Print List Price: | $17.00 |
Kindle Price: | $14.99 Save $2.01 (12%) |
Sold by: | Simon and Schuster Digital Sales LLC Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Chronicles: Volume One Kindle Edition
The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.
“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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateOctober 11, 2004
- File size683 KB
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Eschewing chronology and skipping over most of the "highlights" that his many biographers have assigned him, Dylan drifts and rambles through his tale, amplifying a series of major and minor epiphanies. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at his encounters with the Beatles, look elsewhere. Dylan describes the sensation of hearing the group's "Do You Want to Know a Secret" on the radio, but devotes far more ink to a Louisiana shopkeeper named Sun Pie, who tells him, "I think all the good in the world might already been done" and sells him a World's Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker. Dylan certainly sticks to his own agenda--a newspaper article about journeymen heavyweights Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis and soul singer Joe Tex's appearance on The Tonight Show inspire heartfelt musings, and yet the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy prompts nary a word from the era's greatest protest singer.
For all the small revelations (it turns out he's been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, and Ice-T), there are eye-opening disclosures, including his confession that a large portion of his recorded output was designed to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a "the voice of a generation."
Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries. --Steven Stolder
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
-- Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chronicles
Volume OneBy Bob DylanSimon & Schuster Audio
Copyright © 2004 Bob DylanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743543088
Chapter One
Markin' Up the ScoreLou 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 strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to change - and quick.
The Cafe Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The place was a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables - opened at noon, closed at four in the morning. Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?
I found the place and was told that Freddy was downstairs in the basement where the coats and hats were checked and that's where I met him. Neil was the MC of the room and the maestro in charge of all the entertainers. He couldn't have been nicer. He asked me what I did and I told him I sang, played guitar and harmonica. He asked me to play something. After about a minute, he said I could play harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. At least it was a place to stay out of the cold. This was good.
Fred played for about twenty minutes and then introduced all the rest of the acts, then came back up to play whenever he felt like it, whenever the joint was packed. The acts were disjointed, awkward and seemed to have come from the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a popular TV show. The audience was mostly collegiate types, suburbanites, lunch-hour secretaries, sailors and tourists. Everybody performed from ten to fifteen minutes. Fred would play for however long he felt, however long the inspiration would last. Freddy had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike. He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees. You couldn't touch him. Everything revolved around him. Years later, Freddy would write the hit song "Everybody's Talkin'." I never played any of my own sets. I just accompanied Neil on all of his and that's where I began playing regular in New York.
The daytime show at the Cafe Wha?, an extravaganza of patchwork, featured anybody and anything - a comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized people in the audience, somebody whose entire act was facial acrobatics - just anybody who wanted to break into show business. Nothing that would change your view of the world. I wouldn't have wanted Fred's gig for anything.
At about eight o'clock, the whole daytime menagerie would come to a halt and then the professional show would begin. Comedians like Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Lenny Bruce and commercial folksinging groups like The Journeymen would command the stage. Everyone who had been there during the day would pack up. One of the guys who played in the afternoons was the falsetto-speaking Tiny Tim. He played ukulele and sang like a girl - old standard songs from the '20s. I got to talking to him a few times and asked him what other kinds of places there were to work around here and he told me that sometimes he played at a place in Times Square called Hubert's Flea Circus Museum. I'd find out about that place later.
Fred was constantly being pestered and pressured by moocher types who wanted to play or perform one thing or another. The saddest character of all was a guy named Billy the Butcher. He looked like he came out of nightmare alley. He only played one song - "High-Heel Sneakers" and he was addicted to it like a drug. Fred would usually let him play it sometime during the day, mostly when the place was empty. Billy would always preface his song by saying "This is for all you chicks." The Butcher wore an overcoat that was too small for him, buttoned tight across the chest. He was jittery and sometime in the past he'd been in a straitjacket in Bellevue, also had burned a mattress in a jail cell. All kinds of bad things had happened to Billy. There was a fire between him and everybody else. He sang that one song pretty good, though.
Another popular guy wore a priest's outfit and red-topped boots with little bells and did warped takes on stories from the Bible. Moondog also performed down here. Moondog was a blind poet who lived mostly on the streets. He wore a Viking helmet and a blanket with high fur boots. Moondog did monologues, played bamboo pipes and whistles. Most of the time he performed on 42nd Street.
My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.
Fred always tried to make a place for most performers and was as diplomatic as possible. Sometimes the room would be inexplicably empty, sometimes half-empty and then suddenly for no apparent reason it would be flushed with people with lines outside. Fred was the man down here, the main attraction and his name was on the marquee, so maybe a lot of these people came to see him. I don't know. He played a big dreadnought guitar, lot of percussion in his playing, piercing driving rhythm - a one-man band, a kick in the head singing voice. He did fierce versions of hybrid chain gang songs and whomped the audience into a frenzy. I'd heard stuff about him, that he was an errant sailor, harbored a skiff in Florida, was an underground cop, had hooker friends and a shadowy past. He'd come up to Nashville, drop off songs that he wrote and then head for New York where he'd lay low, wait for something to blow over and fill up his pockets with wampum. Whatever it was, it wasn't a huge story. He seemed to have no aspirations. We were very compatible, didn't talk personal at all. He was very much like me, polite but not overly friendly, gave me pocket change at the end of the day, said "Here ... so you'll keep out of trouble."
The best part of working with him, though, was strictly gastronomical - all the French fries and hamburgers I could eat. At some point during the day, Tiny Tim and I would go in the kitchen and hang around. Norbert the cook would usually have a greasy burger waiting. Either that, or he'd let us empty a can of pork and beans or spaghetti into a frying pan. Norbert was a trip. He wore a tomato-stained apron, had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of claws - thought of himself as a lady's man - saving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy and visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. The kitchen was like a cave bored into the side of a cliff.
Continues...
Excerpted from Chroniclesby Bob Dylan Copyright © 2004 by Bob Dylan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC2JT8
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (October 11, 2004)
- Publication date : October 11, 2004
- Language : English
- File size : 683 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 320 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0743244583
- Best Sellers Rank: #107,056 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #89 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #143 in Biographies of Actors & Entertainers
- #285 in Rock Band Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, artist and writer. He has been influential in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when his songs chronicled social unrest, although Dylan repudiated suggestions from journalists that he was a spokesman for his generation. Nevertheless, early songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the American civil rights and anti-war movements. After he left his initial base in the American folk music revival, his six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" altered the range of popular music in 1965. His mid-1960s recordings, backed by rock musicians, reached the top end of the United States music charts while also attracting denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics have incorporated various political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the performances of Little Richard, and the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, Dylan has amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning 50 years, has explored the traditions in American song—from folk, blues, and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and the Great American Songbook. Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but songwriting is considered his greatest contribution.
Since 1994, Dylan has published six books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. As a musician, Dylan has sold more than 100 million records, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time. He has also received numerous awards including eleven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." In May 2012, Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Alberto Cabello from Vitoria Gasteiz (Bob Dylan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
I have not seen Dylan since that time, but like many of us, I have often wondered after the spiritual welfare of our bard. Is he still intact? And, as an experienced editor, I was more than a little interested to see what he had written, afraid of what I might find. I had no idea.
The short answer is yes, he is alive and doing well. Some of this book is a running account of the times and Dylan's personal history, complete with descriptive prose, at times bordering on the poetical. Nothing earthshaking here, and were this the only thing the book offered, I would have left disappointed. But there is more, and most important, there is what I had hoped to find, signs that Dylan's incredible laser-like mind is still active.
You can't see much of this in the historical recount. Where it shines out is in the Chapter "Oh Mercy," where Dylan details how he re-took hold of himself during what looked like a massive downhill slide of self-confidence, and with a few injections of eternity, turned his performing career around. Better yet, is the INCREDIBLE account of his New Orleans recording session, going into blazing detail on how almost every song was recorded. This is sheer poetry to my ears, not because I could follow everything he was laying down, but because his clarity and love of music comes across like a lightning. This is the Dylan I knew and the one all these years I hoped was still in there. I wish ALL the book was like this.
After years of wondering whether Dylan had more or less passed on, but while still was living, I am gratified to see that he is alive, well, and still walking point. I am reminded of something I wrote about Dylan some years ago in an article called "Grant Green: The Groove Master," which this book has just helped to confirm:
"To get your attention and make clear that I am saying something here, consider the singing voice of Bob Dylan. A lot of people used to say the guy can't sing. But that's not it. He is singing. The problem is that he is singing so far in the future that we can't yet hear the music. I can assure you he is there. I have heard it. Given enough time... enough years... that gravel voice will sound as sweet to our ears as any velvet-toned singer. Dylan's voice is all about microtones and inflection. For now Dylan's voice is hidden in time so tight that there is no room (no time) to hear it. Some folks can hear it now. Someday everyone will have to hear it, because the mind will unfold itself until even Dylan's voice is exposed for just what it is -- a pure music. But by then our idea of music will also have changed. Rap is changing it even now."
It should come as no surprise to those who have listened to Bob Dylan's music, watched his elusive appearances, and followed his unforthcoming interviews, that Dylan often doesn't help you to understand who he is. In what purports to be the first volume of his autobiography, Dylan lets you know who he is and how he got there, but don't expect a straightforward narrative explanation. Just as in his songs and too infrequent appearances, he insists in this wonderful book that you do your work, too. If you do it, however, and are at least marginally aware of the details of his life, you will find this extended riff on Bob Dylan's early years in New York as well as his reflections on family, fame, recording, and more to be deeply informative and most satisfying. In Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004, 320 pages, $27.00/11.99)
He arrives in New York on a cold winter day, alone with only his guitar for company, not knowing anybody, but curious and open to his own experience. He's searching for Woody Guthrie, even then hospitalized in New Jersey, whose muse has drawn him to folk singing and wandering. He finds his way into the Greenwich Village of the late fifties with only the folk songs he's studied and learned, his dogged persistence, and his intelligence, and then burrows himself in the folk music culture of this interesting period roiling with cultural change in America reflected in the musical and social life of The Village. He begins visiting and then performing at little hole-in-the-wall venues where, during the afternoons, anyone can take the stage to sing, recite poetry, or find their own mode of expression, working for tips. He keeps his eyes open, soon meeting people who welcome him to flop on their couches or mattresses in their apartments. He meets, and cultivates in his own elusive way, Dave Van Ronk, and many other artistic and music business lights in the Village.
Dylan describes crashing with Ray Gooch, whose Village apartment was filled with books that he dived into. In an extended riff, Dylan writes about what he read, saw, studied, picked up, put down, returned to and groped through to gain understanding, all the time soaking up a world of literature, history, and art he had become ready to indulge in and integrate into his yearning and experience. He's a virtual vacuum cleaner for seemingly random ideas, musical, literary and artistic, which he slowly but surely integrates.
In its own discursive way, Dylan's story emerges. He writes about how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan through an interesting search for a name reflecting the personna he was constructing for himself. It, like much of the rest of the book, makes sense in its own seemingly rambling way. He begins to change, as well, in his concept of himself as a singer, moving from traditional and contemporary folk music to what he refers to as “topical” songs, being careful to remove himself as a “protest” singer, but rather an observer of the contemporary scene. While the narrative seems to wander, it's actually pretty straightforward, laced with references to reading, listening, interacting with the music community and the world in thoughtful and insightful ways.
While the book seems to jump around a good deal, it, nevertheless, captures the person I think Dylan, at least, wants to be. As his celebrity increases, his resistance to being made into something he thinks he's not does, too. He consistently styles himself as a folk singer finding songs in his experience and his internal self. He resists becoming a symbol for the fantasies of others seeking to make him into a symbol. He describes the harassment from “pilgrims” seeking him, along with his growing sense of needing privacy and solitude to do his work. Robbie Robertson, of the Band, asks him, “Where do you think you're gonna take it?” as if he were a single driving force behind music. Life seems to represent his resistance to being styled in some way by others. He writes, “It was impossible for me to observe anything without being observed,” exploring the cost of his celebrity on the family life and creative existence he says he wants to pursue and fulfill. I can find nothing in the narrative that points to his seeking celebrity, much less the iconic status he has achieved. His reactions to attending this year's Nobel Prize award ceremonies represent a consistent response from him, as does the graceful statement he sent in.
I'm struck by the need Dylan expresses, which seems very real to me, to live an ordinary family life in the midst of everyone else's desire to turn him into a symbol for something much larger. In the end, Dylan remains a song writer and story tell of unusual grace and breadth. He experiments, as he writes, “throws everything at the wall,” and much of it seems to work for some audience beyond his desires to be a more solitary, family oriented, singer and writer of songs. For, first of all, he's a writer. But the more I listen to him, the more I find him to be a wonderfull, affecting, and honest singer.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Bob Dylan can write. And he can think and sing. What some people might find surprising is that he's a real person, filled with all that portends, yet driven by the external forces of fame and celebrity to become something more. While he doesn't seek sympathy, reading his Chronicles evoked it in me. I find myself liking the person who emerges while, as has become my habit with books by and about musicians, listening to his songs with increasing understanding and empathy. Chronicles gives the reader entree into the real person Bob Dylan is. But, and it's a big But, the reader has to allow him his reality. In that “But” lies the enormous strength and charm of this book. By the middle, I found myself wishing him the peace of a privacy so difficult for him to achieve.
Dylan's description of a decade-long low period in his career, from the late seventies through the eighties he describes a sense of disconnection from his own work, his sense that his career was going nowhere, that he no longer wanted to perform...just going through the motions. Leaving a rehearsal for a tour with the Grateful Dead, he drops into an obscure San Francisco jazz joint, hears a singer simply killing it, and has a revelation which turns him around. During the following European tour with Tom Petty, he sings eighty long-neglected songs from his catalog without a repeat and senses new energy and inspiration. Again, taken at his word, it rings completely true to me. There's an integrity to the writing as he digs within to describe the indescribable. I've always thought of Dylan as being non-communicative except in performance, but Chronicles is a performance, too, a journey where he takes the risks of self-discovery and finds what he's looking for.
His chapter called “Oh Mercy” referring to what has been described as his “comeback album,” discusses song writing and performance, giving huge insights into Dylan's process. How he thinks, jumps from idea to idea while a concept emerges. He resents other people's over-analyzing, but gives himself to the willing reader and consumer of his music. But it must be on his terms. He won't let you take over for him or force him into a mold. His account of the period spent working in New Orleans with producer Danny Lanois to produce Oh Mercy captures the spirit of trying to build a collaborative relationship as well as presenting an impressionistic view of the city and a motorcycle trip with his wife to bayou country that's a joy to read, an extended riff that also helps reveal Dylan's creative process.
“Folk music was all I needed to exist. Trouble was, there wasn't enough of it. It was out of date, had no proper connection the the actualities, the trends of the times. It was a huge story, but hard to come across.” (235) Dylan refers to himself throughout the book as a folk singer, rejecting the critics and fans who would make him into a cultural icon, a leader of a movement, a poet who spoke for and to a generation. For this refusal, for his stubborn insistence to follow his own muse and music, he paid a price, and kept his integrity and at least some independence. Over the more than fifty year course of his career, he has continued to discover himself and his music, while never kowtowing to the rapidly changing world of pop music, but always being aware of what's going on, listening, watching, learning.
Dylan was a voracious consumer of the work of other singers and, later, song writers. Soon after leaving home, he discovered Woody Guthrie, whose work consumed him and helped set his course, until he heard “Ramblin” Jack Elliot, who had traveled with Guthrie, and whose confident singing awed him. Throughout the book, Dylan, explores the influences, both musical and literary, influencing him as well as examining his own inner workings. The amount of careful thought and deep searching that went into thinking through this book should not be underestimated, either in depth or in carefully structured writing. For anyone interested in Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004, 320 pages, $27.00/11.99) is must reading. I enjoyed it and learned a lot, too. I bought the book from Amazon and read it on my Kindle App. fd
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Brazil on September 18, 2021
Reviewed in France on July 31, 2022