Chronicles: Volume One [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Starred Review. After a career of principled coyness, Dylan takes pains to outline the growth of his artistic conscience in this superb memoir. Writing in a language of cosmic hokum and street-smart phrasing, he lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development. He reconstructs, for example, an early moment in New York when he realized "that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself." And he recounts how, in that search for larger reach, he actually went to the public library’s microfilm archives to learn the rhetoric of Civil War newspapers. Skipping the years of his greatest records, or perhaps saving those years for the second volume of his chronicle, Dylan recalls the times when he was sick of his public persona and made more lackluster albums like "Self-Portrait" and "New Morning." He then skips again to his comeback work with producer Daniel Lanois in the late 1980s. Dylan emphasizes that he was "indifferent to wealth and love," and readers looking for private revelations will be disappointed. But others will prize the display of musical integrity and seriousness that is evident in his minutia-filled accounts of his influences in folk and blues. Ultimately, this book will stand as a record of a young man’s self-education, as contagious in its frank excitement as the letters of John Keats and as sincere in its ramble as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to which Dylan frequently refers. A person of Dylan’s stature could have gotten away with far less; that he has been so thoughtful in the creation of this book is a measure of his talents, and a gift to his fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

There's no word yet on how far this first volume goes, but we'll bet that Dylan doesn't leave any answers blowin' in the wind. Look for the complete Lyrics (ISBN 0-7432-2627-8. $45), pubbing simultaneously.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Acolytes and scholars have long argued over the meaning of Dylan's often cryptic songs. Now they have a new source of unparalleled authority to guide their interpretations in the first installment of his long-awaited memoirs, which jumps around chronologically, much as Dylan has veered stylistically over the years. It lurches from youth in Minnesota to arrival in New York City in 1961 to creative slump a decade later to the stirrings of creative revival in the 1980s. Most evocative is Dylan's depiction of early '60s Greenwich Village, which paints the burgeoning folk scene so vividly that it seems to have happened last week. Among the surprising revelations is Dylan's confession that his mundane output in the early '70s was the result of withdrawal into domestic life and a conscious attempt to reject the pressure he had felt as the "voice of a generation." Another surprise is that the book is so straightforward. As opposed to his obtusely surreal novel Tarantula (1971) and his famously evasive interviews, Dylan here is honest, bordering on confessional--that is, if he is to be taken at face value, always a risky proposition with this elusive artist. Dylan envisions this as the first of three volumes of memoirs, so fans shouldn't be upset that he ignores his most significant work but let the omission whet appetites for the sequels.
Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

I live in Seattle, and on November 3, I was reeling from an election result that didn’t surprise me yet managed to leave me stunned. In the evening I finally put on some Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited, his still strange and unsettling record from 1965 that is also one of the towering pop artifacts of the 20th Century. Every time I listen to the music I understand American life better. In every song the assured 24-year-old was reinventing popular music and also making a new world out of trance-inducing quadruple rhymes and sliding, fragmentary story shapes in which Gypsy Davey, Noah’s great rainbow, Miss Lonely, chrome horses, and the mystery tramp all meet and move in Jack Kerouac’s lyric hipsterisms, Walt Whitman’s cadences, Arthur Rimbaud’s visions. Most importantly for a post-election hangover, I was discovering Dylan’s suturing of potent language and swirling music again. Together they seemed to form their own defense against deranging power:

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home.

That’s how “Ballad of a Thin Man” opens, amid heavy piano chords, and culminating in the famous chorus, “Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?” If I had to identify just one kernel of Bob Dylan’s musical genius it would be in his deep understanding of self and its fractions: listen once and Mister Jones might seem to be, say, a clueless super patriot in a red state. Listen twice and it’s me: “You try so hard,” he sings, laughing over the lines. “But you don’t understand.”
Dylan’s pop genius exploded continuously over eight albums between 1963 and 1968, and they affected everyone from the poets of Greenwich Village to the Beatles, whose writing deepened and grew adult after listening to Dylan. Writers studied his lyrics, filmmakers followed him, weekly magazines tried to draw portraits of him. From one photo to the next he seemed a different man with a different face. He wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Hard Rain” when he was 23. When he was 24 and 25 so many songs came to him that he began to write everywhere-in cars, trains, and in backstage rooms with milling people. He turned his back, famously, on folk music, and then on electric music. He became a Christian for the full decade of the 1980s, and when his religiosity seemed to fade he found the producer Daniel Lanois, who helped him make new music greasy with darkness and death, ticklingly humorous, deadly grim. In 40 years he has written over 700 songs, the finest of which seem to many people to have come out of the same head waters as Hank Williams’s writing, but with the rapturous lyrics that put you in mind of literature. Listeners think of Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Andre Breton. But he sounds like no one else.
He was overtly political only until 1964, when he demonstrated a dazzlingly complete absorption of the roots music on Harry Smith’s six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music. After 1964 his politics all moved indoors. The lyrics grew gnomic, romantic, trancelike, private, and yet it was this turn that brought him his status as a prophet whose music laid out the nation’s interior monologue:

Don’t put on any airs when you’re down
On Rue Morgue Avenue
- “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues”

When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
- “Desolation Row”

And Louise holds a handful of rain
Tempting you to defy it.
- “Visions of Joanna”

It’s not until late in Chronicles, which is being advertised as Volume One of a three-part autobiography, that the few episodes that Dylan works to describe in the book become clear. He is trying to re-create his life on paper by recounting what happened when he first arrived in New York in 1961, at 20. In that first year he met everyone, played at the Café Wha? and the Gaslight, signed onto Columbia Records and within a year began to write original songs that would take up permanent residence in the culture. Chronicles underscores that Dylan took his deepest inspirations from what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America”; he wanted to take old Appalachian murder ballads and black man’s banjo music and use their earthy power to drive a wedge into beautiful and empty songs like Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man.” Dylan met the scholar-singers in New York, too, and he knew early on that he didn’t want their purity. Instead, he wanted to push various kinds of music together in his songs like furniture: the social outrage in Woody Guthrie, for example, might meet the sexual explosiveness of Little Richard (“Like a Rolling Stone”) and produce something utterly grown up-cynical, worldly, funny, mean, romantic, sympathetic-that was what a real traveling man could sing. Weird, old America had to meet new, weird America.
So that’s where it begins. Thereafter Chronicles follows a chronology much the way the Old Testament does. After the initial episode of his signing with Columbia Records, he circles back to his arrival in New York in a freezing January, where we learn that he spent long hours at the Folklore Center listening to the old music. We hear that he couch-surfed at different places in the Village where he also read everything: in one four-page burst the list of books he says he read is astonishing: Rousseau, Ovid and Poe; the Greek classics, Lord Byron, Shelley and Balzac; Dostoevsky and Dickens; the Inferno. “The books were something,” Dylan writes. “They were really something.” You can see how his early saturated lyrics must have come out of this scrounging from borrowed libraries. The rich catalogues in “Hard Rain” make a magpie weave of Woody Guthrie, the Old Testament and Dante-the books at hand.
Dylan’s sense of storytelling in Chronicles is a songwriter’s, which is to say that it’s circular and recursive. Two middle chapters wander into the 1970s and the 1980s before they return to New York in 1961. The book is, as a result, unevenly interesting. The chapter on how he made 1989’s “Oh Mercy” is largely forgettable. But there are spots in which the writing holds you, where it is clear-eyed and lovely. Here is one short passage in which Dylan describes his response to reading Vom Kriege, Karl Von Clausewitz’s Romantic-era book about war. Writing at 63, Dylan captures some of his 20-year-old self: “Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet. Without realizing it, some of the stuff in his book can shape your ideas. If you think you’re a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you’re not even capable of dreaming. Dreaming is dangerous. Reading Clauswitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously.”
At 20 he was open to a hard-eyed pragmatic, philosophical book about war that taught him the value of self-doubt and of seeing external events in terms of his inner life. Chronicles could use more insights like this. But I’ll take the scraps he gives us here; and hope that, as he sings in “Stuck Inside of Mobile”, that this isn’t really the end.
Lyall Bush (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

The first installment of a three-volume memoir by one of the greatest musical legends of all time.

Bob Dylan is one of the most lauded and greatest loved songwriters and performers of all time. His particular brand of music first caught the public's attention in the 1960s, when he became something of a chronicler of the American conscience and cultural unrest. His remarkable career in music and literature continues to this day.

Chapter 1: Markin' Up the Score

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" -- then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.

Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.

"You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds. You're gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper -- not that you'll need much in the way of clothes when you're in the ring -- don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard."

"He's not a boxer, Jack, he's a songwriter and we'll be publishing his songs."

"Oh, yeah, well I hope to hear 'em some of these days. Good luck to you, kid."

Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up -- salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.

None of it seemed important. I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music giving it the right to publish my songs, not that there was any great deal to hammer out. I hadn't written much yet. Lou had advanced me a hundred dollars against future royalties to sign the paper and that was fine with me.

John Hammond, who had brought me to Columbia Records, had taken me over to see Lou, asked him to look after me. Hammond had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a premonition that there would be more.

Back at Lou's office, I opened my guitar case, took the guitar out and began fingering the strings. The room was cluttered -- boxes of sheet music stacked up, recording dates of artists posted on bulletin boards, black lacquered discs, acetates with white labels scrambled around, signed photos of entertainers, glossy portraits -- Jerry Vale, Al Martino, The Andrews Sisters (Lou was married to one of them), Nat King Cole, Patti Page, The Crew Cuts -- a couple of console reel-to-reel tape recorders, big dark brown wooden desk full of hodgepodge. Lou had put a microphone on the desk in front of me and plugged the cord into one of the tape recorders, all the while chomping on a big exotic stogie.

"John's got high hopes for you," Lou said.

John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, imposing figures in the history of recorded music -- Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Christian, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton. Artists who had created music that resonated through American life. He had brought it all to the public eye. Hammond had even conducted the last recording sessions of Bessie Smith. He was legendary, pure American aristocracy. His mother was an original Vanderbilt, and John had been raised in the upper world, in comfort and ease -- but he wasn't satisfied and had followed his own heart's love, music, preferably the ringing rhythm of hot jazz, spirituals and blues -- which he endorsed and defended with his life. No one could block his way, and he didn't have time to waste. I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office, him signing me to Columbia Records was so unbelievable. It would have sounded like a made-up thing.

Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didn't make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come. He explained that he saw me as someone in the long line of a tradition, the tradition of blues, jazz and folk and not as some newfangled wunderkind on the cutting edge. Not that there was any cutting edge. Things were pretty sleepy on the Americana music scene in the late '50s and early '60s. Popular radio was sort of at a standstill and filled with empty pleasantries. It was years before The Beatles, The Who or The Rolling Stones would breathe new life and excitement into it. What I was playing at the time were hard-lipped folk songs with fire and brimstone servings, and you didn't need to take polls to know that they didn't match up with anything on the radio, didn't lend themselves to commercialism, but John told me that these things weren't high on his list and he understood all the implications of what I did.

"I understand sincerity," is what he said. John spoke with a rough, coarse attitude, yet had an appreciative twinkle in his eye.

Recently he had brought Pete Seeger to the label. He didn't discover Pete, though. Pete had been around for years. He'd been in the popular folk group The Weavers, but had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped working. Hammond was defiant when he spoke about Seeger, that Pete's ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, that his relatives had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, for Christsake. "Can you imagine those sons of bitches blacklisting him? They should be tarred and feathered."

"I'm gonna give you all the facts," he said to me. "You're a talented young man. If you can focus and control that talent, you'll be fine. I'm gonna bring you in and I'm gonna record you. We'll see what happens."

And that was good enough for me. He put a contract in front of me, the standard one, and I signed it right then and there, didn't get absorbed into details -- didn't need a lawyer, advisor or anybody looking over my shoulder. I would have gladly signed whatever form he put in front of me.

He looked at the calendar, picked out a date for me to start recording, pointed to it and circled it, told me what time to come in and to think about what I wanted to play. Then he called in Billy James, the head of publicity at the label, told Billy to write some promo stuff on me, personal stuff for a press release.

Billy dressed Ivy League like he could have come out of Yale -- medium height, crisp black hair. He looked like he'd never been stoned a day in his life, never been in any kind of trouble. I strolled into his office, sat down opposite his desk, and he tried to get me to cough up some facts, like I was supposed to give them to him straight and square. He took out a notepad and pencil and asked me where I was from. I told him I was from Illinois and he wrote it down. He asked me if I ever did any other work and I told him that I had a dozen jobs, drove a bakery truck once. He wrote that down and asked me if there was anything else. I said I'd worked construction and he asked me where.

"Detroit."

"You traveled around?"

"Yep."

He asked me about my family, where they were. I told him I had no idea, that they were long gone.

"What was your home life like?"

I told him I'd been kicked out.

"What did your father do?"

"'lectrician."

"And your mother, what about her?"

"Housewife."

"What kind of music do you play?"

"Folk music."

"What kind of music is folk music?"

I told him it was handed down songs. I hated these kind of questions. Felt I could ignore them. Billy seemed unsure of me and that was just fine. I didn't feel like answering his questions anyway, didn't feel the need to explain anything to anybody.

"How did you get here?" he asked me.

"I rode a freight train."

"You mean a passenger train?"

"No, a freight train."

"You mean, like a boxcar?"

"Yeah, like a boxcar. Like a freight train."

"Okay, a freight train."

I gazed past Billy, past his chair through his window across the street to an office building where I could see a blazing secretary soaked up in the spirit of something -- she was scribbling busy, occupied at a desk in a meditative manner. There was nothing funny about her. I wished I had a telescope. Billy asked me who I saw myself like in today's music scene. I told him, nobody. That part of things was true, I really didn't see myself like anybody. The rest of it, though, was pure hokum -- hophead talk.

I hadn't come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan, '57 Impala -- straight out of Chicago, clearing the hell out of there -- racing all the way through the smoky towns, winding roads, green fields covered with snow, onward, eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, a twenty-four-hour ride, dozing most of the way in the backseat, making small talk. My mind fixed on hidden interests...eventually riding over the George Washington Bridge.

The big car came to a full stop on the other side and let me out. I slammed the door shut behind me, waved good-bye, stepped out onto the hard snow. The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn't going to try.

I was there to find singers, the ones I'd heard on record -- Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others -- most of all to find Woody Guthrie. New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.

When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn't faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was stro... --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Only in the audiobook world could this comparison be made, but this wonderful production of Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES has some surprising similarities to another Simon & Schuster memoir--Chuck Barris's CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. Sound blasphemous? Both are riffs on the curse of celebrity, both transcend high and low art, both challenge the memoir format, and both revel in the oddities of post-WWII Americana. (Dylan credits his early inspiration to the TV wrestler Gorgeous George.) Most strikingly, Sean Penn's beat reading shares a rhythm and tone with Barris--his is an ideal voice for a reluctant pop hero desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.