Sunday, October 24, 2004
Dylan Looks Back
Chronicles, Volume One
by Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster
$24.00, 294 pp.
Reviewed by Henry Porter
Who is Bob Dylan? Those who have followed the man and his work for the last few decades know that masks and changing identities are inseparable from his art. When audiences had him pegged as a new and pure voice in the folk revival, he took the stage at Newport with an electric guitar and turned into a rock and roller. When rock fans embraced him as the frizzy-haired messiah of the counterculture, he turned into a clean-cut balladeer singing the praises of family, home and fresh-baked country pie. During the gypsy caravan tour known as “Rolling Thunder”, he even wore a rubber mask of his own face. (And in “Renaldo and Clara”, the mostly-improvised shaggy-dog movie he made during that tour, he and then-wife Sara play a couple on the rocks, while Ronnie Hawkins place a womanizing celebrity named “Bob Dylan”). He’s been an evangelist and a bare-bones folk revivalist. When I saw him perform earlier this year, he had become a hard-pounding blues pianist, the bastard offspring of Little Richard and Hank Williams - and never touched a guitar once in the entire concert.
So why a memoir? Why now? Why would someone who famously characterized an artist as someone who “don’t look back” suddenly decide that it was time to rifle through his own back pages?
The first thing you have to wonder if you're a Dylan fan has to be "Is it any good?" Writing a memoir seems like such a pedestrian thing, even a step backward when you're already the author of "Blood on the Tracks" or "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" . But the answer is yeah, it's really good. Chronicles is more than just another souvenir for Dylan fans to put on the shelf next to the biographies and critical discussions.
For a man who has hidden behind so many identities, the book is a way of coming clean, of looking at life through the eyes of a young man who leaves a small town in the middle of nowhere and learns that poetry, folk music and the action on the streets of New York have given him a chance to become someone else. From the opening pages where he feeds a string of lies to the record company publicist preparing his first public biography to an interlude from the end of the sixties where he complains most bitterly about the gap between the life he is trying to live and the expectations that his public image has created, “Chronicles” is a kind of confessional, a view from behind the mask. It's a new Dylan, a fresh, honest voice coming clean on the story of his own life Chronicles is a straight-from-the-hip account of a young man on the verge of fame, written from the perspective of an old man whose less impressed with what he's achieved but can still remember the innocence that pushed him on that artistic road.
Did he really write it? If you've read more than a few celebrity autobiographies, you develop an ear for some of the genre's tricks, the name-dropping and historical/nostalgic epiphanies that link the subject to every major baby-boomer event from Elvis on Ed Sullivan to the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Dylan's book has a few such passages, but even the usual name-dropping is so esoteric and offbeat that it convinces you of the authenticity. The man who hung out with Allen Ginsberg and was considered a threat to the Warhol camp drops stories about meeting Jack Dempsey, Gorgeous George, Frank Sinatra, Jr. and Bobby Vee. The author of rambling songs that drop the names of Rimbaud and Eliot wants you to know that he likes Ricky Nelson, Joe Tex, Harry Belafonte, Balzac and Denzel Washington. And that it was hard getting used to being called "Bob". But as mundane as some of these observations might seem, when you stumble across a line like this, describing Roy Orbison - “He sang like a professional criminal” -any hint of a ghostwriter loses a lot of ground
When did Dylan have time to write it? Was there a collaborator? How many volumes will there be? Since the book covers only about a half dozen years in Dylan's life, (his first years in New York prior to making records, a brief account of his dissatisfaction with fame at the end of the Sixties as he discusses a theatrical project with Archibald MacLeish, and the 1989 recording of "Oh Mercy”), it may have been taken from a larger, more traditionally chronological account. And if so, why these episodes? Why "Oh Mercy" and McLeish rather than "Blonde on Blonde" or the Rolling Thunder revue or the "Gotta Serve Somebody" years? The answers, as one should know by now, are written between the lines. As with his live performances, Dylan delivers what he wants us to hear, not what we expect.
There's a lengthy stretch about how he decided to change his musical style, based on lessons in rhythm given to him by jazz singer Lonnie Johnson . This epiphany, which occurs at the end of the 80s when he's touring with Tom Petty, may be intended to explain why he began what many have called "The Never Ending tour" - but I have to admit that I didn't understand most of it. (Popular music is based on the number 2, he explains, but the number 3 is more “metaphysically powerful”).
In some ways, this book calls to mind the album that resulted from the encounter with MacLeish. "New Morning" is a great album, but was somewhat exaggeratedly labeled as a comeback when it hit the streets in 1970 - which really just meant that after the misunderstood "Self Portrait", it was a fine successor to "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville Skyline", two albums that never grow old. When Dylan returned to performing with his 1972 tour, he told an interviewer that he wasn't singing anything from that album because "he hadn't lived with them" and for the most part it has remained untouched in his live repertoire. But the songs from that album are raw, uncensored reports from Dylan’s psyche, honest and unfiltered. Here, he sings, is what it felt like when I accepted that honorary degree. Here is why I live where I do, the way I do. This is how I feel right now, an ordinary man with extraordinary powers of observation. Straightforward and open, the songs of an album like “New Morning” show Dylan with his mask off and his guard down, yet still selective about every word that slips by. And so does this tiny masterpiece of a memoir.
by Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster
$24.00, 294 pp.
Reviewed by Henry Porter
Who is Bob Dylan? Those who have followed the man and his work for the last few decades know that masks and changing identities are inseparable from his art. When audiences had him pegged as a new and pure voice in the folk revival, he took the stage at Newport with an electric guitar and turned into a rock and roller. When rock fans embraced him as the frizzy-haired messiah of the counterculture, he turned into a clean-cut balladeer singing the praises of family, home and fresh-baked country pie. During the gypsy caravan tour known as “Rolling Thunder”, he even wore a rubber mask of his own face. (And in “Renaldo and Clara”, the mostly-improvised shaggy-dog movie he made during that tour, he and then-wife Sara play a couple on the rocks, while Ronnie Hawkins place a womanizing celebrity named “Bob Dylan”). He’s been an evangelist and a bare-bones folk revivalist. When I saw him perform earlier this year, he had become a hard-pounding blues pianist, the bastard offspring of Little Richard and Hank Williams - and never touched a guitar once in the entire concert.
So why a memoir? Why now? Why would someone who famously characterized an artist as someone who “don’t look back” suddenly decide that it was time to rifle through his own back pages?
The first thing you have to wonder if you're a Dylan fan has to be "Is it any good?" Writing a memoir seems like such a pedestrian thing, even a step backward when you're already the author of "Blood on the Tracks" or "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" . But the answer is yeah, it's really good. Chronicles is more than just another souvenir for Dylan fans to put on the shelf next to the biographies and critical discussions.
For a man who has hidden behind so many identities, the book is a way of coming clean, of looking at life through the eyes of a young man who leaves a small town in the middle of nowhere and learns that poetry, folk music and the action on the streets of New York have given him a chance to become someone else. From the opening pages where he feeds a string of lies to the record company publicist preparing his first public biography to an interlude from the end of the sixties where he complains most bitterly about the gap between the life he is trying to live and the expectations that his public image has created, “Chronicles” is a kind of confessional, a view from behind the mask. It's a new Dylan, a fresh, honest voice coming clean on the story of his own life Chronicles is a straight-from-the-hip account of a young man on the verge of fame, written from the perspective of an old man whose less impressed with what he's achieved but can still remember the innocence that pushed him on that artistic road.
Did he really write it? If you've read more than a few celebrity autobiographies, you develop an ear for some of the genre's tricks, the name-dropping and historical/nostalgic epiphanies that link the subject to every major baby-boomer event from Elvis on Ed Sullivan to the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Dylan's book has a few such passages, but even the usual name-dropping is so esoteric and offbeat that it convinces you of the authenticity. The man who hung out with Allen Ginsberg and was considered a threat to the Warhol camp drops stories about meeting Jack Dempsey, Gorgeous George, Frank Sinatra, Jr. and Bobby Vee. The author of rambling songs that drop the names of Rimbaud and Eliot wants you to know that he likes Ricky Nelson, Joe Tex, Harry Belafonte, Balzac and Denzel Washington. And that it was hard getting used to being called "Bob". But as mundane as some of these observations might seem, when you stumble across a line like this, describing Roy Orbison - “He sang like a professional criminal” -any hint of a ghostwriter loses a lot of ground
When did Dylan have time to write it? Was there a collaborator? How many volumes will there be? Since the book covers only about a half dozen years in Dylan's life, (his first years in New York prior to making records, a brief account of his dissatisfaction with fame at the end of the Sixties as he discusses a theatrical project with Archibald MacLeish, and the 1989 recording of "Oh Mercy”), it may have been taken from a larger, more traditionally chronological account. And if so, why these episodes? Why "Oh Mercy" and McLeish rather than "Blonde on Blonde" or the Rolling Thunder revue or the "Gotta Serve Somebody" years? The answers, as one should know by now, are written between the lines. As with his live performances, Dylan delivers what he wants us to hear, not what we expect.
There's a lengthy stretch about how he decided to change his musical style, based on lessons in rhythm given to him by jazz singer Lonnie Johnson . This epiphany, which occurs at the end of the 80s when he's touring with Tom Petty, may be intended to explain why he began what many have called "The Never Ending tour" - but I have to admit that I didn't understand most of it. (Popular music is based on the number 2, he explains, but the number 3 is more “metaphysically powerful”).
In some ways, this book calls to mind the album that resulted from the encounter with MacLeish. "New Morning" is a great album, but was somewhat exaggeratedly labeled as a comeback when it hit the streets in 1970 - which really just meant that after the misunderstood "Self Portrait", it was a fine successor to "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville Skyline", two albums that never grow old. When Dylan returned to performing with his 1972 tour, he told an interviewer that he wasn't singing anything from that album because "he hadn't lived with them" and for the most part it has remained untouched in his live repertoire. But the songs from that album are raw, uncensored reports from Dylan’s psyche, honest and unfiltered. Here, he sings, is what it felt like when I accepted that honorary degree. Here is why I live where I do, the way I do. This is how I feel right now, an ordinary man with extraordinary powers of observation. Straightforward and open, the songs of an album like “New Morning” show Dylan with his mask off and his guard down, yet still selective about every word that slips by. And so does this tiny masterpiece of a memoir.
