Chronicles, Volume 1
by Bob Dylan
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Book Reviews of Chronicles, Volume 1
Book Review: Who was Bob Dylan?
Summary: 5 Stars
I am one of those for whom the poetry of Bob Dylan was a major influence during the formative sixties. From "Look out, kid/ they keep it all hid" to the haunting "dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/silhouetted by the sea", his outlook penetrated the cells of my brain.
So I was a little shocked to read on the back page of a recent New Yorker these words from Dylan's autobiographical Chronicles: "The world was absurd.... I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation I was supposed to be the voice of." I thought, how arrogant. You may not have wanted to be the voice of our generation, but don't tell me you had little in common with us -- if that is so, then your songs were lies, and I know they were not.
In spite of this predisposition, when my sister sent me a copy of Dylan's book for my birthday, and a lady friend picked it up before I did and pronounced it good, I felt compelled to have a look at it. What I found there was a remarkable and unexpected landscape, one in which that quote from the New Yorker not only fits but makes perfect sense.
Who was Bob Dylan? Poet? Philosopher? Minstrel? Revolutionary? This book makes the answer very clear. Dylan was a musician, pure and simple. He may have been a poet as well, and even a revolutionary, but that was all secondary to and in the service of his music.
He did not choose to be the Designated Spokesman for the epoch in which I came of age. That role was thrust upon him by others, and he never accepted it for one minute. His whole life was music, folk music first and foremost, and then whatever original elements he could contribute to that foundation. The lyrics he wrote were important, to be sure, but to him they must have been just another way of making music. It was all about the song, the beauty of the song, finding a way to make the song live and breathe and show its inner light.
Chronicles is not structured like any ordinary autobiography. At one point Dylan injures his guitar-playing hand severely, but does not tell us how. The chapters do not follow a strict chronology, and the year in which any event occurs can often only be guessed at.
In spite of these gaps, the book is a deft and illuminating self-portrait. It is composed in the style of a Cubist painting, with multiple perspectives superimposed over one another, but it tells a very clear and coherent tale. Almost all the pieces of the puzzle can be found at one point or another: childhood, family life, departure from home, early influences, first record contract, and so on.
The only major gap, in fact, is precisely the period of his meteoric rise to fame. That whole decade is missing from these chronicles. It is like a black hole, whose existence we know of here only by what came before and after it.
Dylan's success became his curse. The quiet family life he craved was systematically undercut by the demands of a hungry cultural current knocking knocking at his door. His whole life became a quest to escape the image he had become. The absence of those years from this book is just another emphatic expression of his rejection of that role.
Dylan's writing style is fresh and vigorous, with sparkling diction and lively sentence structure. His memory is acute, his descriptions of faces, furniture, conversations rich and vivid.
What Chronicles gives us is the life of a musician, one who happened to have the misfortune to be cast in the lead role in a play for which he did not audition. It is a book that will stand the test of time as surely as will Dylan's music.
Its ultimate magnitude, it is too soon to judge. Provocatively, however, this work is entitled Chronicles, Volume I. Perhaps Volume II will give us those years so conspicuously missing here.
Book Review: Dylan's thoughts on music and the process of creating
Summary: 4 Stars
"Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded 'Rock Around the Clock.'"
Now I ask you: Of all the ways you might have imagined that Bob Dylan would begin his memoirs, would you have dreamed...that?
If you're like me, you'd expect something more cryptic ("The ragman draws circles") or political ("How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?") or lyrical ("Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed"). But the lead of a magazine profile? No way.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the surprises that Dylan delivers in what's billed as the first in a series of memoirs. But "surprises" may not be the right word --- "put-ons" may be more like it.
In the beginning of his career, when Bob Zimmerman, son of a Minnesota storeowner, morphed into a Woody Guthrie clone, he was the very embodiment of passionate liberalism and poetic truth --- Tom Paine meets Rimbaud. Well-respected books testify to his ambition, his cruelty to friends and colleagues, his contempt for the press.
You'll find none of that here.
This Dylan is a guy who had "come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down." He had thought for a time of going to West Point. He had no great commitment to social justice or nuclear disarmament. Later, he would dream of a house with a white picket fence.
Maybe Dylan really believed this stuff way back then. Or, more possibly, believes it now and has simply backdated his opinions. This reader's not buying it. Artists who spend a lifetime covering their tracks tend to continue to obscure them. And artists who don't have a compelling reason to tell all rarely do.
So Dylan meanders through his early days in New York, presenting charming but unrevealing portraits of the people he meets along the way, the books he reads, the music business circa 1962. "I had no ambitions to stir things up." Right. Snore.
But this writing has a purpose --- it loosens Dylan up. Unlike a Real Writer, who writes and cuts and rewrites and cuts, Dylan writes and writes, saving every precious word. And, slowly, he writes himself into the book's true subject, which is music: how you make it, where it comes from, what you do when the magic's not in your fingertips anymore.
"A song is like a dream," he writes, "and you try and make it come true." Now he's getting somewhere, you think, and then, suddenly, you hit a rich vein --- the 60-page story of making a record in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois as the producer. Bono had recommended Lanois, and Dylan finds him a good collaborator ("He wanted to dive in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid") but their work together doesn't get off to a great start ("The tune was gaining weight by the minute and none of its clothes were fitting").
The process of creation --- that's a safe place for Dylan, and suddenly he's free to write. And joke. Other people enter, and they have their say. The book breathes. And the reader leans in, enchanted by the tale.
Books need editors as surely as musicians need producers. But who would dare to edit Bob Dylan? Who would tell the boss, "We're going to delay this baby yet another year because I want Bob to rewrite"? No, that doesn't happen. It's a good thing that Dylan is so magnificently gifted that the last half of his book makes us forget the first.
--- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth
Book Review: WHO CARES
Summary: 1 Stars
BOB DYlAN HAS HAD A PROFOUND INFLUENCE ON ME AS HE HAS FOR MANY OtHERS--the first time i heard his crazy whining voice his wild heavy lyrics pouring out like a volcano erupting and immediately altering my consciousness i was hoooked! it was the early 60`s i was like 14 or something my uncle turned me on to him! and ive been addicted ever since ! you can sing like that !!???? thats allowed !!?? to sound so real - so crazy- and the rhythms and melodies !!!the brilliant funny deep lyrics the poignancy - the irony the wit and genius !i couldnt get enuff of him and told everyone i knew about him and made them listen ! he rocked my world as they say---god bless john hammond for signing him up ! BUT ITS NOT BOB HIMSELF or his personal life that intrigues-- ITS HIS ART-- HIS WORDS AND MUSIC--& HE NEVER DiSSAPOINTS IN CONCERT AS FAR AS IVE SEEN-- AND IVE SEEN HIM LIVE MAYBE 10 TIMES or more- ALWAYs THRILLING-- hES A TRUE ARTIST TO ME-- HE CAN NEVER SING THE SAME SONG THE SAME WAY -- CAUSE HES ALWAYS CHANGING AND LIKE PICASSO SAID ~ MAKE IT NEW ~~ HE ALWAYS DOES--- HIS SONGS ROCK IN CONCERT AND HE ALWAYS HAS A ROCKING BAND-- HIS PRESENCE AND PERSONA - BOTH COMPELLING & POWERFUL HE LOOKS TO ME LIKE THE LITTLE PRINCE STANDING THERE ON STAGE W HIS GUITAR OR AT THE PIANO--- SLIGHT -- THIN NOT TOO TALL USUALLY IN COWBOY GEAR---AND HE AND HIS BAND WEAVE MAGIC !BUT LET US NOT CONFUSE THE MAN W HIS ART-- HE CHANNELS INSPIRATION LIKE ALL INSPIRED POETS -- BUT PLEASE BOB-- I KNOW NO ONE EVER HAS ENUFF MONEY I GUESS-- AND WHY NOT SELL EVERY SCRAP U CAN to the hungry masses !- TO ALL WHO OBSESS OVER EVERYTHING IMAGINABLE FROM THEIR pop ICONS-- BUT THIS BOOK MEMOIR WHATEVER IT IS--- ITS NONSENSE ! ITS OBVIOUS HE HAS A THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE HAS ABSORBED MUCH OF THE GREAT WRITINGS OF MAJOR POETS RIMBAUD BLAKE I CHING LAO TSE HENRY MILLER -- HIS DRAWINGS ARE INTERESTING AND HE ENJOYS EXPRESSING HIMSELF IN MANY VARIOUS MEDIA-- BOOKS MOVIES PAINTING DRAWING--- BUT ITS HIS MUSIC THAT SETS HIM APART--- HIS OTHER VENTURES IN ART/COMMERCE ( WHICH IRONICALLY OLD WILLIAM BLAKE SAYS ARE NEVER COMPATIBLE ! AND BALKE IS ALWAYS RIGHT !!)ARE DISASTROUS ILL CONCEIVED INSCRUTIBLE OVERBLOWN RAMBLING AFFAIRS BETTER LEFT UNEXPOSED---BUT SOME PEOPLE WILL BUY ANYTHING -- EVEN ME sometimes !-- BUT REALLY DONT WASTE YER TIME-- LETS NOT ENCOURAGE THIS shoddy self indulgence-- THIS BOOK IS SUPERFICIAL UNINTERESTING NOT WELL WRITTEN AND LIKE OTHERS HAVE SAID HERE- HE SKIMS OVER THINGS AND DELVES INTO OTHER THINGS AD NAUSEUM--- THE RECORDING SESSION----IN NEW ORLEANS---NOT MUCH THERE-- THE REST - BABBLING & MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING--- I DISCARDED THE BOOK AFTER READING MOST OF IT -OUT OF BOREDOM W IT--- WHAT MAKES GREAT WRITING COMPELLING IS PERSONAL/UNIVERSAL REVELATIONS-- THE TRUTH IS WHAT MAKES ART COMPELLING-- WE LAUGH AT TRUE THINGS - EVeN ON SITCOMS ON TV-- IF SOMEHTING RINGS TRUE - WE LAUGH-- ITS LIKE THE TRUTH IMMEDIATELY SETS US FREE !as was pointed out- the whole suzy rotolo thing--- skimmmed over-- no one wants his whole life exposed-- and such details are none of our bizness-- but dont pretend to write a memoir and skim over stuff and expect us to eat it up-- but eat they will apparently ! as this thin tepid offering is selling apparently and garnering much praise---dont believe any of it-- the book sucks-- listen to his music-- but for compelling inspired or revealing writing look elsewhere !it aint rolling bob !!!! but u better believe next time u come to my town - the town u had to move to to find and express yerself in the heady 60`s--i`ll be there--- eating up every minute of it !Book Review: Chronicles, Vol. 1
Summary: 5 Stars
Bob Dylan is known as a spiritual man, but also a loner, often offering opaque answers (or none at all) to direct questions. True to form, in Chronicles I there are many biographical omissions, and we are not given any real insights into his spiritual beliefs. However, what this autobiography does offer is a very engaging look at one man's evolution with his own creative voice, both in light of, and in spite of, the public attention it has received. It is on this level that Chronicles I interested and challenged me.
Unlike Bob Dylan's previous book, 1966's Tarantula, which was a psychedelic roll through his subconscious, Chronicles I features an introspective Dylan writing plainly and openly about his creative process. For a famous recluse Dylan is remarkably exposed; however, many of the elements that defined Dylan's musical path are dealt with only in passing-sometimes in a single sentence. In fact, in some cases the moments that made Bob Dylan into Bob Dylan are ignored completely. Counter to what many music critics and fans may have wanted or expected, we are not offered an autobiography that is a full, wide-screen disclosure. What we are given is an invitation into the creative process of one of popular music's most significant icons.
We are given snapshots of the formation of the man at different stages of his career: the young man striving for success; the successful man striving for authenticity; the older man striving for inspiration. The book is an account of process, perseverance and passion, and we see Dylan struggling to form and understand the voice that he feels is uniquely his, recognized now as one of the most significant in pop culture in the last fifty-odd years.
To me, Chronicles I is at its best when it is showing the Dylan of the early 1960s, when he first arrived in New York City. Virtually alone in an unfamiliar city, Dylan began playing shows in folk clubs around Greenwich Village. We are told of how he forged his identity on hard-scrabble folk music and emulated the parts of other artists that he admired, in a slow opening of his creative scope and a honing of an authentic voice of his own. Collectors of rare folk albums provided source material that became Dylan's foundation, and with a few specific musicians providing artistic epiphanies, Dylan's unusual vision took over.
Dylan's writing is a cadence of shortened sentences and clipped asides, and often reflects a wry humour that surprised me. But most impressive about Dylan's prose style was how similar it is in tone to his music. Chonicles I displays the same combination of simple words and sentence structures, mixed with vivid and unusual metaphors that are characteristic of Dylan's lyrics. Open the book to nearly any page and read for a paragraph or two and a voice you already know is reading to you. These lyrical skills have inspired a whole raft of pale imitators in a variety of genres, but are best used in the practised hands of an old pro.
I was also struck by Dylan's admission that he notices details more than narrative, a trait that informs his music and his writing. When I think of any significant Dylan song, it is the frayed snippets of sepia-toned characters that emerge. There are vagabonds, dilettantes and debutantes in his songs, and so too, in his recounting of his life, where he tells stories about the people and the times that were forming around him. As one of the most heralded and most revered musicians in modern times, it is revealing to see the processes of the man behind the myth.
Book Review: Interesting, but heavily whitewashed fluff.
Summary: 2 Stars
You can't blame Bob Dylan for keeping his personal life very private and out of public view. Everyone deserves privacy. For someone so famous, the risk of self-revelation is to be chewed up and spit out by the tabloids and gossip-mongers. Dylan says that Johnny Cash's song "I Walk the Line" was a huge influence, especially the opening words: "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine." Dylan says he took that line to heart and did keep a close watch on his innermost heart, and after reading this book it's plain that that's still the case. There's nothing really personal here, and to read his own account of himself you get the impression that he's the nicest guy in the world, never had a cross word for anyone and led a pretty much idyllic and idealistic life.
I guess that's a common fault of autobiographies: the whitewash effect. The less appealing details are skimmed over or, in this case, left out altogether. There are many accounts already out there portraying Dylan as a brilliant but arrogant SOB, who had plenty of unkind words for many people. Not mentioned here. As one example, he tells us about one of his romances, Suze Rotolo, and waxes poetic about her, comparing her to a Rodin sculpture. Later he says they "just passed out of each others' lives," "She took one turn in the road and I took another." He self-servingly leaves out of this benign scene little details like getting her pregnant, then ditching his "spiritual soul-mate" like dirt. He talks extensively about many of his songs and what the lyrics meant, but doesn't mention that he wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" for Suze, or what his lyrics meant to him at the time. He also fails to mention that Suze then had an abortion of his child and afterwards attempted suicide by locking herself in her apartment and turning on the gas, and Bob saved her by breaking down the door, but then ditched her again, this time for Joan Baez. It would've made a much more interesting book to hear his version of that episode, since he brings Suze up in the first place, but no such details are forthcoming anywhere in the book. He mentions nothing of his marriage to Sara, such as the affair he had with the nanny that Sara hired to care for his children.
But why should he tell us anything really personal? It's not in his best interests, and one thing he makes clear is that he is very career-oriented, and very impressed with his own success. It would be foolish of him to reveal more than his musical influences and early contacts, and that's all he does. Two of the longest chapters describe the making of two albums, in great detail. They're sort of interesting, but read more like lengthy magazine articles. Throughout the book there's a lot of chatty name-dropping, and the mention that this or that person would eventually record one of his songs, that kind of thing.
In the end, though, this is Bob Dylan, one of the most brilliant of all musicians and songwriters. His music is on a level of its own and has influenced the world, so the fluff is of some interest, self-serving though it is. Overall, the book is fun, superficial, quick and easy reading. But now that I've read it, I wish I had waited for it to come to the library; I would've felt better afterwards if I didn't actually pay money for it. Buy his records. Borrow the book.