Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Chronicles, Volume 1
Book Review: Add this book to the long list of Dylan's achievements!
Summary: 5 Stars
I was not sure what to expect from Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Volume One." Bob Dylan's reclusive nature and contempt for the media make it hard to get a real look at the man behind the green smoky haze. This book finally removes the haze.
The book starts with Dylan all alone in New York town. If this was in the summer it wouldn't be that bad, but he arrives in the dead of winter. All alone he bums food and places to stay. Many of his first shows were played for only hamburgers and a drink.
At first I was upset when I heard he decided to talk about New Morning and Oh Mercy instead of albums like Blonde on Blonde. I think Dylan picked the album he did because he was so drugged during other albums he does not remember much from them. The chapter on Oh Mercy gives the greatest picture of a Dylan recording session ever. I hope we can someday hear all the outtakes Dylan speaks of.
The greatest part of this book is Dylan's descriptions of people and places. Dylan uses his poetic nature to paint marvelous pictures. We walk right along with Dylan through many different times in his life. He is very honest with events, but still covers up a lot. We hear nothing of his divorces or children. We hear nothing of Dylan's womanizing ways. We hear nothing of his conversion to Christianity. Volume 2 might address these if we are lucky.
I am a big Dylan fan, but this book can be read by anyone. People might think I'm going to far, but this is better than Kerouac's "On The Road." Buy this book now! It is the best book I've read this year.
Book Review: After 45 Years of Mystery
Summary: 5 Stars
After nearly 45 years of evasiveness, few expected Dylan's autobiography to be forthcoming, or even readable. He had begun his career inventing stories about his early life, and had misled and toyed with interviewers throughout. His songs were presumed to be autobiographical, but were often so abstract and surreal that no real person could be seen. When he announced a multivolume autobiography, most people expected more of the same, something like the opaque, impressionistic hipster poem Tarantula. Instead, he has produced a clear, detailed, intensely honest and artistically challenging masterpiece of the memoir style. After all those years of carefully fabricating the fictional character of Bob Dylan, he finally opened the door and let us meet Bobby Zimmerman.
Journalists, obsessed fans, revolutionaries, and other such dangerous, unstable people pestered him mercilessly. His home was invaded, his family was stalked, and his garbage sifted and catalogued. He was defined first as the true guardian of the folk music tradition, then as the spokesman of a generation, and then as a prophet, even a messiah. When pressed to speak, he said that he was simply a "song and dance man ... a high wire artist." His few interviews were funny, oblique, and sometimes vicious putdowns of the generally clueless music press. He protected his privacy intensely, keeping his distance with intellectual misdirection worthy of Houdini.
Deep in Dylan's character is the obsession that his life not be forced into someone else's mold and his song lyrics suggest that we do the same:
"It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to."
"Don't trust me to show you beauty ... if you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself."
He bristled and angered at the demands of the public that he answer questions and reveal himself. In recent years, despite being on stage more than 100 times a year, he has come to be seen as permanently inscrutable, this generation's Garbo. Finally, in his own time, he decided to tell the back story and turned his creative talents to this new form of expression. He applies the same brilliant imagery, piercing reality, and evocative ideas that mark his songs to a narrative format, and at the same time reveals enough personal detail to satisfy any Dylanologist. It seems that when we stopped demanding anything of him, he freely and cheerfully began to answer all our questions - very zen-like.
Chronicles is structured like an Elmore Leonard novel. The scenes are dense with detail, flashbacks are expertly structured to explain the importance of key events, and his thought processes are followed with psychological subtlety and insight. The format of the book is to drop in on our hero Bobby Zimmerman at three widely-spaced moments, carefully describe the world outside his eyes, and then expand the context to include the surrounding forces and events. His attention to detail is Proustian, but unlike Proust, his details are interesting.
The book opens with him alone and broke, having just arrived in Manhattan. With a painter's eye he describes the scene and the people, and his early personal history is gradually introduced to explain the decisions he made. A second section focuses on the Woodstock period of withdrawal and creative desiccation. The third segment recounts the rebirth of inspiration, emphasizing his collaboration with Daniel Lanois in the recording of Oh Mercy. Any of a myriad of moments could have been used, and those who complain about the book bemoan those missing stories - his religious period, his marriage and his relationship with his children, drug and alcohol excesses - but Dylan could have chosen almost any of the vignettes of his life with the same result. This is, after all, Volume One. There is no reason to believe that he would hesitate to talk about any of those issues.
The biographical details are fascinating, but more intriguing are the many other doors opened during the narrative. He introduces a wide range of cultural influences (from Tiny Tim to Mae West) and fully explains his indebtedness to his musical and poetic progenitors - Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Little Richard, Robert Johnson, Bertold Brecht, Rimbaud, along with dozens of others. The music industry giant, John Hammond, said that Dylan was the latest in a long line of tradition, and Dylan would not disagree.
An added treat are thought digressions that introduce brightly colored characters and scenes that could live in "Mozambique," or "Desolation Row." A motorcycle ride outside New Orleans is highlighted by meeting Sun Pie, an ancient peasant philosopher who provokes Dylan to personal reassessment with the simple question, "Got everything you need?" Dylan, who still has great humor, answers, "Yeah, but I need some more."
Doubtless, Dylan is deep-down as baffled by the events of his life as are his admirers. In a recent 60 Minutes interview, he talked about his early masterpieces as if they fell out of the sky onto him. With a touch of fatalism or perhaps sadness he said, "I can't do that anymore." That is a bit of artistic false modesty - the songs on his last two albums are monumental and timeless, and the recent movie Masked and Anonymous is an underappreciated creative bombshell.
In Chronicles, Dylan invites us to sit alongside him on the psychedelic carnival ride of his life, and with the skill and compassion of a great artist makes those scenes real for us. He was always most upset and offended when described as anyone's "leader." He was simply doing his best to live and understand his life. If he is now giving us any advice, it is that we put as much effort into living and understanding our own.
Book Review: All I expected
Summary: 4 Stars
A great book for everybody looking to understand Bob Dylan.
Not the "minstrel", nor the "folk" singer, nor the "poet", not the "freedom fighter" not even The author, etc.
Only facts.
Maybe some omissions but... who really cares ?
I won't give him 5 stars just because the points could have been better structured.
Sometimes it jumps from one thing to another with no so much "linking".
Book Review: All we need to know
Summary: 5 Stars
There seem to be many people who won't be satisfied until they know everything about this guy. The trivia of his life is not what makes him unique. It only serves our perverse need to make him seem more like us. Do we really need to know the details of his motor cycle accident, the names of his wives, his divorce, what he eats? These types of questions seem to be the equivalent of what his favorite color is. The same type of check list that is applied to every available celebrity on a weekly basis.
I am more than willing to accept that what Dylan chooses to write about in this remarkable book are the people, experiences, and influences that are important to him. Personally, I don't find him to be as obtuse and elusive as many others seem to. I see him as a man who is more than willing to expain what he feels confident to explain. After all, how much are we willing or able to explain about ourselves?
Dylan's life isn't mysterious. ALL our lives are mysterious; maybe he's just more aware of that than the rest of us.
What I did find most compellng were the parts of the book where he was writing about his music. When you understand the laser- like focus he brought to his craft, the way he ate, breathed and slept music, the way he absorbed everything that crossed his path, it's not a big leap to see how his songs turned out the way they did. As some one said; the most creative artist is the one who adapts the greatest number of influences. Without being explicit about his early song writing, he reveals so much that the individual song titles are almost unnecessary. The section where he talks about songs coming to him, some fully formed, like they were floating toward him gently down stream was facinating. No wonder he doesn't explain what they mean: he's says that songwriting is like trying to make dreams real. Like dreams, he probably can't explain them any better than we can. Like dreams, they're open to interpretation.
There is no doubt that Dylan is a muscial genius. He is the ultimate real deal, and there are't many of them. I doubt he's a genius at personal relationships, mathematics, or keeping track of his keys, though. It turns out he's no slouch at narrative, but that shouldn't be too surprising.
As far as I'm concerned, I found the book totally fascinating, easy to read, and completley engaging. If his next two installments are only about music and song writing, I will be more than satisfied. I don't need to know what he does in his time off. I don't need him to be ordinary. Why should he be?
Book Review: Always great to hear the man's words
Summary: 5 Stars
Ever since I heard about this autobiography I began waiting for it.
I thought, and knew, so many other things would have come out, different perspectives of different times, places and facts every Bob Dylan fan already knows.
To my great surprise, this work was astonishing. Much better than a new collection of songs, full of intriguing and vivid images, details that seem to be coming from yesterday while they actually belong to another era. And, once again, Dylan was able to surprise all of us. The way he skips from one decade to the other, to be back from the starting point, keeps the reader always awake. And even the most famous episodes are told from another perspective, with a sophisticated fine writing which is the man's trademark. The way Dylan takes us all for a tour around an early '60s New York City, how his trousers sink in a pool of water and mud as he's approaching Woody Guthrie's basement, a timeless New Orleans that echoes in the making of "Oh Mercy", the jumps through times and decades... all is here, in a fantastic book.
You will discover a young Dylan reading Leopardi and other unknown poets, being interested into Masonic movements, hanging around small libraries in dark basement across a now disappeared Greenwich Village. You'll also be surprised by the way he thinks and manages music, the structure of melodies and what happened that night in Locarno....
But mostly, you'll read very intense lines: what his grandmother told him, how he felt in that big car driving around New York, why he wanted David Crosby around in Princeton...
Once again, what really captures about this book is the way it is written. Using some kind of trance-like images and word-streaming, his descriptions are always accurate and new, impressed on his mind like the day they entered his mind. A writing style that has impressed professional hypnotist like Steven Gilligan, who was extremely fascinated by Dylan's writing.
Not to miss is also the audio version, narrated by Sean Penn. Alas, it is abridged.