| Dylan chronicles his journey
For more than four decades, fans have searched for the man behind the myth and the music.
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Dylan was surprised to learn he didn't enjoy writing a book as much as writing songs. "I'm surprised anybody gets a book out, " he says.
They scrutinized enigmatic lyrics on his 43 albums and puzzled over evasive comments in rare interviews. His abstract poetry in Tarantula and sketches in Drawn Blank only enhanced the riddle, while a vast library of unauthorized biographies tended to blur his identity with conflicting theories and agendas. He remained a closed book.
Until now. Another side of Bob Dylan emerges today in Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, $24), a candid memoir that pulls the veil of mystique from pop culture's reluctant icon to reveal a creative giant unlocking his destiny. He tells his story, but he's not calling it an autobiography.
"I don't exactly know what that word means anyway, so I don't think I'd be up to that task," Dylan, 63, says in a phone interview.
After reviewing Dylan's unpublished notes on early albums, Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal suggested he write about specific periods rather than undertake a life story.
"I understood that strategy," says Dylan, who says he wrote Chronicles to share key recollections, not to amend errors by other authors. "I didn't feel like I had to counteract anything. I maybe had to put to rest a lot of superstitions, but it wasn't like it troubled me to write the book. I didn't have to write an apology. I wasn't trying to explain anything to anybody. I was intrigued by the whole process with words and how they would flow and with how certain people would light up my memory. I was just trying to charm my way through it, really."
Dylan's memory yielded richly detailed anecdotes, events and conversations. Using a vintage Remington typewriter, he wrote off and on for the past three years, completing entire sections in single sittings "because if I stopped, I didn't want to have to go back and read it."
The articulate, well-read but private singer found Chronicles far more challenging than songwriting.
"Writing a song is what I can do and know how to do and need to do," he says. "I'm surprised anybody gets a book out. I use a lot of metaphors and symbolism in songs, and they're based on rhythmic value. Obviously, you can't do that when you're writing a manuscript, which has to make literal sense. I had to regulate my imagination; I couldn't just wander all over the place.
"I can't say I liked the process. When I write a song, it stays in my mind for a brief period, and I don't have to connect it to the next song. When I'm writing a song, I feel like I'm still living life.
"With a book like this, it occurs to you after a while that you're really not living life. You're trying to put it on pages in a typewriter. I don't mean to sound like I wrote the book by an oil lamp, but I did feel like I was closing myself off."
Recalling the early days
In 293 pages, Dylan recounts his youth in Minnesota, his early days as a performer on the folk circuit in Greenwich Village and the creation of 1970's New Morning and 1989's Oh Mercy.
Salient details emerge. As a teen captivated by military history, he briefly yearned to attend West Point. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, he tried on stage names, including Elston Gunn. After discovering poet Dylan Thomas, he considered Bobby Dylan (rejected because of other Bobbys — Vee, Darin, Rydell). He thought Bob Allyn sounded like a used-car salesman, so he settled on Bob Dylan.
In New York, Dylan's talent flowered as he hungrily explored the city's arts and colorful characters, from boxer Jack Dempsey to folkie Dave Van Ronk.
"Everything had a different gratification and delight back then," he says, reflecting on gigs at Cafe Wha? and the Gaslight. "That's when I was coming up as a performer. My life hadn't been filled with too many mistakes leading up to that. As time went on, things began to scratch and sting. All of a sudden, the magic carpet got yanked away."
Dylan's stardom brought media scrutiny and unwelcome canonization as a protest prophet. He retreated to Woodstock to raise a family, dodge his stalkers and shed the millstone of '60s messiah.
"When I was in Woodstock, it became very clear to me that the whole counterculture was one big scarecrow wearing dead leaves," he says. "It had no purpose in my life. It's been true ever since, actually."
Though Dylan insists no topic was off limits in Chronicles, he barely acknowledges his 1966 motorcycle accident and avoids mention of his divorce and conversion to Christianity in the late '70s.
"That would fall under the category of what doesn't matter," he says. "If somebody wanted me to write an article about my motorcycle accident, I'm sure I could come up with one, but what's the point? In no way is the book an open confession. It was never intended to be. The confessional stuff is OK if you do the penance along with it, but that was never my intention."
"Confessional stuff" apparently includes naming wives and children, which he studiously avoids.
"Personal details are important if they move the story along, but these chronicles are nothing more than shaking down the tree of life and seeing what comes out," Dylan says. "Those things didn't come out. I'm in possession of those things, but I don't think that's enough to really excite a reader. I could have been more nasty and sultry if I wanted to be, but there wasn't any reason."
Inspiration in literature
Dylan expounds with gusto on his musical odyssey, outlining his influences, his growth as a performer and songwriter, his models and collaborators. Folk music was the fulcrum, but Dylan also found inspiration in jazz and blues, train whistles and church bells, in newspapers and literature. He read Balzac, Faulkner, Byron, Pushkin, Milton, Shelley, Poe and Dickens.
"I went to it on my own," he says. "I was into the folk-song language, and intuitively I knew all these books would enrich the human mind. People I was meeting in the late '50s and early '60s were much older than me. They all had books on their shelves. Up till that time I'd probably just seen comic books. In high school, I'd read Sir Walter Scott, and my favorite books were Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur. The folk songs were all beer and Bibles and rum. It seemed to me that all those words on the shelf led to a different kind of glory."
Chronicles' happiest passages dwell on exploring and sharing music. The tone sours when fame and battle fatigue set in. After a serious hand injury and while on tour in the mid-'80s, Dylan writes, "I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck ... I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic ... I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion."
Spent and uninspired, Dylan pondered retirement.
"It was just a misdirection of my talent," Dylan says. "It burned itself out at that time. I would not have called it a creative slump. I had horse-whipped myself so bad, and I was critically hurt in so many ways, I really didn't have much more to say at that point."
Permanence in song
As it turns out, Dylan had plenty left to say. His latest albums, 2001's Love and Theft and 1997's Time Out of Mind, rank among his classics. He has written songs for his next studio album, which he'll tackle after completing a U.S. tour in November. A restless troubadour, Dylan keeps his songs alive on stage. When he takes his final bow, those tunes won't leave the spotlight.
"They're not worth much if they don't have permanence," he says. "A lot of them will last. A lot of them won't. I came to terms with that a long time back. What made my songs different, and still does, is I can create several orbits that travel and intersect each other and are set up in a metaphysical way. They all came out of the folk music pantheon, and those songs have lasted. So if my songs were written correctly and eloquently, there's no reason they wouldn't last."
Whether Chronicles has a long shelf life is less certain.
"I was just happy when I turned it all in and they agreed it was good enough to put out and I wouldn't have to do any more," Dylan says, laughing. He's in no rush to plunge into a second volume. He's quick to add that he didn't approach Chronicles as a vanity project.
"In a lot of ways, this is written like I play," he says. "There's a certain section of my mind that is playing for people who've never heard of me or never heard my songs. In the same way, I don't have to trade on my reputation to write a book. It can't stand if it's only written for people who know about me or are familiar with my work. This book has to reach people who might not have heard my name before." | |
