Chronicles: Volume One (Hardcover)

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)

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.
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