Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan

You could never claim that you didn’t know what you were getting into. There are no shortage of warnings, harbingers and portents that a potential biographer could find to encourage a rapid detour or retreat – offhand comments that all boil down to ‘you don’t know me, how could you know me?’ – from the blasted road that leads to the charnel house of Dylan biography.  In the early days, Mr. Dylan was admittedly a little less cagey; there are stories of Bob spending late nights with Robert Shelton while he was working on ‘No Direction Home’ and I remember the tag line on the cover of ‘Dylan’, the first biography written by Anthony Scaduto that read ‘I like your book.  That’s the weird thing about it. – Bob Dylan.’   Since then, things have been firmly shuttered in fortress Zimmerman, and every book published since then has relied on varying degrees of second hand information.  Realizing this, some like Clinton Heylin in his ongoing ‘Behind The Shades’ biography updates have treated Dylan’s life as a journalistic event wherein the writer who provides the greatest number of quotes and expert sources wins.  Heylin’s knowledge of the outer events of Dylan’s life is creepily encyclopedic, but other than providing obsessive fans with a lot of trivia, the awkward reconciliation of personal details with art that Heylin relies on makes for an uncomfortable read that often seems voyeuristic and simply wrong.  More successful are David Hajdu’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’ that focuses on the early New York Folk scene of which Dylan was a part and ‘Dylan’s Visions of Sin’ by Christopher Ricks that explores the singer’s language and spirituality as it is reflected in his art without making any assumptions about Dylan the man.  Even Dylan’s own memoir, ‘Chronicles’ is suspect in its treatment of events and functions more as a fine piece of writing and literary expressionism than a straight autobiography.

So, what the Hell did Ian Bell think he was up to with ‘Once Upon A Time – The Lives of Bob Dylan’?

A little research revealed that Ian Bell is a former winner of the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism – so, he sounds a little more interesting already, and his previous biographical work included ‘Dreams of Exile’, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (and no other ‘rock star biographies’).  Bell was also the former editor of the Observer and a columnist for The Herald in London, so expecting at least some half-way decent writing, I decided to give the book a chance and I’m glad I did.

In many ways, ‘Once Upon A Time’ is the kind of biography that one expects to read long after the subject has died.  It functions more as a life and times of the artist rather than a blow by blow account of all the events of his life and is much stronger for this. From the beginning, Bell’s insights into the post war reality that young Robert Zimmerman grew up in captivate and encourage the reader. There is no uncomfortable fawning about Dylan’s brilliance or looking backward at his biography to colour everything he ever did as foreshadowing his future genius.  At first, I kept skipping ahead in the book to see if Bell would ever abandon his slightly aloof or arm’s length perspective and jump right into the gossip and conjecture that mars most books of this type.  Initially, it seemed as if Bell was being too careful and that he had constructed a kind of opaque film that separated him from his subject; reading the book felt like looking at an image through the wrong end of a telescope. Gradually, I was won over and realized that this is how Bell had set out to write.  He doesn’t write simply about ‘Bob’ who he had never met – there’s not much about Dylan’s romantic foibles, his problems with drugs or anything like that  – but about the cultural movements, economics and political realities that formed the time he – and most of his readers – grew up in or lived through.

More than anything else, ‘Once Upon A Time’ offers a compelling account of American life between the early forties to mid seventies with some insightful connections made between larger cultural forces and Dylan’s words and music.  For example, when Bell examines the influence of black music on Dylan’s songwriting, he begins by quoting from another journalist’s essay in which the author asserted ‘..he (Dylan) learned about race through his study of popular music.’  Such statements have reinforced some rather questionable myths, with Bell quick to point out ‘Knowledge was born from a collective memory, too.  Some things were hard to forget, and some persistent, ugly facts of American life did not fit the usual caricatures.’ (Bell p.86)  He then discusses a lynching that took place in Duluth, near the Zimmerman’s hometown of Hibbing in 1920 and examines how such events must have informed the collective unconscious of everyone who lived there at the time.

In section after section of the book, Bell leaves the presumptions about Dylan’s influences and motivations as they’ve been reported over the years for other journalists to exhume or solidify.  That Bell follows his own instincts and understandings of history is the book’s greatest strength.  Thankfully, the cultural insights are original and well argued.  ‘Once Upon A Time’ never reads like a Sociology 101 textbook or ‘A Young Person’s Guide To The Sixties.’ Rather it is a fluid read that moves organically through its subject matter.  The associations and connections that Bell ventures are all well argued and illuminated, and for the first time ever reading about a pop culture figure, I managed to finish the whole book without becoming embarrassed for the writer.  Very few authors who have written about a rock musician have communicated such a love for the written word or expressed ‘big ideas’ without coming off as pretentious or out of his depth in the way that Bell does.  Finally, Ian Bell trusts the intelligence and willingness of his reader to follow his arguments and make connections of his or her own.  It’s impossible to express strongly enough how rare an achievement this is.

‘Once Upon A Time – The Lives Of Bob Dylan’ is the first of a two part biography, and covers up until 1974 and the release of ‘Blood On The Tracks.’  The second installment, ‘Time Out Of Mind’ has been published in the UK and should see publication in North America before long.  If you have even a passing interest in Dylan or want an inkling of know how books in the future will try to make sense of the myriad chaos of daily life in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘Once Upon A Time’ is essential reading.

Maybe it’ll take a hundred years to look at Dylan’s life without being affected by subjectivity and prejudice , but by that time the zeitgeist, the feeling in the air that permeates his music will be gone and it’d be like reading Shakespeare on the subway to work in the morning. For the time being, ‘Once Upon A Time’ may be the best book ever written about ‘Dylan’ for a long time to come. Ironically, however much the petty details of the singer’s life have been overlooked in its pages, Dylan’s still the instigator of every phrase Bell writes, the one in the boiler room shoveling in the coal that keeps the story going. It’s like the title of one of the old guy’s songs where he complains, ‘I’m not there.’ Well, we all know better than that, but I don’t think anyone will mind if he sits out this dance while we read this book.