Chronicles, Volume One (Audio CD)

"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 I 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.

The New Yorker

If “What is Bob thinking?” is the catechism of Bob Dylan fanatics, this first installment of his memoirs is a kind of Holy Grail—Dylan telling us what he thinks he thought while he did what he did. The book starts in 1961, with Dylan’s arrival in New York, “a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn’t going to try.” When John Hammond signs Dylan, he is “in a state of unstable equilibrium, but you wouldn’t have known it.” This inscrutability typifies Dylan and turned pop music as much into a game of concealment as a crowd-pleasing celebration. Even when Dylan divulges his thoughts, he remains terse. Hearing Ricky Nelson on the radio, he knocks Nelson’s “bleached out lyrics” but confesses that he and Nelson “have a lot in common.” Then comes a sentence that a lesser writer would have embellished: “Ricky’s song ended and I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim.”

Bob Dylan is one of the most lauded and greatest loved songwriters and performers of all time. His particular brand of music first caught the public's attention in the 1960s, when he became something of a chronicler of the American conscience and cultural unrest. His remarkable career in music and literature continues to this day.