Chronicles, Volume 1
by Bob Dylan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bob DylanBrand: PBS
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2004-10-05
ISBN: 0743228154
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of Chronicles, Volume 1
Book Review: They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown
Summary: 5 Stars
Bob Dylan wrote a book of memoirs called Chronicles: Volume One. I remember that he wrote a book before that, called Tarantula, that perplexed critics and public alike. It was kind of esoteric, and that is an understatement. Indecipherable is more like it. I never read it, but from the buzz I gathered that it could have been a prank, like he was just going to put out a book because so many people were pestering him for the answers, like he was the spokesman for a generation he didn't claim to be from or to understand. This will shut them up, he told himself. Why did James Joyce write Finnegan's Wake? Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald write The Great Gatsby? Why does anybody write anything? Leave me alone, he seemed to be saying.
With Tarantula in mind, I was about to write off Chronicles: Volume One. I did read it though, and I was surprised that it was very well written:
New York City was cold, muffled and mysterious, the capital of the world. On 7th Avenue I passed the building where Walt Whitman had lived and worked. I paused momentarily imagining him printing away and singing the true song of his soul. I had stood outside of Poe's house on 3rd Street, too, and had done the same thing, staring mournfully up at the windows. The city was like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favortism. Everything was always new, always changing. It was never the same old crowd upon the streets.
I crossed over from Hudson to Spring, passed a garbage can loaded with bricks and stopped into a coffee shop. The waitress at the lunch counter wore a close-fitting suede blouse. It outlined the well-rounded lines of her body. She had blue-black hair covered with a kerchief and piercing blue eyes, clear stenciled eyebrows. I was wishing she'd pin a rose on me. She poured the steaming coffee and I turned back towards the street window. The whole city was dangling in front of my nose. I had a vivid idea of where everything was. The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close.
There is a little story about the book that I would like to relate to you all. It is really only tangentially about the book, but sometimes the tangents are better than the main thrust. Bob Dylan was going to play somewhere in the Northwest--either Portland or Seattle, one of those places. Opening for him was none other than Merle Haggard, Bakersfield's favorite son, the "Okie from Muskogee." Actually, Merle's father was from Muskogee, but Merle was born in Bakersfield. Anyway, that was a big hit for Merle, so that is who you'd think of whenever someone said "Okie from Muskogee."
Buck Owens was from Oklahoma, but he settled in Bakersfield, and he is now associated with Bakersfield. They named Buck Owens Blvd. after him, and that is where the Crystal Palace, his night club and restaurant, now sits. He also bought the iconic Bakersfield sign and moved it from Union Avenue to right next to the Crystal Palace. Years after they named a street for Buck, they finally got around to giving Merle a street, too. They renamed part of Seventh Standard Road Merle Haggard Blvd. It runs all the way to Oildale, which is where Merle was born, in a converted boxcar on Yosemite St that is still there today.
As a young man Merle was an inmate at San Quentin Federal Prison. But once he became famous with hits like "Okie From Muskogee" and "Fightin' Side of Me" he was embraced by the conservatives and was given a full pardon from then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Merle played at the White House for President Nixon. At this time in history Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard would seem to be polar opposites. A counter-culture clash. It is true that Dylan was friends and had recorded with Johnny Cash, but he was from a different country of Country Music. Who would have dreamed that Merle Haggard would later be opening for Bob Dylan? In fact, Dylan probably wanted Merle to be on the bill with him because he knew what a great singer and songwriter he was. A long time secret admirer. It was Dylan's choice to have Haggard open for him. The Times They Really Are A'Changin'.
Buck and Merle go way back, in fact they were both married to the same woman, Bonnie Owens, but at different times. Buck wanted to go to the show and he took his entourage up there with him in his private plane. Backstage at the Dylan show were Ringo Starr, who had recorded one of Buck's songs, "Act Naturally," so they knew each other. Ringo's wife was there, and also the guy who played Wohojowitz on Barnie Miller. Funny thing is, Wohojowitz and Ringo were there as much to see Merle as Dylan, because both Ringo and Wohojowitz were HUGE country music fans. Buck might not have been so keen on seeing Dylan, actually, but he brought along one of his signature Red, White, & Blue Telecasters, inscribed with some heartfelt sentiments to present to him.
In comes Bob, trying to wear a cowboy hat, but with his big frizzy afro, it sat uneasy on his head. Buck gave him the guitar, and Dylan gave Buck a copy of his new book, Chronicles: Volume One. Those present, who knew Buck well, doubted he would actually read the book, but he accepted it graciously. I like that story, and I also doubt that he read the book before he passed on, but I can just imagine the look on his face. But if he had read the book, he probably would have liked it a lot. Buck once said he liked The Rolling Stones better than The Beatles.
It wasn't what you'd expect. Sometimes it would veer into the more esoteric style when he was trying to communicate matters of arcane lore, but he mostly told the story with vivid details that were very easy to follow. You'd wonder how he could describe things that happened so long ago with such accuracy, but he must have kept a journal. Maybe he knew the day would come when he'd want to preserve his life for posterity.
Though Bob Dylan does have a rather rambling style of writing, he does eventually get to the point. For instance, one part starts off saying that he is going to tell you about someone, but then many paragraphs and pages later, he still hasn't gotten around to it. Maybe this is an old raconteur's technique, because I kept turning the pages wondering if he would ever get back to it. When he finally did, I felt relieved, like I had been holding my breath while watching a juggler juggling knives, torches, and chainsaws. The book kind of skips around in time, too. It starts off when he is young and progresses chronologically, but it jumps over the best part, the height of his songwriting prowess when he wrote all those masterpieces.
I kept my sights on the Gaslight. How could I not? Compared to it, the rest of the places on the street were nameless and miserable, low-level basket houses or small coffeehouses where the performer passed the hat. But I began to play as many as I could. I had no choice. The narrow streets were infused with them. They were small and ranged in shape, loud and noisy and catered to the confection of tourists who swarmed through the streets at night. Anything could pass for one--double door parlor rooms, storefronts, second story walk-ups, basements below street level, all holes in the wall.
There was an unusual beer and wine place on 3rd Street in what used to be Aaron Burr's livery stable, now called Café Bizarre. The patrons were mostly workingmen who sat around laughing, cussing, eating red meat, talking pussy. There was a small stage in the back and I played there once or twice. I probably played all the places at one time or another. Most of them stayed open 'til the break of day, kerosene lamps and sawdust on the floor, some with wooden benches, a strong-armed guy at the door--no cover charge and the owners tried to offload as much coffee as they could. Performers either sat or stood in the window, visible to the street, or were positioned at the opposite end of the room facing the door, singing at the top of their voices. No microphones or anything.
Talent scouts didn't come to these dens. They were dark and dingy and the atmosphere was chaotic. Performers sang and passed the hat or played while watching tourists file past, hoping some of them would toss coins into a breadbasket or guitar case. On weekends, if you played all the joints from dusk 'til dawn, you could make maybe twenty dollars. Weeknights it was hard to tell. Sometimes not much because it was so competitive. You had to know a trick or two to survive.
He is a young folk singer knocking around Greenwich Village, meeting up with people like Thelonious Monk, and the next thing you know, he is in a recording studio trying to recapture his old glory. I think that may have been a raconteur's trick, too. Hold back some of the good stuff for Chronicles: Volumes Two, Three, and Four. Sometimes the point he is trying to make is that he is just a normal guy trying to support his wife and kids. That kind of made me laugh. I pictured him giving his son Jacob advice about the music biz. 'You'll never make it in Rock. Your voice is too normal sounding.'
Adjacent to this concern is how people are trying to hold him up as some kind of prophet or spokesman. He made a movie called Masked & Anonymous that could be seen as a fable wrapped in his myth. Dylan played Jack Fate, a singer who'd just been released from prison into a very unstable country:
Jack Fate: I was always a singer and maybe no more then that. Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don't mean as well. Like what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of? Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.
I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoyed Chronicles: Volume One and wanted to gain a deeper understanding. Ebert hated it, gave it two thumbs way down, but it seems like he had a personal vendetta against Dylan, and just didn't get him, and would never get him, as a musician, as a poet, as an actor, or as a writer. Renaldo and Clara might not be such a good choice, with Bob Dylan playing Renaldo. To like that, you'd probably have to also like his previous book, Tarantula. To like that movie, you'd even have to be a fan of his harmonica playing. Not that Renaldo plays harmonica, but you'd have to be that much of a hard core Dylan fanatic to like Renaldo and Clara. But you could get by Masked & Anonymous with just a mild appreciation, as long as you weren't a playah hatah like Ebert.
I remember Mad Magazine did a parody of Bob Dylan, and instead of "The Times They Are A'Changin'" he was saying "These tunes I am a'changin'." Funny that Bob says the same thing himself, essentially, about his early songwriting days. He was mostly learning folk songs, but he would change a line here or there. Something happened though, and he had an epiphany and the flood gates were opened. He talks about some obvious influences, and some more unlikely ones:
In a few years' time, I'd write and sing songs like "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and some others like that. If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written. In about 1964 and '65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson's blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down--that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write. I wasn't the only one who learned a thing or two from Johnson's compositions. Johnny Winter, the flamboyant Texan guitar player born a couple of years after me, rewrote Johnson's song about the phonograph, turning it into a song about a television set. Johnny's tube is blown and his picture won't come in. Robert Johnson would have loved that. Johnny, by the way, recorded a song of mine, "Highway 61 Revisted," which itself was influenced by Johnson's writing. It's strange the way circles hook up with themselves. Robert Johnson's code of language was like nothing I'd heard before or since. To go with all of that, someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else." When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier. It went right along with Johnson's dark night of the soul and Woody's hopped-up union meeting sermons and the "Pirate Jenny" framework. Everything was in transition and I was standing in the gateway. Soon I'd step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up. Not quite yet, though.
In Chronicles: Volume One, there is a part in it where Dylan is really famous and people are starting to take notice. He gets a letter from poet Archibald MacLeish inviting him to drop in and visit. We have a little dog called Archibald MacLeish, Arch Duke of Cornwall, Arch Bishop of Canterbury. He is part Pomeranian and part Wire Haired Chihuahua. I know that it is illogical for him to be both an arch duke and a member of the clergy, let alone a Poet Laureate and Wurlitzer Prize winner, but we usually just call him Archie for short. His full name doesn't fit on his dog tag. The poet Archibald MacLeish is writing a play and wants to discuss the prospect of Dylan writing some songs for it:
MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet and that my work would be a touchstone for generations after me, that I was a postwar Iron Age poet but that I had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era. He appreciated my songs because they involved themselves with society, that we had many traits and associations in common and that I didn't care for things the way he didn't care for them. At one point he had to excuse himself momentarily, left the room. I glanced out the window. The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth. A jackrabbit scampered past the scattered chips by the woodpile. When he returned things fell back into place. MacLeish picked up where he left off. MacLeish tells me that Homer, who wrote the Iliad, was a blind balladeer and that his name means "hostage." He also told me that there's a difference between art and propaganda and he told me the difference between the effects. He asked me if I'd ever read the French poet François Villon, and I told him that I did read him and then he said he saw some slight influence in my work. Archie spoke about blank verse, rhyme verse, elegiacs, ballads, limericks and sonnets. He asked me what I had sacrificed to pursue my dreams. He said the worth of things can't be measured by what they cost but by what they cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high and that there are some things that will never wear out.
You can glean a bit of what inspired him to write those great songs from reading Chronicles: Volume One, but he must be saving "the secret" for future volumes. I remember when I first heard Bob Dylan. My friend Otto was reading the paper at his house on Jansen Avenue that we all called The Walls, and I burst in with the vinyl solution. I played it for him but he was nonplussed. He thought it was okay, but derivative.
I let Otto go back to his newspaper, said I'd see him later and put the vinyl back in the cardboard sleeve. The record that didn't grab Otto very much had left me numb, like I'd been hit by a tranquilizer bullet. Later, at my 4th Street pad I put the record on again and listened to it all by myself. Didn't want to play it for anybody else.
Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition. The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines. Dylan masked the presence of more than twenty men. I fixated on every song and wondered how Dylan did it. Songwriting for him was some highly sophisticated business. The compositions seemed to come right out of his mouth and not his memory, and I started meditating on the construction of the verses, seeing how different they were from Lefty Frizzell's. Dylan's words made my nerves quiver like piano wires. They were so elemental in meaning and feeling and gave you so much of the inside picture. It's not that you could sort out every moment carefully, because you can't. There are too many missing terms and too much dual existence. Dylan bypasses tedious descriptions that other song writers would have written whole songs about. There's no guarantee that any of his lines either happened, were said, or even imagined.
I copied Dylan's words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-bottomed truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction--themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn't have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them. But how? How had he done it? There is a scene where he reflects on a recording session, a much later recording session. The producer seemed disappointed that he hadn't been able to muster his talent sufficiently to reach his previous plateau:
I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs that he wanted, like "Masters of War," "Hard Rain," "Gates of Eden," but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn't get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it, you've got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once, and once was enough. Someone would come along eventually who would have it again--someone who could see into things, the truth of things--not metaphorically, either--but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.
Dylan goes on to say that lately he is listening to Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. You might think it strange that Dylan would be into Rap, but what was "Subterranean Homesick Blues" if it wasn't a Rap? He expects someone to appear out of that scene. He'd be "able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you'd know him when he came--there'd be only one like him." Dylan felt that he had come along at a seminal moment in history, but that moment had passed. Still, you can't take that away from him:
I was born in the spring of 1941. The second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt--towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval--indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with--rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
Tarantula by Bob Dylan
Masked and Anonymous
Bob Dylan - Don't Look Back
Lyrics: 1962-2001 by Bob Dylan
The Times They Are a-Changin'
Freewheelin'
The Basement Tapes
Highway 61 Revisited
Blonde on Blonde
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home
The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years' time a $#*! storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn. Bras, draft cards, American flags, bridges, too--everybody would be dreaming of getting it on. The national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble the Night of the Living Dead. The road out would be treacherous, and I didn't know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn't run by the devil either.
Summary of Chronicles, Volume 1
"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 I, 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 - smokey, 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 I into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.
One would not anticipate a conventional memoir from Bob Dylan--indeed, one would not have foreseen an autobiography at all from the pen of the notoriously private legend. What Chronicles: Volume 1 delivers is an odd but ultimately illuminating memoir that is as impulsive, eccentric, and inspired as Dylan's greatest music.
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
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