writers on the receiving end of Heylin’s Bob barbs. Specifically, Howard Sounes’s Down the Highway: the Life of Bob Dylan, also being reprinted this month, is deemed ‘semi-literate’ by Heylin, and Sounes himself is called a ‘professional dirtdigger’ in Heylin’s latest book, The Double Life of Bob Dylan.

As Sounes says in the Guardian article, he has more mentions in Heylin’s book than Bruce Springsteen does. Sounes was understandably surprised and upset by the remarks, and naturally began criticising Heylin in return. A few days later, in the letters page of the Guardian, another writer, Spencer Leigh joined in, saying he also was ‘savaged’ by Heylin, who had called his writing ‘a pseudo-historical work’. Maybe this will open the floodgates for others attacked by Haylin to speak up, and they’ll set up a #MeToo-type movement, and call it #ExpectingHaylin.

The whole thing is of course immature and ridiculous. Haylin is an arrogant twerp. Has he learnt nothing from the songs of Bob Dylan? I don’t think Bob would approve; he comes across mostly as being quite modest, considering he’s the greatest singer/songwriter ever.

• June’s issue of Uncut magazine features a previously unreleased 1983 Dylan song on their ‘free’ CD; Too Late is an early acoustic version of what would become Foot of Pride (nailed by Lou Reed on Dylan’s The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration album). The song will presumably be part of the Bootleg Series 16, focussing on Infidels outtakes, when it’s released later in the year.

This post appeared at #3 on expectingrain, Sunday 3 October 2021.

Previously on Barnflakes
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts video
Top ten writers on Bob Dylan
Happy 70th birthday, Bob!