Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Chronicles, Volume 1
Book Review: "All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities."
Summary: 4 Stars
So Bob Dylan has finally sat down and written his memoirs and Simon & Schuster has published the first volume of same and we all picked it up and read it hungrily and we end up learning... uh... not much that we didn't know already.
Not that we should really be all that suprised. Dylan is usually presented as obfuscating the truth, which is certainly something he has done, does, and will probably continue to do, but the REAL truth of the matter concerning his songwriting, singing, and other musical endeavors (i.e., the things that I would think/hope most people are interested in learning about him) is that he doesn't have a clue. In Bill Flanagan's excellent WRITTEN IN MY SOUL (sadly out of print, but probably available at your local public library), Dylan is quoted as saying, "I can't expound to much on what I'm doing because I really don't have any idea what I'm doing." As I said, Bob has been responsible for his share of BS over the years but I, personally, take this statement at face value. Anyone who writes songs (or novels, or stories, or screenplays, or who paints pictures, or whatever) can tell you that when the REALLY GOOD STUFF comes... it just comes. You have no idea where it came from, what it means, or any of that stuff. You're just glad it came.
I'm aware that I've said very little about CHRONICLES itself. It's great. If you enjoy Dylan's songwriting, odds are you'll like his prose as well. His voice is unique regardless of what medium he's working in - who else could come up with a line like, "If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen." ? I don't think you even have to be a big Dylan fan to get something out of this. It reads fast, as well - I'm kind of a slow reader and I read it cover to cover in about four days. If you've read this far, you're probably interested enough in the book to find it enjoyable.
Book Review: "Birth is an Invasion of Privacy"
Summary: 5 Stars
A book filled with deep-etched faces, powerful voices, strange turns of the corner, hilarity, sadness, and surprise. Dylan's resistance to self-voyeurism enables him to cast the light onto others, characters as memorable as I've found in print. Like Ray and Chloe with whom B lives in NY (or stays with--he's never clear about the banalities like who splits rent with whom). We discover their library (and the inside of the books as narrated through Dylan's life), their proverbs, their worries (some of which send Dylan to the NY Public Library to read Civil War era papers convinced that the Civil War is haunting everyone around). Here are people living their lives and thinking at the same time; a world at odd with the way thinking is supposed to be parcelled off from living. And New York itself as a universe, a dance, a dark symbol, and a mystery, and yet another amazing person. And later Dylan works back to those he played music with in Minnesota, and the Gothic dourman Pankake who makes it his mission to tell BD he's no Guthrie.
Then Dylan hides from crazed hordes who would proclaim him prophet, redeemer, and soul of a generation, who want to climb all over his house, and move in with him, kick him out of bed and drink his beer). The high point here is David Crosby's pithy comment on the honorary degree ceremony at Princeton (recounted by BD with a poignant honesty all around). I won't spoil it by giving it away here.
Finally BD drives out into the New Orleans countryside and stops at an offroad museum run by a man named Sun Pie. Here are ten pages of brilliant, bizarre, strange discoveries. And for those who have the lyrics to "Highlands" "Love and Theft" or "Things Have Changed" in their brain, there is a whole other level of appreciation.
After Ray and Chloe, Sun Pie, Bertold Brecht's Pirate Jenny who calls out destruction all around, the sad Archibald Macleish, Robert Johnson as debated by BD and Dave Van Ronk, BD's grandmother (always remember everyone is fighting a hard battle)-- to mention only a few of the moments in this book that have become like old friends I could talk about forever-- I came away amazed and already sad the last page was turned; like leaving the concert hall at the end of BD's inspired November 2000 concert in Philadelphia.
Book Review: "Lies That Life is Black and White"
Summary: 5 Stars
The man with the hurricane hair shows himself as the most human of all rock and rollers. Family, privacy, art for art's sake, and other concerns take center stage and Dylan does not hold back on answering age old questions, including those that deal with "how do you write a song". It also demonstrates that Dylan has a huge heart. Anyone from Dylan's world who can refer to Bobby Vee as a "brother" has an infinite depth of humanity and compassion. The book is written in Dylan's own cryptic style and those who are unfamiliar or uneasy with the prose of a poet will be somewhat confused. Indeed, there is something going on here and some will not know what it is, but Dylan holds nothing back in attempting to relate what it was like to be held up as a God by an entire generation when, in fact, all he cared about was his family and protecting them. Additionally, Dylan reveals his early influences and how he approaches a subject of a song. It really is an amazing book. Anyone who has followed Dylan's career and life will be hard pressed to critize the artist for being too guarded or for not expressing himself adequately. In fact, if the book has any faults it is that Dylan goes into too much detail when it comes to guitar stylizing or the framework of a song. All and all, this is a supreme effort and will rank with Dylan's greatest works as it puts to rest the label of "recluse". Dylan shares himself beyond anything that was expected. Can't wait for Volumes 2 and 3.Book Review: "Twas in another lifetime ...
Summary: 3 Stars
...one of toil and blood." How different the world was in 1962. Mr. Dylan did not invent rock'n'roll hipness from talking too much, but from saying so little, and this impressionistic memoir is proof he's still not revealing too much. Bobby Vee, Frank Sinatra Jr. and Tiny Tim are not necessarily the first characters Mr. Dylan's audience associate with the legend, which leads many disappointed readers to assume that this is an attempt to obscure rather than to clarify. But so what? At this late date, a straightfoward memoir would cover some very well-known facts. Mr. Dylan has his biographers to set the story straight -- let's assume his own words still mean just what they say and that the created legend was a confusing mix of false starts and stops, confidence and insecurities, and extemporized recording sessions.
Why not? No one creates their own legend out of whole cloth -- it depends on the willing suspension of belief in his audience, and it's helped along by a publicity department that values Mr. Dylan's own unwillingness to open his mouth about what the words mean. That's what the lyrics are for in the first place.
Still, that doesn't mean that "Chronicles" isn't a put-on, a put-down or intentionally arcane. "Bob Dylan" is still his own best character. The book succeeds best in conveying the singer's own doubts about himself. Mr. Dylan's selective memory is certainly not a generation's collective one, and why should it be? The book reads like an overheard monologue, a man on the porch remembering bits and pieces of the past: this happened, oh yes, and then this. Mr. Dylan can be a sly dissembler, but there is truth in the telling. Are there great stories waiting in volume two? Probably not the ones his fans remember. Reading "Chronicles" is akin to discovering one's hero still puts his pants on one leg at a time -- disappointing, but what does one expect? Ambrose Bierce defines the imagination as "a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership." I'll bet Mr. Bierce never had anyone yell out "Judas!" after him, though.
Book Review: "Who is that Man"
Summary: 5 Stars
Here's what we learn from Chronicles:
-- prickly Bob must have applied the lesson we all heard early in our lives from our Moms, "if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all," for the only person even remotely criticized in Chronicles is Suzy Rotolo's mother and then it's only to note that she didn't like Bob;
-- Bob could have been an antiques dealer for his descriptions of pieces of furniture in 40-years-ago rooms are both minute and copious;
-- he and Tiny Tim huddled around a radio listening to Ricky Nelson's Traveling Man and when the song was finished Bob gave the rest of his French fries to Tiny and wandered off;
-- in a similar pop moment, Bob travels uptown to pay his respects to Bobby Vee and then melts away before the crowd of fans mobs Bobby;
-- his favorite cover of his songs is Johnny Rivers's Positively Fourth Street;
-- Bob in fact would have let "Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter..."
-- he's a hockey fan and when was the last time you read Vic Hadfield's name in a book;
-- he understood the redemptive power of AM radio for '50's and early 60's youth: "WWOZ was the kind of station I used to listen to late at night growing up, and it...touched the spirit of (my youth). Back then when something was wrong the radio could lay hands on you and you'd be all right;"
-- neither his wife (or wives, numbers aren't clear to me) nor children seem to have names;
-- seeing Gorgeous George in a hotel lobby at a low performing point buoyed him;
-- lots of creative tension between him and Daniel Lanois on Oh, Mercy (my editorial comment: a damn fine album I've also reviewed here) leads a decade later to reuniting for the brilliant Time Out of Mind, and Dylan generously recognizes Lanois' key contributions;
-- he hated the famous Ronnie Gilbert "Take him, he's yours" introduction at Newport (currently one of the sound bites at the EMP Dylan exhibit in Seattle);
-- he never had any doubt at all about his destiny;
-- Three Penny Opera and, particularly, Pirate Jenny influenced his music as profoundly as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson.
All that and a whole lot more we learn in Chronicles as Bob rambles in no chronological or any other order through some acts in his life and career.
But since Bob is always Bob, whether these glimpses or anything else in the book are conventionally "true" or not is a whole different question. At a minimum say this: Bob entertains as well on the written page as he does in The Neverending Concert Tour.