Chronicles, Volume 1
by Bob Dylan
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Book Reviews of Chronicles, Volume 1
Book Review: To a younger generation, Dylan is a much needed elder.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book should have been called "Ramblings" instead of "Chronicles". There is no chronology. Fragments abound so much that it is now hard for me to write without the urge to use them myself. If you asked me what the point was, I wouldn't be able to say. If you were thinking you could write a report on the life of the author you'd be disappointed. I wouldn't even classify it as a biography. It is more like a long conversation over coffee - the kind a younger person stumbles into with a wise elder where the youth wouldn't get a word in edgewise. He wouldn't need to. You can hear the voice of Bob Dylan speaking through this style of writing as if he were sitting right there, rambling on from one subject to another right across the table from you.
And he pulls it off because he is a poet. His fragmented-style of speech on a range of subjects from his own youth, to the music scene when he was getting started, to observations on historical and then-current events, to his discussions of other musicians and so forth - it all has a prosaic resonance that carries the reader through the book without effort. At the same time he comes across fully human rather than as a larger than life megastar. A lull occurs in the book where he dawdles too much on one of his recording sessions, but in emerging from the details of the experience, you have the realization that this is not an untouchable musical genius with mysterious powers, producing his work by way of some divine revelatory exchange with the heavens, but an artist who struggles with his craft and never quite settles on satisfaction with the result.
The artistic personality finds acceptance here. Perhaps that is why I loved reading this book so much. I felt like if Bob Dylan were actually here, the generation gap would not hinder the exchange. I grew up in the 80s. The first time I saw Bob Dylan was on the "We Are the World" video. My friends and I thought it was a riot to imitate his nasal off-key verses. We didn't know about Bob Dylan. We wondered who let him in the studio with all those "stars". Years later I was working in a CD store (record stores were being phased out) when Dylan's 3-CD box set of bootleg recordings came out. By then I knew Dylan was important because he wrote "All Along the Watchtower", which was one of my favorite Hendrix songs. I got the bootleg discs and couldn't stop playing them. I didn't bother with anything else. The bootlegs were perfect to me. Like Robert Johnson, unfinished, unproduced, a man with his guitar and harmonica singing poetry, singing stories - real music.
But I did not really know Bob Dylan. I wasn't alive when he started out nor did I witness what he went through as a pop icon expected to lead a revolution. But this book introduced to me his world: folk music and whoever the Beat poets were. Whatever it is I know I like it. I feel like I am on the verge of some great cultural discovery - an aspect of authentic America that is lost on my generation, much like jazz or the blues. So what is folk music anyway? I thought it was Tracy Chapman in the 80s. Then I learned about Bob Dylan in 1991. A movie came out a few years back featuring "Man of Constant Sorrow". The soundtrack was great - from prison songs to Alison Krauss. Folk music makes me think of a strange cross between hillbilly heathenism and southern Christian fundamentalism. Being turned off by both, I still like it.
So now I've got some homework. After a few days of listening to modern folk music sage I realized I need to know all about Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac (a writer who I had never heard of before, but is of some apparently great influence on the "Beats" as in beatnik [unconventional/nonconformist] or beatific [exalted joy] - incidentally Dylan makes some remark about Americans who don't know him - and I never even heard of him), Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and other pioneers of American music. Dylan dropped names throughout this book, often without referencing any background information. So I wouldn't know if they were musicians, poets, writers, or what kind. ...Just leads in a detective story in pursuit of identity.
So in this book I learned it's all right to be myself. It is OK to be one of those artistic types in an engineer's world of presumed objectivity and always needing to be on time. When I was younger I wanted to lead the next revolution - the one we thought was going to happen in the 90s and make the 60s look like the 50s, (or some nonsense like that). I became a Muslim and thought Islam was the vehicle for change. Instead, I got caught up in a world community with so much inner unrest that making any positive impact on others was going to be a far-flung proposition. It's like expecting broke people to teach the world how to get rich. Meanwhile I was so busy being anti-conformist to my own American culture that I didn't notice how much of a conformist I had become within the Muslim scene. A conformist is a conformist either way - someone who's lost his unique identity and stopped being true to himself just to fit in. It's a false superficial kind of fitting in that one day when called upon to fill your emotional or psychological needs caves in. Once it did for me, I realized my error. Instead of a revolution, what I needed was a relationship with God, and God is not found through conforming to the wishes of others. That is what Islam means: There is no god, except THE God. (I.e. no other needing to be pleased except God).
I am not sure Bob Dylan would agree with me on that. Despite all his common-sense wisdom there is a strange pessimism that chases his observations. He speaks of avoiding any search for truth as if trying to pin that down is too imperialistic, while I have always seen that search as part of my purpose. His last line epitomizes what I mean about him: "...not only was it [the world] not run by God, but it wasn't run by the devil either."
I kept thinking as I read this book - that very few of the people I know, (mostly Muslims), would have any interest in it. I would go further and say that they wouldn't even be able to keep up with it. Though I would say it is important in this question of American Muslim culture, because while most of us are busy grappling with the issue of what it means to be Muslim today, who has bothered to focus on what it means to be an American? Once we get past the "I'm not a terrorist" rhetoric, maybe Dylan could help us answer what else it means. Folk music might be important in this - music being so intrinsic to culture. Obviously commercialism is as American as it comes, but not necessarily an aspect we are proud of or want to keep around. What is America underneath its commercial exterior? Doesn't folk music, including country, blues, rock, jazz, and even rap, (Dylan says he was checking out Ice T, Public Enemy, and NWA), provide pieces to the puzzle? The instruments, their sound, the feelings, and the stories all add up to something inseparably American. Our music is not all just drugs and sex to be shunned due to a sense of obligatory religious puritanism. Rather, the culture of America can be found in its history and its art. We will remain culturally illiterate as long as we shun its art as evil and look at its history as little more than an extension of European imperialism. Certainly, not all art is good and imperialism cannot be denied, but we must not oversimplify America and its people lest we be guilty of the same stereotyping that America perpetrates against Islam and Muslims. The American Muslim must have a well-rounded appreciation for both. Dylan's book is too advanced for Muslims as a starting place, but maybe it is a kind of litmus test - but even then, only for a certain kind of American.
In closing, I felt like I shared the past few days with Bob Dylan. We didn't talk about Islam at all. He told me all about folk music and his own experiences as a musician in a by-gone era. Rent was $60. You could hang out at the right places and run into the right people. You could be honest and still get into the music business with some honest people. He digressed often, which was cool, because he shared his thoughtful insights on history and politics and other matters. [I noted an interesting comment he made about Swaggart's downfall being not out of line with Biblical religious figures who also had slavegirls and/or prostitutes]. He did not talk much about what he thought about things going on right now, though I wished he had. I am not sure why, but it just seems to be worth knowing what Bob Dylan thinks about things. Maybe because in an age of such social disconnection, where families are nuclear and grandparents get shelved away in homes, he is the closest thing we have to a wise elder.
Book Review: After 45 Years of Mystery
Summary: 5 Stars
After nearly 45 years of evasiveness, few expected Dylan's autobiography to be forthcoming, or even readable. He had begun his career inventing stories about his early life, and had misled and toyed with interviewers throughout. His songs were presumed to be autobiographical, but were often so abstract and surreal that no real person could be seen. When he announced a multivolume autobiography, most people expected more of the same, something like the opaque, impressionistic hipster poem Tarantula. Instead, he has produced a clear, detailed, intensely honest and artistically challenging masterpiece of the memoir style. After all those years of carefully fabricating the fictional character of Bob Dylan, he finally opened the door and let us meet Bobby Zimmerman.
Journalists, obsessed fans, revolutionaries, and other such dangerous, unstable people pestered him mercilessly. His home was invaded, his family was stalked, and his garbage sifted and catalogued. He was defined first as the true guardian of the folk music tradition, then as the spokesman of a generation, and then as a prophet, even a messiah. When pressed to speak, he said that he was simply a "song and dance man ... a high wire artist." His few interviews were funny, oblique, and sometimes vicious putdowns of the generally clueless music press. He protected his privacy intensely, keeping his distance with intellectual misdirection worthy of Houdini.
Deep in Dylan's character is the obsession that his life not be forced into someone else's mold and his song lyrics suggest that we do the same:
"It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to."
"Don't trust me to show you beauty ... if you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself."
He bristled and angered at the demands of the public that he answer questions and reveal himself. In recent years, despite being on stage more than 100 times a year, he has come to be seen as permanently inscrutable, this generation's Garbo. Finally, in his own time, he decided to tell the back story and turned his creative talents to this new form of expression. He applies the same brilliant imagery, piercing reality, and evocative ideas that mark his songs to a narrative format, and at the same time reveals enough personal detail to satisfy any Dylanologist. It seems that when we stopped demanding anything of him, he freely and cheerfully began to answer all our questions - very zen-like.
Chronicles is structured like an Elmore Leonard novel. The scenes are dense with detail, flashbacks are expertly structured to explain the importance of key events, and his thought processes are followed with psychological subtlety and insight. The format of the book is to drop in on our hero Bobby Zimmerman at three widely-spaced moments, carefully describe the world outside his eyes, and then expand the context to include the surrounding forces and events. His attention to detail is Proustian, but unlike Proust, his details are interesting.
The book opens with him alone and broke, having just arrived in Manhattan. With a painter's eye he describes the scene and the people, and his early personal history is gradually introduced to explain the decisions he made. A second section focuses on the Woodstock period of withdrawal and creative desiccation. The third segment recounts the rebirth of inspiration, emphasizing his collaboration with Daniel Lanois in the recording of Oh Mercy. Any of a myriad of moments could have been used, and those who complain about the book bemoan those missing stories - his religious period, his marriage and his relationship with his children, drug and alcohol excesses - but Dylan could have chosen almost any of the vignettes of his life with the same result. This is, after all, Volume One. There is no reason to believe that he would hesitate to talk about any of those issues.
The biographical details are fascinating, but more intriguing are the many other doors opened during the narrative. He introduces a wide range of cultural influences (from Tiny Tim to Mae West) and fully explains his indebtedness to his musical and poetic progenitors - Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Little Richard, Robert Johnson, Bertold Brecht, Rimbaud, along with dozens of others. The music industry giant, John Hammond, said that Dylan was the latest in a long line of tradition, and Dylan would not disagree.
An added treat are thought digressions that introduce brightly colored characters and scenes that could live in "Mozambique," or "Desolation Row." A motorcycle ride outside New Orleans is highlighted by meeting Sun Pie, an ancient peasant philosopher who provokes Dylan to personal reassessment with the simple question, "Got everything you need?" Dylan, who still has great humor, answers, "Yeah, but I need some more."
Doubtless, Dylan is deep-down as baffled by the events of his life as are his admirers. In a recent 60 Minutes interview, he talked about his early masterpieces as if they fell out of the sky onto him. With a touch of fatalism or perhaps sadness he said, "I can't do that anymore." That is a bit of artistic false modesty - the songs on his last two albums are monumental and timeless, and the recent movie Masked and Anonymous is an underappreciated creative bombshell.
In Chronicles, Dylan invites us to sit alongside him on the psychedelic carnival ride of his life, and with the skill and compassion of a great artist makes those scenes real for us. He was always most upset and offended when described as anyone's "leader." He was simply doing his best to live and understand his life. If he is now giving us any advice, it is that we put as much effort into living and understanding our own.
Book Review: My Back Pages
Summary: 3 Stars
(...)
Since Bob Dylan published Tarantula in 1966 his autobiography has been anticipated with some trepidation. Would it be as unreadable? Would it lay to rest the misinformation spread about him and by himself. Well, it is certainly readable, and it is in fact beautifully written in a style that flows and rolls with ease. This is certainly not a book of self-analysis, nor self reflection. It is a book of reminiscences and astute observations and characterisations of people and places, and is particularly engaging in conveying the vibrancy of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. The style is reminiscent of a detective novel, using the typical tricks of the genre, and of film, in using flash-backs and leaps forward, as he chronicles his way through the early years of fulfilling what he believed to be his destiny. He describes listening to Ricky Nelson while waiting to be called to sing at Café Wha, and then relates how ten years later Nelson was booed off the stage for changing direction. Nelson was a man with whom he could empathise, having gone through the experience many times himself.
This is not a history. Bob Dylan is born on page 29, and after gliding through various episodes, including signing for John Hammond at Columbia records, he returns to describe his home town of Hibbing Minnisota on page 229. In between there is a sudden leap to 1987 when he is recuperating from a hand injury, and artistically burnt-out. He begins by describing a meeting with Lou Levy, the music publisher at Leeds Music, just after arriving in Greenwich Village and ends the book by telling how Al Grossman, his manager, gave him $1000 to buy himself out of the deal shortly after.
His character sketches of the people he knew are precise and incisive, such as of Tiny Tim, later famous for his hit, sang in a falsetto voice accompanied by a ukulele, `Tip-toe Through the Tulips',. In describing Bob Neuwirth, who became a close friend, Dylan writes, in Raymond Chandler style: `Right from the start you could tell that Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom. He was in a mad revolt against something. You had to brace yourself when you talked to him.' Neuwirth appears in the Dylan Film `Don't Look Back', and these character traits are evident in his treatment of Joan Baez.
There is a good deal of self justification in the book. Dylan tries to put the record straight on a few mythologies that have surrounded him. He treats in a cursory manner his well known predilection to fabricate stories about his own background. He explains how when confronted with Billy James the publicity man for Columbia Records, he felt intimidated by his Ivy League Harvard presence, telling him that he was from Illinois, worked on construction in Detroit, had no family, and had rode into New York on a freight train. He doesn't explain why he lied about his past to his friends, nor does he try to analyse how hurt his parent were at being disowned by him. He is quite bitter in remembering how Joan Baez criticised him for abandoning the folk movement. He vehemently denies having been a spokesman for a generation, but this is disingenuous. He didn't feel comfortable with the responsibility of being hailed as a spokesman, but there is no getting away from the fact that he consciously wrote songs, such as `Bowing in the Wind', Playboys and Playgirls', and `The Times They are A' Changin' in order to appeal the social conscience of his generation. After Kennedy's assassination he felt distinctively vulnerable, and did not himself want to become a target. He has on many occasions denied that he took his name from Dylan Thomas, and once famously said that `I have done more for Dylan Thomas than he ever did for me'. In this book he talks about the process of choosing a stage name. He had thought of calling himself Robert Allyn, changing the e in his own name to a y. At about the same time he read some Dylan Thomas, and imagined that Dylan must have changed his name from Dillon to Dylan. Bobby Dylan, he thought, was too much like Bobby Darin, and anyway there were too many Bobbies making records. He settled on Bob Dylan, because it sounded right, not because he had any particular liking for the poetry. In fact, in an interview in Robert Shelton's archives, Dylan explicitly say that he disliked Dylan Thomas' flowery and affected style.
Fans who were won over to Bob Dylan by the strength of his lyrics will be disappointed that he talks only of the process of writing songs, but not of their content. He makes no attempt to explain their meaning, nor to analyse their impact. This is not surprising given that when asked about the meaning of his lyrics he always got irritated and dismissed the questions with such curt answers as `I don't know, man'.
The book is not an act of self-disclosure, the mask is not taken from the face, and there is very little sense of the emotional life of the author. He says very little about intimate relations, except to express his desire to protect his wife and family from the gaze of publicity, and to complain of the constant invasion of privacy. He also says very little about his relationship with Joan Baez, or St, Joan as she was pejoratively known.
Bob Dylan's Chronicles are well worth the wait, and while they do not allow the reader too great an insight into the inner life of the artist, they reveal a great deal about his psychology, and how he is still prepared to be economical with the truth on many issue. In fact, he reveals a great deal about his manner of writing when he talks of himself and Bono, of U2. He says that they are very alike in that `We can strengthen any argument by expanding on something either real or not real' (p.175).
(...)
Book Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Folkie
Summary: 4 Stars
I confess to picking up Bob Dylan's Chronicles with some trepidation. This is a man notorious for erasing and rewriting the facts of his life, a man who went through repeated incarnations for reasons often obscure to the rest of us, someone who stubbornly refused, throughout his entire career, to put labels on himself or his songs. How much of this well-documented obscurantism would find its way onto the page?
Even though some of these fears were justified - there's a lot of emotional and factual evasiveness - this is nevertheless a terrific book. Dylan didn't set out to write a conventional autobiography. This isn't a born here, did this, went there chronological narrative. Nor is it an apologia for the life he lived, or a settling of old scores. It's about the education, sentimental and otherwise, of a world class bard. On that level, he totally delivers the goods, providing honest, hard won insights about what molded him as a musician. He writes with intelligence and candor about his creative influences, and movingly about periods of creative atrophy and regeneration.
The emotional heart of the book is the tale of young Bobby Zimmerman, high on Kerouac and scratchy Woody Guthrie 78s, trekking from Minnesota to New York City in the early sixties, determined to make his mark as a folk singer. Writing in a striking and quirky style, he brings the Greenwich Village folk scene to life while generously acknowledging the musicians and intellectuals who gave him a hand up, a good idea, or a couch to crash on.
Young Dylan knew where he was heading, and had unshakable faith he'd get there. As he scuffled through the Village, he absorbed everything and seemingly forgot nothing. We get Whitmanesque recitations of musicians heard, celebrities met, books read, current and historical events noted As a performer, he was nurtured and influenced by traditional American music: blues, country, jazz, and particularly folk. Talking about musicians who changed their style, he says of himself, "As for me, what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitudes to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before." Bob Dylan may have been an original, but he takes great pains to show us that his songs didn't come out of thin air.
The book jumps around in time and space. He opens with the hardscrabble Village days and takes us to the point where he's about to stop channeling his folksinger predecessors and start writing his own songs. We then cut to the late sixties, when he's dealing with the unwelcome byproducts of worldwide fame. Desperate to avoid the radicals and just plain crazies who want to co-opt him for their own purposes, he flees from place to place to find some peaceful space to raise his children. He's determined to preserve his identity as a working musician and avoid becoming everybody's prophet or anybody's icon. He's a man struggling to keep control of his own soul.
We lurch from there to 1987, when he's struggling with artistic burnout. A chance encounter with a jazz singer gives him access to a new singing technique and a remembered conversation with a blues musician gives him new rhythmic tricks. He takes us into a recording studio in New Orleans during this same period, and shows us his struggles to lay down some new songs using these new insights. He rubs our noses in the sweat, frustration and uncertainty of making original music. All his hard-won musical technique still doesn't grant him unimpeded access through that door to the place where it all comes together just once, just right.
In the final section we detour back to the nascent folkie as a teenager in Minneapolis, and then we're in the Village again, in the early sixties. He zeroes in on the influences that formed him as a songwriter, a fascinating stew that included Rimbaud, Brecht, the blues musician Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, and, of course, Woody Guthrie. These weren't subconscious influences. When Dylan heard something he thought was the real deal, he dissected it with the focus and care of a Swiss watchmaker. Inspired as his songwriting may have been, according to him it was never casual or effortless.
Like Dylan's best songs, Chronicles is tough-minded, honest, filled with startling imagery and striking insights. Much of the stuff of everyday life is missing here, but that's alright. We never listened to Dylan to get the facts; but we did count on him to make us feel the Big Truths. That's what he does here.
Book Review: The Bard Shows His North Country Roots
Summary: 5 Stars
Around our house, Dylan is nearly deified, sharing the honor with another Minnesotan native son - Prince. My husband, Canadian born, but Minnesota-raised, has to be reminded periodically that we can't listen to best of Dylan all day and night, every day and night. Still, his love of the Bard from Hibbing has spread to me and our four children as over the years we lived our lives to a soundtrack of Dylan crooning, until songs like "Sara" seemed to describe our own lives as much as his. Our kids love the stories our brother-in-law tells about arriving to teach Chemistry at Bard College in the early Sixties and seeing the teenage Bob Dylan sitting strumming his guitar on the steps of the gym everyday. So when CHRONICLES: Volume One arrived at our home, everyone, from Dad to our three grown sons to 14 year old Liesette, wanted to read it.
CHRONICLES is a beautiful book. And I mean that literally. It feels real and solid in your hand with wonderful thick pages of rag paper that looks hand torn like the books in Ivy League libraries. The text is real and solid too.
Dylan does not disappoint. His memoir is highly readable and engaging. The voice is rhythmic, descriptive and poetic as you'd expect from America's unofficial Poet Laureate. But there are surprises here too. Dylan has a broad grasp of politics and human interaction. His descriptions of famous people and places hold interest, but some of his most finely drawn characters are unknown, like the old timer Sun Pie who Dylan met in Louisiana.
The memoir begins in New York City when Dylan meets boxer Jack Dempsey just after signing with Columbia Records. Music aficionados will enjoy the richly detailed descriptions of people, places and events in musical history. But readers will also enjoy Dylan the voracious reader who informs and delights with his multilayered descriptions of literary works and the way they affected his life and thinking. Dylan's reading taste is diverse, from Balzac to Robert Graves' THE WHITE GODDESS to Tennessee Williams' plays and the Bible. His stories about his personal relationship with poet Archibald McLeish is worth the price of this book alone.
Readers will be surprised to learn that Dylan first began drawing art at the same table where he would later pen his first songs. His discussions of art will resonate with visual artists, especially his on the mark ode to Red Grooms.
CHRONICLES reveals the breadth of Dylan's taste and intellectual curiosity. He is refreshingly non-judgmental and classist. Wrestlers, Slim Pickens, Jean Genet's THE BALCONY, opera, Jack Dempsey and Picasso - Dylan takes it all in, filters it through his keen mind, and distills phrases that capture the contribution of each with an open-minded embrace that feels particularly American. America at its best.
The memoir jumps back in forth in time and place with some of the most fascinating stories set in Woodstock, Minnesota and New Orleans where Dylan illuminates the creative process with his description of the relationship between him and producer Daniel Lanois amid detailed descriptions of motorcycling across the Louisiana landscape.
With Chapter 5 "River of Ice," CHRONICLE ends where most memoirs begin, in Bobby Zimmerman's hometown of Hibbing in Northern Minnesota. At the end, Dylan places himself as a Minnesota son, among Roger Maris, Charles Lindberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and Eddie Cochran, "Native sons - adventurers, prophets, writers and musicians. They were all from the North Country. Each one followed their own vision, didn't care what the pictures showed." Dylan writes that he felt like he was "one of them or all of them put together" in one of the most lyrical and insightful odes to the independent spirit that characterizes the North Country. The depth and originality of this memoir proves Dylan's roots remain firmly planted in Northern Minnesota.
CHRONICLES Volume One leaves the reader looking forward to Volumes Two and Three. Despite himself, Dylan continues to be the "voice of a generation." But now the generation he speaks for transcends his own and includes our twenty something and teenage children, as well as their Dad and me who still find lots to relate to in the words of the reluctant spokesman from the North Country.
It's good that the book is well-made and designed to last because I suspect that our children's children will be drawn to it when they reach adolescence, and again when they reflect on their lives in middle age, and it will speak to their children's generation as well.