Seeing yet another side of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan fans are in for a treat. The man’s new album, Together Through Life, will be released on April 27. Before that, Dylan begins the latest instalment of the Never-Ending Tour at Sheffield Arena on Friday; and Thursday sees the publication of Revolution in the Air, a new book by the man The New York Times described as “the only Dylanologist worth reading”, Clinton Heylin. Certainly, Heylin, who previously wrote the Dylan biography Behind the Shades, seems to have little time for other Dylanologists, or would-be Dylanologists. In the introduction to Revolution in the Air, he muses that he is “providing yet another invaluable resource for the congenitally lazy breed of ‘rock critic’ to cherry-pick for this month’s Why Dylan Matters feature”.

So, when I met Heylin recently, I thought we should start from the assumption that of course Dylan matters, and that we really don’t need reminding why he matters; and instead we should concentrate on what, if anything, the Dylan fan might glean from yet another book on the man. Refreshingly, Revolution in the Air isn’t about Why Dylan Matters, nor is it about What Dylan Means: it is, essentially, What Bob Did Next — a chronological journey through his songs, taken one at a time in the order they were written. The simple mathematics of Dylan’s output appear to be smiling on this venture, as the 600 songs in the man’s catalogue (this doesn’t include the new album) are split evenly into two volumes of 300 each, with the first volume taking us from the earliest attempt at a song (1957’s Song for Brigit — apparently written for Brigitte Bardot) through to Wedding Song, the last track written for Planet Waves, while Volume 2 will spring into life with Dylan’s most-loved creative rebirth, Blood on the Tracks.

One of the great advantages of Heylin’s approach is that it really brings into focus the extraordinary period from spring 1962 through to the summer of 1965 when Dylan was completely reinventing himself, pop music and the wider popular culture on a regular basis. The landmark songs of this period — Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Mr Tambourine Man and Like a Rolling Stone — each kick off a new level of songwriting; but Dylan is moving so fast at this point that he is effectively writing one kind of song while still recording the previous kind, and in live performance singing the generation before. What Heylin’s approach makes clear is that, even while many in his audience thought he was moving way too fast for them, he was actually slamming on the brakes, playing what he must already have considered “the old stuff”. This also helps to explain the sheer sense of release when he finally does get up on stage with the Hawks and plugs in his electric guitar; no wonder he doesn’t let a few boos stop him — this stuff has been building up inside of him for months.

Placing the songs in the order they were written also reveals some extraordinary decisions. Dylan had actually written Mr Tambourine Man before he went into the studio to make his fourth album, but chose not to release it, instead putting out Another Side of Bob Dylan, a (relatively) simple collection of (mainly) love songs, and keeping this astonishing leap forward for album five. It’s become traditional to think of the mid-1960s as a kind of songwriting competition between Dylan, the Beatles and Brian Wilson. How galling for the other contenders in this competition to find out that Dylan was sometimes keeping his best players on the bench and fielding a weakened team. “You think Chimes of Freedom is a great song?” Dylan must have been laughing to himself. “You have no idea.”

Not every page is revelatory, as Heylin admits: “You can overstate the importance of chronological order. But what surprises me is that nobody had attempted to do this before.” The vastness of the task may be one explanation, but Heylin says his main problems in dating songs came only with those written after 1990 — a mere 60 out of the 600. “To be honest, after 1990, it becomes almost impossible to organise the material in this way, but it also becomes less important because, for the first time ever, Dylan starts to repeat himself,” Heylin says. “Prior to Love and Theft, Dylan never repeated himself. Whether they were good, bad or indifferent, his albums always represented something new.” But Heylin considers Love and Theft to be essentially Time Out of Mind Volume 2, and adds: “Everything I’ve heard of the new album tells me it’s Time Out of Mind Volume 4. He’s making the same album. I’m not necessarily criticising him. But it means that what I’m doing with these books becomes less interesting.”

Heylin believes the reason why Dylan is sticking with essentially the same template lies in the long, seven-year gap between Under the Red Sky and Time Out of Mind, a period in which Dylan appeared to have run out of ideas: “I think that when he made Time Out of Mind, it had taken him so long to take that step that he made a decision. ‘I’ve got two choices: I can wait perhaps another seven years for lightning to strike again, or I’m just going to mine this seam till it’s done.’ ”

Together Through Life does closely follow the pattern of Dylan’s previous three albums, but he freshens up the sound cleverly by bringing in the Los Lobos accordion player David Hidalgo, who features on every track, thus giving the album a discrete sonic identity, much as Scarlet Rivera’s violin did on Desire. Mike Campbell, guitarist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (who backed Dylan in the 1980s), is also on the album, which is produced by Dylan himself (using his Jack Frost pseudonym). Intriguingly, online Dylanologists have already unearthed several lyrical borrowings from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the David Wright translation) among the new album’s songs. My Wife’s Home Town contains the line “I’m pretty sure she’ll make me kill someone”, which appears in The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale; Forgetful Heart includes the line “Nothing shocks me more than that old clown”, which also appears in the Summoner’s Tale; while the refrain from I Feel a Change Coming On, “and the fourth part of the day is already gone”, turns up in the Sergeant- at-Law’s Tale. But Dylan is more than capable of writing a fine couplet without leaning on Chaucer. My favourite comes from My Wife’s Home Town: “Well, there’s reasons for that and reasons for this / I can’t think of any just now, but I know they exist.”

Dylan has always borrowed words and phrases, and in his early days he co-opted the tunes of old folk songs on a regular basis to provide the framework for his new lyrics. Blowin’ in the Wind, for example, adapts the tune of an old spiritual, No More Auction Block. But despite leaning on the past, the song sparked off a whole new direction in Dylan’s career — one that he was far from happy with. Again, Heylin’s approach, taking us back to when the song was written, gives a clearer focus. Only a week after writing Blowin’ in the Wind, Dylan had already begun introducing it with the defensive line “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that”. Remarkably, within a few days of its genesis, long before it had been recorded, when only a handful of New York fans could have heard it, the song had already landed the young Dylan with a new problem, one that was to plague him for decades — people asking him “What does it mean?” — and he was already backing away from being anybody’s spokesman.

Things have changed, however. In a recent interview with the music journalist Bill Flanagan, Dylan said: “I see that my audience now . . .feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs, it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up . . .If there are shadows and flowers and swampy ledges in a composition, that’s what they are in essence. There’s no mystification . . . All those things are what they are.”

And perhaps that’s another reason why Dylan is sticking with the style he developed on Time Out of Mind; because he has finally won back what he lost way back in 1962 — the right to just be a songwriter, not a spokesman. We still listen carefully to what he says, but, these days, it’s not because we think he knows some big secret that we don’t; it’s because, even if he’s only saying what we’re all thinking, he just says it better.

Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Volume 1 1957-1973 is published by Constable on April 23