Heylin - Still on the Road

STILL ON THE ROAD

Also by Clinton Heylin:

So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeares Sonnets

Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan vol. 1 (195773)

The Act Youve Known For All These Years: A Year In The Life of Sgt Pepper & Friends

Babylons Burning: From Punk to Grunge

From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk

All Yesterdays Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 196671 [editor]

Despite The System: Orson Welles versus The Hollywood Studios

Bootleg The Rise & Fall of the Secret Recording Industry

Can You Feel The Silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography

No More Sad Refrains: The Life & Times of Sandy Denny

Bob Dylan Behind The Shades Take Two

Dylans Daemon Lover: The Story of a 450-Year-Old Pop Ballad

Dylan Day By Day: A Life In Stolen Moments

Never Mind The Bollocks, Heres The Sex Pistols

Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 196094

The Great White Wonders: A History of Rock Bootlegs

The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing [editor]

Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains: The Recordings of Sandy Denny & Richard Thompson

Rise/Fall: The Story of Public Image Limited

Joy Division: Form & Substance [with Craig Wood]

CLINTON HEYLIN

Constable London

To Tony Lacey, for twenty years of friendship and faith.

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010

Copyright Clinton Heylin, 2010

The right of Clinton Heylin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781-84901011-5

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

{ Contents }

{ Just Like Another Intro }

I never opened up my own thinking. My stuff was never about me, per se, so everybody who... thought it was about me... they took the wrong road. Dylan, 2007

Im not a playwright. The people in my songs are all me. Dylan, 2009

Still On The Road, the sequel to my previous volume on Dylans songs, Revolution In The Air, tells quite a different tale. Like that volume, its nature is dictated by the material it addresses, as it tells the stories of the next three hundred songs. But whereas the first three hundred songs were essentially written in a thirteen-year period, it took the man some thirty-three years to complete this second series. As a result, the songs herein are intersected by several periods of creative abeyance which last anywhere between six months (the first halves of 1975 and 1977, the second half of 1981) and six years (19916).

Nonetheless, both books share the key structural aspect each is divided into two blocks of creative time: the first, when songwriting generally came easily and plentifully; the second, when the pipes got rusty, and supply became intermittent at best. In that first volume, the period 19617 saw Dylan write 236 songs in the white heat of inspiration, and a mere 52 songs in the years from 1968 to 1973 the so-called amnesia (see my discussion in Behind the Shades, pp. 29496). The differential is not quite so acute in this second volume, but the book still ends up being divided between the 163 songs he wrote (or co-wrote) in the years 197483, and the remaining 137 songs, which occupy the years from 1984 to 2006.

I would personally argue that the years 1974 to 1983 saw Dylan write as many great songs as he managed in those wild mercury years. After re-establishing his genius credentials with the devastating Blood on the Tracks, he reinforced them with Desire and completed the cycle with perhaps his most lyrically ambitious work to date, Street-Legal, before surrendering himself to God. A trilogy of testaments to his new-found faith followed (Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love), before he signed off on those halcyon days with the 1983 comeback album, Infidels, which for all its (largely self-inflicted) flaws, again proved that no one wrote Dylan quite like Dylan.

But what truly marks out these years for Dylan the singer-songwriter was how on every occasion he entered the studio to record an album, he always had the material to make a classic just like the early-to-mid sixties. The fact that he only managed to transfer such potentially first-class material onto tape in fits and starts, limiting himself to just two truly classic albums in this ten-year period, Blood on the Tracks and Slow Train Coming and a couple of close calls, in Street-Legal and Infidels does not devalue his output as a songwriter