Chronicles, Volume One
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Overview
"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 One, 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 — smoky, 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 One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.
Listen to excerpts from Chronicles: Volume One, the audiobook, read by Sean Penn:
Conscience of a Generation (2:37)
Johnny Cash (2:27)
On Writing Songs (3:17)
The Gaslight (2:27)
Visiting Woody Guthrie (3:32)
©2004 Bob Dylan. All Rights Reserved. (p)2004 Simon and Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Synopsis
"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.”
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewOkay. So. Bob Dylan.
Here's the thing with Dylan, folks: Lots of people have problems just accepting what he's giving them. At this point in time, we are so darn tickled to hear that our cantankerous favorite has given us another little piece of his life that we are just about beside ourselves. We hear the word "memoir" and we attach a certain expectation to it. We want history. We want truth. We want explanations. We want to know what those songs are about, finally. Can you see where I am going with this? If you want to enjoy this surprisingly enjoyable book, you will need to check your expectations at word number one. What we have here is a slightly random account of Bob Dylan's struggle with his destiny as "voice of a generation." It does not seek to explain, only to intimate. He only ever refers to his wife as "my wife." He rarely gives exact dates, skipping 20 years ahead by simply saying, "Years later…". Oh, and no, he does not tell us who the heck he's talking about in "Positively Fourth Street."
The book deals a lot with Dylan's desperate desire not to be anyone's spokesperson, let alone everyone's. The slightly unorganized chronology is focused loosely around Dylan's arrival in New York circa 1961, his anxious retreat to Woodstock to escape the public eye, and the recording of Oh Mercy in New Orleans in the late '80s.
The most moving parts of the book, however, come when Dylan talks about his childhood and family in Minnesota. He often refers to his brown-skinned grandmother who smoked a pipe and seems to have been the genetic impetus for young Robert's word-slinging savvy. There is a certain honesty in his telling here that makes us feel like this time and these people are the only things in his life that he never needed to lie about, regardless of whether or not he ever did. It's one of those rare cases where the realities of these things are actually more remarkable than he could have made them up to be.
The book is great for strange little stories and vignettes: Dylan's first trip to Woody Guthrie's house; how an unnamed jazz singer rescued our hero from obscurity; the time Robbie Robertson asked him where he was going to "take" the music scene; a motorcycle ride through Louisiana to meet a guy named Sun Pie; a girl named Chloe who let him crash at her Greenwich Village pad in the '60s. We also get completely outrageous musings on the pentatonic scale and a random mentions of Machiavelli and Ice-T. All of these are effective tidbits. In a way, these things are more important than an exhaustive rehashing of the studio sessions for the first five albums or whatever. They are what Dylan remembers. They are what he had, day to day. They are not what a reporter or reviewer gave him; or us.
If nothing else, Bob Dylan sure can turn a phrase. He engages the reader (as he does the listener) with his seemingly accidental forays into absolute down-home clarity. My favorite line in the book comes when he describes David Crosby as a guy who "could freak out a whole city block all by himself." He uses metaphor in his distinctly recognizable way, so that we know this book is pure Dylan. Who else could come up with, "My haystacks weren't tied down, and I was beginning to fear the wind." If anyone else had said that, we would call it "Dylanesque." Elizabeth McMillan
Tom Carson
… to point out that Chronicles is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it's genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one -- his sense of strategy vis-a-vis his audience hasn't been this keen in 30 years -- and it's a zesty, nugget-filled read. His assessments of other musicians are as acute as they are idiosyncratic, partly because (no great surprise here) he instinctively zeroes in on their personae in the guise of talking about their music, as in this jambalaya of observations about Roy Orbison: ''He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. . . He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.'' Better still is a terse explanation of what separated Hank Williams from most 50's country-and-western singers: ''There was nothing clownish about him.''— The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Richard Harrington
… lucid, cogent, coherent, crystal clear. You hear Dylan's inimitable voice, his cadence, his dry wit, twists of phrase, the rasp, rush and tumble of memories -- all beautifully articulated. … Chronicles delivers what Dylan has so parsimoniously dispensed in selected interviews over the decades: genuine insights into his work. Like James Joyce's largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chronicles offers a way to understand the mind and art of its author at a crucial juncture, when Dylan is finding the voice that speaks to and (despite his protests) for a generation, when he's busily reinvigorating bardic tradition.— The Washington Post
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.”Janet Maslin
Deliberately, no doubt, Chronicles: Volume One beggars the efforts of biographers to reconstruct Mr. Dylan's inner workings. With no great interest in the supposed landmark events of his life or even in the specific chronology or geography of his movements, he prefers to mine a different kind of memory. And he once again makes his homage to Woody Guthrie - another figure not known for autobiographical exactitude - with a writing style both straight-shooting and deeply fanciful … Gone is the druggy logorrhea of his 1966 novel, Tarantula, as Mr. Dylan - a man who says he now owns a bumper sticker reading "World's Greatest Grandpa" - looks back on his life. Yet Chronicles is hardly tame. It is lucid without being linear, swirling through time without losing its strong storytelling thread.— The New York Times
Library Journal
There's no word yet on how far this first volume goes, but we'll bet that Dylan doesn't leave any answers blowin' in the wind. Look for the complete Lyrics (ISBN 0-7432-2827-8. $45), pubbing simultaneously. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.From the Publisher
"A remarkable achievement, and like Henry Miller's best personal writings, it is a story that opens up the times that it portrays, and then reveals the possibilities of the human spirit."— Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone